This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin.
Time is money. We should not be stingy or mean with it, but we should not throw away an hour any more than we would throw away a dollar-bill. Waste of time means waste of energy, waste of vitality, waste of character in dissipation. It means the waste of opportunities which will never come back. Beware how you kill time, for all your future lives in it.
"And it is left for each," says Edward Everett, "by the cultivation of every talent, by watching with an eagle's eye for every chance of improvement, by redeeming time, defying temptation, and scorning sensual pleasure, to make himself useful, honored, and happy."
CHAPTER VII
HOW POOR BOYS AND GIRLS GO TO COLLEGE
"Can I afford to go to college?" asks many an American youth who has hardly a dollar to his name and who knows that a college course means years of sacrifice and struggle.
It seems a great hardship, indeed, for a young man with an ambition to do something in the world to be compelled to pay his own way through school and college by hard work. But history shows us that the men who have led in the van of human progress have been, as a rule, self-educated, self-made.
The average boy of to-day who wishes to obtain a liberal education has a better chance by a hundredfold than had Daniel Webster or James A. Garfield. There is scarcely one in good health who reads these lines but can be assured that if he will he may. Here, as elsewhere, the will can usually make the way, and never before was there so many avenues of resource open to the strong will, the inflexible purpose, as there are to-day—at this hour and this moment.
"Of the five thousand persons—students,—directly connected with Harvard University," writes a graduate, "five hundred are students entirely or almost entirely dependent upon their own resources. They are not a poverty-stricken lot, however, for half of them make an income above the average allowance of boys in smaller colleges. From $700 to $1,000 are by no means exceptional yearly earnings of a student who is capable of doing newspaper work or tutoring,—branches of employment that pay well at Harvard.