ABILITY, GAGE OF
Mr. Edmund Driggs, of Brooklyn, gives a motto that came into his life like an influence, and greatly helped him toward success. At the age of fifteen he left home to engage with an older brother in the freighting business on the Hudson River. The first duty he performed on the vessel was to go aloft to reef the pennant-halyards through the truck of the topmast, which was forty feet above the top of the mainmast, without any rigging attached thereto. When the sailing-master had arranged the halyards over his shoulder, with a running bowline under his right arm, he ordered him aloft. The new sailor looked at the sailing-master and then aloft, and then asked the question, “Did anybody ever do that?” “Yes, you fool,” was the answer. “Do you suppose that I would order you to do a thing that was never done before?” The young sailor replied, “If anybody ever did it, I can do it.” He did it. That maxim has been his watchword through life. Tho he is now over seventy years of age, he is still engaged in active business life, and whatever enterprise he undertakes the watchword still is, “If anybody ever did it, I can do it.” (Text.)—Wilbur F. Crafts, “Successful Men of To-day.”
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ABILITY, USELESS
Plutarch says that a traveler at Sparta, standing long upon one leg, said to a Lacedæmonian, “I do not believe you can do as much.” “True,” said he, “but a goose can.”
There are many who have abilities to do greater things who are content to boast of some accomplishment as useless as standing on one leg.
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Abnormality—See [Deformity].
ABSENT-MINDEDNESS
A Canadian farmer, noted for his absent-mindedness, went to town one day and transacted his business with the utmost precision. He started on his way home, however, with the firm conviction that he had forgotten something, but what it was he could not recall. As he neared home, the conviction increased, and three times he stopt his horse and went carefully through his pocketbook in a vain endeavor to discover what he had forgotten. In due course he reached home and was met by his daughter, who looked at him in surprize and exclaimed, “Why, father, where have you left mother?”—Leslie’s Weekly.