SOMETHING TO DO
OH, ye who complain of the grind, remember these words (which are true!): The dreariest job one can find is looking for something to do! Sometimes, when my work seems a crime, and I’m sorely tempted to sob, I think of the long vanished time when I was out hunting a job. I walked eighty miles every day, and climbed forty thousand high stairs, and people would shoo me away, and pelt me with inkstands and chairs. And then, when the evening grew dark, I knew naught of comfort or ease; I made me a bed in the park, for supper chewed bark from the trees. I looked through the windows at men who tackled their oysters and squabs, and probably grumbled again because they were tired of their jobs. And I was out there in the rain, with nothing to eat but my shoe, and filled with a maddening pain because I had nothing to do. And now when I’m tempted to raise the grand hailing sign of distress, I think of those sorrowful days, and then I feel better, I guess. I go at my labors again with energy vital and new, and say, as I toil in my den, “Thank God, I have something to do!”
INDUSTRY
HOW doth the busy little bee improve each shining hour! It honey takes from every tree, and keeps it till it’s sour. Ah, nothing hinders, nothing queers its labors here below; it does not always cock its ears, to hear the whistle blow. Wherever honey is on tap, you see the bumbler climb; for shorter hours it doesn’t scrap, nor charge for overtime. It’s on the wing the livelong day, from rise to set of sun, and when at eve it hits the hay, no chore is left undone. And when the bumblers are possessed of honey by the pound, bad boys come up and swat their nest, and knock it to the ground. The store they gathered day by day has vanished in a breath, and so the bees exclaim, “Foul play!” and sting themselves to death. There is no sense in making work a gospel and a creed, in thinking every hour will spoil that knows no useful deed. No use competing with the sun, and making life a strain; for bees—and boys—must have some fun if they’d be safe and sane.
WET WEATHER
ALL spring the rain came down amain, and rills grew into rivers; the bullfrogs croaked that they were soaked till mildewed were their livers. The fish were drowned, and in a swound reclined the muskrat’s daughter, and e’en the snakes, in swamps and brakes, hissed forth “There’s too much water!” And all my greens, the peas and beans, that I with toil had planted, a sickly host, gave up the ghost, the while I raved and ranted. The dew of doom hit spuds in bloom, and slew the tender onion; I viewed the wreck, and said, “By heck!” and other things from Bunyan. All greens of worth drooped to the earth, and died and went to thunder; but useless weeds all went to seeds—no rain could keep them under. When weather’s dry, and in the sky a red-hot sun is burning, it gets the goats of corn and oats, the wheat to wastage turning; the carrots shrink, and on the blink you see the parsnips lying, but weeds still thrive and keep alive, while useful things are dying. It’s strange and sad that critters bad, both veg’table and human, hang on so tight, while critters bright must perish when they’re bloomin’!