Evening Round Up Part 31

And compensation, the salve to the sore, makes the great man deaf to the noise and immune to the attacks of the knockers.

In his own heart he knows he has done a thing worth while; his own conscience is clear, and he cares not for the estimate of the world.

His own character is his chief concern, and he is content in the knowledge that time will bring its reward.

If you have high ideals in business, if you make success, mark well, you will be a subject of attacks, of lies, of malice, of envy, of disreputable compet.i.tion; there is no way out of it.

But you will be repaid. The lover of fair play, the grateful, the true, honest, worth-while people will flock to your standard; the riff-raff will skulk behind bushes and throw rocks and mud, but their acts will prove to the great ma.s.s of the people that your purposes, practices and policies are right.

Therefore, courage is to be your chief a.s.set; with patience, pride, perseverance your lieutenants.

Be not weary, grow not discouraged when your progress is hampered by obstacles.

OLD AGE

The Pleasures of a Well Lived Life

There are three periods in our lives: the youth period or prospective period, the adult or introspective period, and the old age or retrospective period.

Too many there are who look forward to old age with fear or dread.

But old age has its joys and pleasures as keen as youth or adult age, if the youth and adult ages were lived sanely, worthily and properly.

If middle age is spent in getting dollars only, then old age will be days of empty nothingness.

Youth is the planning time of ideals and ambitions, middle age the building time and old age the dividend time.

With many, old age is reading the book of the past, with sadness as the reader recognizes that the ideals, plans and hopes were shattered. As age turns the page in the book of the past he reads one hope after another vanished in smoke.

Antic.i.p.ation is seldom realized, and this is as it should be, for in time men will learn to live each day for each day's good and each day's happiness.

Let us perform our duty today, let us put away a kindly act, a smile, a word of cheer in the bank of good deeds.

Each of us has our share in this world's work. It matters little whether our actual share is what we had guessed or wished it to be.

Vicissitudes clip us here and there, so-called misfortune or bad luck will strike us when least suspected. The failure of our dreams should not grieve us.

We cannot reach up and grasp the stars, but like the pilot at the wheel at sea we can steer by those stars and help us on our way.

Our ideal may not be realized but the journey to it may still be a pleasant one.

Our ideals, plans and hopes had a real purpose, a real service; they gave us courage and made us work and thus they were well worth while.

We must not in the old age period condemn ourselves because our plans failed or our castles were shattered.

There is no hard luck but incurable disease or death. It is not for us to mourn the past or weep over the vases from which the flowers are gone.

In our active days we must realize we are putting memories away in our brains that will come back to us in old age.

Only what we put in our brains we can take out.

So then, Mr. Avarice, I warn you if gold is your G.o.d it's cold comfort you will get in your sunset days.

Build up loving ties, appreciation and worth-while riches of good deeds, and in your evening of life you will be welcome in the midst of the group.

If your life was sold for gold your evening of life will be short and miserable; legatees will grudge you your every breath; they will endure you simply because they are checking off the days from Time's calendar until the day of your pa.s.sing, and the dollars you sold your soul and heart and life for will be lavishly spent by cold-blooded heirs who cared nothing for you.

Leave a legacy of love, example and character, and if with these there are a few dollars, they simply prove your frugality, economy and independence.

A few dollars left to heirs will help. Many dollars will hurt. Dollars in old age will give you pleasure by helping in tight corners, and helping your loved ones over the b.u.mps in the road.

Use the dollars to help those you love to help themselves, and your old age will be a busy, happy one and you won't be in the way.

To prepare for that happy period of your life the foundation must be built in the active today period.

Carry smiles in your old age; they will keep the heart young, the digestion good, and life will be worth while.

TIME

What Geology Tells Us About Time

I have traveled horseback over the great arid plains of the West and read the story of the ages gone before.

In Arizona and New Mexico there are ancient ruins of forts and cities built by people we know not of.

Chalcedony Park with its petrified forest of mammoth trees silently testifies to a period when vegetation was rampant and on what is now a desert.

In Wyoming there is coal enough to furnish fuel for the United States for several centuries.

Coal is carbon made from trees and vegetation covered with earth and rock, pressed, and preserved through the thousands of years necessary to change it from vegetable to carbon.

Oceans and floods gradually covered millions of acres of trees and plants with ooze and soil and sand. Ages turned some of these deposits to stone.

There in bleak Wyoming is testimony and evidence of changes that time only can bring about.

"A thousand years is as a day and a day is as a thousand years." Thus wrote the scribe of old. So then we must consider this estimate of time in reading the history of the sequential events in the first chapter of Genesis which describes the order of the world's creation.

The arrangement of the formation of the world was the dividing the light from the darkness, conforming to the rotation of our globe and consequent day and night.

Then the separating of land and water, then the birth of vegetation on the land, the creation of fish and reptiles in the sea, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and finally the higher animal, man.