The Book of Courage Part 5

And so they show their weakness, their unfitness for bearing responsibility, their cowardice when the world is calling for courage.

Worth-while work demands the finest kind of courage, and with perfect fairness work gives back courage to those who put courage into it.

I

BEGINNING

"Yes, he's a right good worker, when you once get him started," a country newspaper editor said to a friend who was inquiring about a boy who had been in the office three months. "Watch him now; you'll see what I mean."

The boy had just brought from the express office the package of "patent insides," as the papers for the weekly edition of the newspaper, already half printed in the nearby city, were called. With a sigh he dragged these up the stairs and laid them on the folding table. With another sigh he contemplated the pile and thought how much time would be required to fold the eight hundred papers. After lengthy calculation he stopped to read a column of jokes from the top paper in the pile. At least five minutes pa.s.sed before the first paper was folded. At the end of ten minutes he had succeeded in folding perhaps twenty-five papers.

When the noon hour arrived not one third of the task was completed.

While he ate his lunch he was thinking of the dread ordeal of the afternoon--six hundred more papers to be folded! Would he ever be done?

He was still pitying himself as he walked slowly back to the office.

Just before reaching the doorway into which he must turn, he spied an acquaintance. He made his way over to the boy who had attracted him, not because he had anything to say to him, but that he might delay a little longer the moment of beginning work at the folding table.

"What are you going to do?" he asked idly of the boy, who had taken off his coat and was rolling up his sleeves.

"The boss wants me to sort that lot of old iron," was the reply.

"What, that huge pile! It will take you a week, won't it? Just think how much of it there is!"

"No, there isn't time to think how much of it there is," was the reply.

"And what would be the good? Not a bit of use getting discouraged at the very start, and that is what would happen if I didn't pitch in hard. The job is going to be done before night--that is, if I'm not interrupted by too many loafers coming in to ask fool questions."

The boy from the printing office was about to resent this speech of the boy at the iron pile, but he thought better of it. "Perhaps there is something in what he says," he said to himself, as he went up the stairs. "Suppose I try to pitch in hard."

So he surprised the foreman by beginning at the pile of six hundred papers as if he was to be sent to a ball game when he finished. And he surprised himself by finishing his task in a little more than an hour.

The lesson he learned that day stood him in good stead when later he was taking his first difficult examination in a technical school. His neighbor stopped to look over the paper from beginning to end, and was heard to mutter, "How do they expect us to get through ten questions like these in an hour's time?" The boy from the printing office had no time for such an inquiry, but began work at once on the first question, without troubling himself about those that came later until he was ready for them.

So it was when, his technical course completed, he was confronted by his first great railroad task, the clearing up of a wreck that looked to his a.s.sistants like an inextricable tangle. After one good look at it he pitched in for all he was worth, thus inspiring the men who had felt the task was impossible, and within a few hours the tracks were clear.

The ability to pitch in at once on a hard job is one characteristic of the man who accomplishes tasks that make others sit up and take notice.

John Shaw Billings, the famous librarian, had this ability. To a friend who praised him for the performance of what others thought to be a most difficult task, he said:

"I'll let you into the secret--it is nothing really difficult if you only begin. Some people contemplate a task until it looks so big it seems impossible, but I just begin, and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done."

II

PURPOSE FORMING

One of the interesting points the fascinated reader of biography comes to look for is the first hint of the formation of the purpose that later characterized the life of the subject. There is infinite variety, but in every case there is apt to be something that takes the purposeful reader back to the days when his own ambition was taking shape.

For instance, there is Daniel Boone. One would not be apt to select him as an example of one whose life was ruled by a purpose deliberately formed and adhered to for many years. Yet he had his vision of what he desired to accomplish when, at twenty-one years of age, he was marching from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to join Braddock's company. On the way he met John Finley, a hunter who had traveled through Ohio and into the wild regions to the south. His tale of Kentucky fired Boone's imagination, and the two men planned to go there just as soon as the trip to Fort Duquesne was at an end. It proved impossible to carry out the plan for many years, but Boone never lost sight of his purpose, and ultimately he carved out the Wilderness Road and opened the way for the pioneers to seek homes in the Kentucky Wilderness.

Alexander Hamilton was but twelve years old when he wrote from his home in St. Croix, in the West Indies, to a friend in America:

"I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I am confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hope of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity."

Not for a day did he lose sight of his purpose. The opportunity he sought came years later. He sailed for America, and began the career that led to usefulness and fame.

As a boy Robert Fulton was ambitious. He had two dreams. He wished to go to Europe to study art, and he wished to buy a farm for his widowed mother. For these objects he saved every dollar he could. On his twenty-first birthday he took his mother and sister to the home he had bought for them, and later in the same year he sailed for Europe.

When Peter Cooper was making his way against odds in New York City he felt the need of an education. But he had to work by day and there was no night school. Night after night he studied by the light of a tallow candle. And while he studied, his life purpose was formed: some day he would make it easy for apprentice boys to secure an education after working hours. Many years pa.s.sed before he was able to carry this purpose into effect. By this time the apprentice system had been displaced, but he felt that young people still needed the school he had in mind. In 1859, nearly fifty years after his own boyhood struggle, he founded Cooper Union, in which thousands have had the opportunity "to open the volume of Nature by the light of truth--so unveiling the laws and methods of Deity that the young may see the beauties of creation, enjoy its blessings and learn to love the Being from whom cometh every good and perfect gift."

As a boy Abraham Lincoln made up his mind "to live like Washington." He was twenty-two years old when, in New Orleans,--where he had taken a flatboat loaded with produce--he saw a slave auction and spoke the never-to-be-forgotten words: "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard." Thirty-five years later came his chance, and he did "hit that thing hard" with the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation.

Alexander Graham Bell's life ambition was to teach deaf children how to articulate. Funds were short. That he might have more funds he engaged in experiments that led to the invention of the telephone. When the telephone instrument was given the attention it deserved at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, the inventor wrote triumphantly to his parents: "Now I shall have the money to promote the teaching of speech to deaf children."

James Stewart, the Scotch boy who became a famous missionary in South Africa, was fifteen years old when, one day while following the plow in Perthshire, he began to brood over the future. "What was it to be?" The question flashed across his mind, "Might I not make more of my life than by remaining here?" Then he said, "G.o.d helping me, I will be a missionary." At another time, while hunting with a cousin, he said "Jim, I shall never be satisfied till I am in Africa with a Bible in my pocket and a rifle on my shoulder, to supply my wants."

James Robertson was a school teacher in Canada when he became a Christian. On the Sunday he was to take his vows as a follower of Christ, he walked two miles to church with a friend who has told of his memories of the day thus:

"As we went along the Governor's Road there was a bush, 'Light's Woods,'

on the south side of the road. Robertson suggested that we turn aside into the bush, not saying for what purpose. We penetrated it a short distance, when, with a rising hill on our right and on comparatively level ground, the tall maples waving their lovely heads far above us, and the stillness of the calm, sunny day impressing us with a sense of the awful, we came to a large stone. Robertson proposed that we engage in prayer. We knelt down together. He prayed that he might be true to the vows he was about to take, true to G.o.d and ever faithful in his service."

From that day the young man's purpose was inflexible. He would be a minister. He did not dream of conspicuous places in the church. When the temptations came to seek place and position, he wrote to Miss Cowing, who had promised to be his wife, "We are no longer our own. The time for self is gone for us."

William Duncan likewise was tempted to seek a position of prominence.

When he decided to become a missionary, his employers sought to dissuade him. "You have one of the keenest brains in England," one of them said.

"Don't you see you are making a fool of yourself?" "Fool or no fool, my mind is made up, and nothing can change it," was the positive reply. And he set his face like a flint, and in time began the wonderful work that has written his name indelibly in the history of the Indians of Western Canada and Alaska.

Washington Gladden was a country newspaper man in Owego, New York, when he united with the church, and began to make definite plans for a larger future than he had yet dreamed of. First he went to the Academy and then to college, with the ministry always in view.

George Grenfell, who became a missionary in Africa, was thirteen years old when he began to think of devoting his life to work for others. The reading of Livingstone's first book turned his thoughts to Africa.

William Waddell was fifteen years old when he became a Christian. At the time he was working for a ship-joiner at Clydebank, Scotland. The ambition took possession of him to become a missionary to Africa.

Neither lack of education nor scarcity of funds was allowed to stand in his way. He kept at his work until he saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt asking for men to go to the Orange Free State to a.s.sist in building a church. He volunteered, and, as a layman and a mechanic, began his wonderful career in Africa.

David Lloyd-George was an orphan in Wales when he determined to be a lawyer. So he read, under the guidance of his shoemaker uncle, and when he was fourteen he was ready for the preliminary examination. For six years more he continued his preparation. Before he was twenty-one he set out on the career that has made him the leader to whom King and people of England alike turned eagerly.

These men found their place and did their work, not because they sought great things for themselves, but because they lived in the spirit of the advice given by a celebrated Canadian to a company of young people:

"You cannot all attain high positions: there are not enough to go around. You cannot all be preachers or premiers, but you can all do thoroughly and well what is set you to do, and so fit yourselves for some higher duty, and thus by industry and fidelity and kindness you can fill your sphere in life and at last receive the 'Well done' of your Lord."

III

USING TIME WISELY

A remark made by an acquaintance in the street car showed such familiarity with the work and trials of the busy conductor that inquiry followed.

"Yes, I was a conductor once," the man said, "but I had my eye on something else. At night I took a business course, and soon was able to take a position with a railroad company."

"That was fine!" was the answering comment. "How you must have enjoyed resting on your oars as you reaped the fruits of extra toil."