The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Snap
"I'M looking for a three-hour course to fill up my program for next semester," Gregg said to me yesterday, "Do you know of any snap course?"
Before I answered him, my mind went back to commencement time. We were sitting on the porch talking it over, Frank and I, after the fellows had left. We had been celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our graduation from college, and we had had three happy days together with the fellows, some of whom we had not seen since the day we parted after our commencement exercises. We had all been struck by the changes which had come to each of us, and naturally each one had swelled with satisfaction whenever some one intimated that he had changed little.
Mac had been in Arizona most of the time working cruelly hard in the mines; he was bald and seamed, and crippled with rheumatism. Pete's hair, which had been a riotous bunch of black curls, was entirely white. Fred, who had been slender and smooth cheeked showed a face that bore the mark of hard struggle and a physique that pulled the scales at twice the amount he could manage when he was a freshman. Ed seemed most like himself; brown haired, smooth faced, slender as a boy, he had changed least of all. Life had been a rather easy routine for him; he had not needed money; he had struggled little; he had developed little ambition; he entered only slightly into the reminiscences and the controversies which sprang up; he had no plans for the future, little thought of the past.
After they were all gone some way we decided that Fred had gripped us most of all. He had been a wild, untrained, harum scarum fellow, who cared little for God or for his instructors. He had brought himself to the front; he was the head of a big engineering plant; he had great ambitions for the future, and he was managing his men and his boys in a masterly way; best of all he had conquered himself, and all the wild passions that seemed to rage through him were under his control. His face showed character and conquest and self-mastery. You could tell by looking at him that he was strong and dependable. He had tried the hard thing and he had made good at it, while Ed was just as he used to be. He had got nowhere; he had no ambition to get anywhere. He had not sacrificed; he had not suffered, and for him there had been no development. And so as we thought it all over we decided that the man who had changed the most had done best. It is struggle that turns the hair gray and eats furrows into the face and bends the shoulders. All these suggest accomplishment and so are venerable and beautiful.
The man who is looking for the snap, for the soft job in college and out of it, is not likely to get anywhere; a passive unaggressive existence means weakness and stagnation.
"No," I said to Gregg, "I can't think of any snap courses."
September