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{{c|
{{xxxx-larger|The {{uc|Sunday Eight O'Clock}}}}{{dhr}}{{uc|Brief Sermons for the Undergraduate}}{{dhr}}{{asc|By}}{{dhr}}{{larger|{{uc|[[Author:Thomas Arkle Clark|Thomas Arkle Clark]]}}}} {{asc|Dean of Men, University of Illinois}}{{dhr|7}}{{uc|Urbana Illini Publishing Company 1916}}
}}

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{{c|Copyright, 1916 {{smaller|by}} Illini Publishing Co. {{smaller|Printed November, 1916}}}}

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{{di|P}}ROBABLY most of the readers of these brief homilies will close the book with a smile at the little foibles or serious faults of their brother men, possibly known to them by name, at whom the gentle criticisms are pointed. Most of us will believe that we have long ago been promoted from the primer of conduct. We can enjoy the reminiscences of our youthful shortcomings called up by these chapters; the humor, the style, the human sympathy and charity that make for a better common understanding, they all appeal to us. And yet few will fail to admit, quite tacitly no doubt, that we too share the weaknesses of those who inspired the sermons, and that we can use the advice./begin/

They are inspired indeed. For they are all documents of real experience; behind each is at least one episode fresh from the

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life of college students, which is quite like the life of mankind in general. The simple, homely truths of existence, the lessons of human intercourse here told us, the sound and helpful and kindly advice are not new in the world, but they must be taught over and over again, and they have not often been 80 well expressed. Because they have been well told, made real and vivid and impressive to the readers of the ''[[Daily Illini]]'' of the University of Illinois where they have appeared every Sunday for the past year or so, it has seemed desirable that they should be preserved.

Probably no one person needs the guidance or advice offered by many of these little sermons; one might react unfortunately to a reading of all of them at a sitting. But every one of them has gone home to some readers. Many of them have had surprising results. Within a few days after "[[The Uncertain Mail]]" first appeared no fewer than forty guilty consciences sought pardon from

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the Dean. They had never known that courteous but unsolicited notes should be answered, or they had meant to write, but . . . . And how many, secretly and ashamed, made new resolutions, not because of this one reminder only, but of others as well?

I recall the interested surprise with which Dean Clark told me of the elderly man who called, after reading one of these, to ask what was clearly to him an embarrassingly personal question.

"Dean Clark", he said, "I've lived a long while, and have eaten baked potatoes with a spoon as long as I can remember. I am chagrined, but helpless, as I read your reference to that practice of mine. How then ''should'' I eat a baked potato?"

Not all of us will be willing thus candidly to admit how often our foibles are illuminated in the pages of this book.

{{right|offset=2em|{{sc|[[Author:Frank W. Scott|Frank W. Scott]]}}}}

November, 1916

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{{di|I|fl="}} SUPPOSE it seems pretty tough to have to get back to hard work," a freshman said to me as we were sitting together on the train that was bringing me back to the University from a summer of sight-seeing and freedom from office routine. What I said in reply is perhaps beside the mark, but the fact, and my text, remains that the day's work for each of us should have our interest and our best efforts, should bring us a measure of joy, and should not be delayed or done badly because of past pleasures or present allurements.

The boy entering college is likely to have at first a misconception as to what for him the real work of the day is. He has but recently broken away from the attachments and duties of home, and he often falls into a maelstrom of attractions at college. It is not strange, often, that he should frequently

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see things out of proportion, and that he should not at once recognize the fact that for him the real day's work is his college work—the assignments which from day to day he will jot down in a friendly note book, as they come from the lips of his various instructors. Other things may be important, but they are only incidental.

A few months ago I saw a body of Scotch Highlanders—five thousand of them—marching away to war. They were farmers, clerks, laboring men of all sorts who had left their regular work, their friends and their families to take up the business of war. Most of them have since met death upon a foreign shore. For many of them there was much joy and comfort and love left behind; for all of them there was sacrifice and privation and the danger of death ahead. But all of these hardships were for them a part of the day's work, and they were going to it with firmness and courage and with faces set. No doubt their minds were

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filled with the thoughts of the friends they were leaving behind; they would have been something less than human if they had not thought occasionally of the danger ahead; but whatever they thought or felt there was fight in their eyes, and they marched straight ahead, to the accomplishment of their tasks.

It is with that sort of spirit that the freshman should go to his work. Every day will have its special tasks; these should be done and done within the time assigned for them. He will not always find them easy or pleasant. The soldiers that I saw were carrying guns that, no doubt, galled their shoulders, and heavy knapsacks that seemed like an Old Man of the Sea about their necks; their feet were often blistered and sore, but they marched on; the day's work had to be done.

A young man said to me not long ago in explaining his failures of last year: "My work was very difficult, and I could not get interested in it, so I shirked it." Such a man would make a poor soldier, just as he

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made a poor student. Whatever your day's work is you should go to it with courage and vigor. If it is difficult you will get so much the more training out of it if you manage to do it. If it is not to your liking so much the more to your credit if you do it well. All sorts of things will call you away from it, some of them very good in themselves—physical and social pleasures, the picture shows, your new-made friends—but so far as they take your mind off the real business of the day they are bad. The day's work must be done.

And you will find as you address yourself manfully to the task of doing your college work that gradually it will grow easier, gradually your interest and your pleasure in it will increase, and finally you will come, as most men do who have chosen wisely, to look forward to it with real pleasure and to leave it with regret.

''{{smaller|September}}''

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{{di|I}} WAS sitting in the office at the close of a tiresome registration week when he came in shyly and apologetically. He was a freshman, two thousand miles from home, he said, and he was sick—too sick to study, too sick to eat.

I inquired as to his symptoms, but they were indefinite, elusive. He was suffering, but his pain was not "localized" as the physicians say. As I suggested remedies, other troubles presented themselves, until finally he broached the subject of going home, and I knew he was homesick. I fixed him up—no matter how. The main point of the story is that he stuck; he fought it out as every manly boy does. He is an instructor now teaching other freshmen, and very likely has forgotten the whole circumstance.
{{nop}}

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If in all the disorder and confusion of the new duties and the new scenes incident to the opening of college some lonesome freshman has felt the call of home, there is nothing in that to be ashamed of. Perhaps those who have not had these feelings are less to be commended than those who have. It is rather a credit than otherwise to be in love with home.

Before long, if you keep at it, the interest in your daily work will develop, the thing which seemed so chaotic and confused will resolve itself into the orderly and the familiar; friends will spring up, pleasant associations will be formed—associations almost as pleasant, perhaps, as those you had at home, and the pain and the longing will grow less. As I recall them now, the boys who have grown homesick have usually been those who have cared most for the ideals and the principles of home; they have been good boys who, if they stayed, have developed into strong men.
{{nop}}

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Some day not far distant as you catch a glimpse of a newly formed friend across the green quadrangle stretching in front of University Hall, or as you see "Bart" kick a difficult goal on Illinois Field or Pogue carry the ball across the line for a touchdown, a wave of feeling will rush over you, and you will realize that you are a part of it all, and that it is your college and your campus, and your team, and that it is home here, and you love it.

And the homesick feeling will be gone.

''{{smaller|September}}''

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{{di|I}} WAS ten, I suppose, and the pup and I were wandering across the dry stubble of prairie grass. I was picking my way cautiously in a vain endeavor to save my bare feet from the sharp ends of the dead weeds. The pup—young, curious, and unsophisticated—was making wide excursions in all directions, searing up flocks of quails or nosing in a gopher's hole. I was carrying a jug of water to the men in the hay field; the pup was intent on new experiences.

We had not gone far until we came upon a bumble bees' nest buried under the prairie sod. The bees were not in a good humor.

They were buzzing about petulantly, and, remembering former experiences, I veered to one side. The pup was fascinated. He showed interest, but with head erect he kept at first at a safe distance. Then, his curios-

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ity getting the better of him, he drew nearer. A hoary obese bumble bee made a pass at him, and he ran yelping to me.

The temptation to see something new was too great for him, however, and not heeding my voice, he went slowly back, stuck his nose into the hole, and was stung.

It was a sad little pup, with a limp tail and a wry distorted countenance, that trotted dejectedly and thoughtfully at my heels as we wended our way back from the hay fields. He had sought and found adventure, he had seen the world, he had had experience, but he had paid dearly for it.

His is an experience not confined to young and venturesome dogs. It is characteristic of youth. The young fellow just entering college—curious, eager, unsophisticated, full of vitality—finds it hard to avoid the bumble bees' nest. There is the temptation to grow wise, to see a little of life, to approach near enough to these untried dangers to satisfy curiosity and yet not to be stung. Few boys

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Stung expect to come out of these derelict excursions any the worse for the experience; they want only to see; but he is the rare exception who does not ultimately feel the sting of shame or disgrace, and physical pain.

The girl who is eager to be a good fellow, who is out for a lark, and who laughs at conventionalities, is running into the bumble bees' nest. She will hardly be able to keep herself from criticism, from vulgar cheap comment, from the sting of a tarnished reputation.

It is a foolish pup that sticks his nose into a bees' nest.

''{{smaller|September}}''

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{{di|A}} DEAR old lady whom I once knew used to say in evidence of the fact that she had not wasted her eighty years, that she had never belonged to a club or been a member of a committee.

Hers was, perhaps, an extreme view to take, and one not likely to be accepted by the impulsive undergraduate. There is no doubt much to be said in favor of belonging to something. To do so may widen one's acquaintance and develop his initiative and increase his responsibility and his power of leadership, but whether it does or not very few fellows who are asked to join anything can find it in their hearts to refuse. It is a sort of flattery which we all fall for.

At this season of the year, however, when clubs are multiplying and lists of prospective members are being prepared, and the

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nets are being laid to ensnare the unsophisticated, it is possibly not unwise to sound a soft note of warning. The man who asks you to join something is like a promoter or an insurance solicitor or a book agent. He presents the invitation so skillfully that it seems like a rare privilege that one can not afford to slight, or the opportunity of a life time which one should not neglect. The prospect is alluring, but the cost is sometimes great.

One may belong to too many things. I know a number of undergraduates who belong to so many that they have time for nothing else. The joiner often has no time for his studies and no money to pay his regular bills. All his substance is wasted on his organizations, and all he has to show is a few flunks, some unpaid bills, and a collection of curiously designed pins.

Don't join anything that you haven't time to help, and don't join anything that can not be of some real service to you. A good

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many of our undergraduate organizations are groping about with the hope that they may ultimately find some real purpose for existing besides contributing to the support of fraternity jewelers and getting their photographs in the class annual. I am repeatedly besought to suggest some real object in life for a dozen different organizations which have not yet stumbled upon anything worth doing. Joining becomes with many fellows a fad and an obsession. It overshadows every other ambition and desire. It may be good to join something, but it is imbecility to join everything.

{{c|{{smaller|''September''}}}}

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{{di|W}}HEN I was an undergraduate in college and used to go home for the summer to work up a little physical enthusiasm on the farm, Cornelius O'Donnell, a shrewd old Irishman who lived down in the Dutch Flats and with whom we used to exchange work during harvest time, was wont regularly, after he had greeted me and inquired if I were "still down there in college," to propound the question, "Well, what are you goin' to make o' yourself?"

I am not sure that Cornelius thought that in the transformations that go on within college walls it is possible to construct a delicately wrought silk purse out of a sow's ear, but he had the feeling that any serious minded and reasonably intelligent young fellow who was willing to put in four years of good hard work could mould himself into

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any desired shape—could make out of himself, almost anything. And he was right.

I have wondered often as I have seen each year the hundreds of new men entering college, what their individual ambition is—what they want to make of themselves. I heard our President say not long ago that it is foolish for a man to waste his time in learning in college what he could pick up at the "Corners"; he should seek something worth while.

Some fellows are satisfied with small accomplishment in college—to be the best dancer on the campus, or the keenest fusser, or the most adroit pool player or the most notorious loafer, or, without scholastic excellence, to shine in some undergraduate activity. They are setting for themselves a low standard.

My old German teacher used to say that one can buy anything from the gods if one is willing to pay what it costs. It is possible, I believe, for every healthy young

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fellow to accomplish any reasonable ambition and to make himself about what he wishes. The price of such accomplishment is not infrequently high; it means high ideals, sacrifice, and hard work, and self-control, and self-discipline.

I come back to the old question. What are you going to make of yourself—you who are already some distance along the course? You have the materials and the opportunity to make almost anything you desire. You can become a rounder or a man of stable, reliable character; you can develop into a commonplace loafer who wastes his hours in, playing Kelly pool or penny ante, or you can become a real student who cultivates careful speech and broad interests and habits of self-control, and who does his daily task excellently.

It is up to you; you'll never again have so good a chance as now to make something of yourself.

''{{smaller|September}}''

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{{di|I|fl="}}'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

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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

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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

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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."

''{{smaller|September}}''

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{{di|I}} RAN into Brown the other night about eight o'clock as I was com ing down Green Street. He was with two or three companions, well known men about the campus. It was a commonplace discussion that they were carrying on, but he was swearing profanely and loudly, mixing his oaths with vulgar gutter talk. I was not shocked, for as a boy I had been thrown with all conditions of the underworld—coal heavers and river rats, and ignorant section gangs, and I had heard the talk of the riff raff that follows a threshing outfit in the {{hinc|northwest}}—but I was surprised.

You must not class Brown as the ordinary loud-mouthed underclassman. He is a senior who has an educated, religious father and a refined, gentle mother. At home Brown is himself an active member of the leading

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Protestant church, and sometimes at vacations he leads the Christian Endeavor meeting. At college he is a prominent man. He was wearing an "I" sweater when I met him, and he is a member of one of the best known organizations of upper classmen. He is not a coarse fellow; he has simply learned to swear as he learned in the grades to chew tobacco—because he thought it was smart and made him appear grown up. He swore at first to let people know, who would not otherwise have suspected it, what a young devil he was, and he swears now because he wants people to realize what an important character he is.

Of course, at home he doesn't swear at his mother or his father or his pastor or at any one or in the presence of any one whom he respects; and at college he is more or less careful who hears him. With his profanity he tries to impress his over-worked landlady and the laundry boy, and he awes under classmen who see a good deal of his swagger

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and hear a good deal of his profane talk.

It is a habit easily acquired but not so easily broken. Brown does not stop to think how coarse and vulgar and commonplace it makes him; how irreverent it is. Nor does he realize how every vulgar profane word he utters throws discredit upon his teachers and his father and his mother and himself.

"Every fellow does it" is the excuse offered if one ever stops to offer an excuse. It is a common vulgar fault, too common and vulgar in fact for the college man who has opportunities and training and who, if he is to get far in the world, should have ideals above the low and the profane.

{{c|{{smaller|''October''}}}}

—30

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{{di|I}}'VE seen a good deal in the newspapers from time to time with reference to the certainty that if you drop a letter into the mail box at the corner of your street, it will be delivered to the proper person; but I don't believe it.

I feel somewhat as [[Author:Mark Twain|Mark Twain]] said he did regarding the notice of his death which he read in a country newspaper; I think the reports have been greatly exaggerated. I've read something to the effect that not more than one letter out of a million ultimately goes astray, and that that one has a good chance of being run to cover by some epistolary sleuth in the dead letter office; but I've watched the thing, and I'll have to be shown.

I had a few hours of unexpected leisure one day last summer, and feeling more than ordinarily kindly toward the human race I

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used it to write to a few of the undergraduates who, it seemed to me, had done something that merited attention or was worthy of praise. When I had finished there were fifteen or twenty in all. The summer dragged on, and I was made happy by receiving two acknowledgments, one from McKinley, ashy little country freshman, and a gracious pleasant one from Bullard whom most people at first sight might have thought crude. I should scarcely have expected either to reply.

Now the thing that convinces me that all this talk about the reliability of the mails is wrong is the fact that I did not hear from those other eighteen letters.

Take Burton, for example, who won the western tennis championship. I'm sure that if he had received my congratulations, he would at least have acknowledged the note. He comes from a part of the country where they are fed on courtesy and good form three times a day, and he has an aunt who

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belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution. A man with a past like that behind him couldn't neglect to acknowledge a simple little note.

There was Stephens, who is really a nice boy and who won the high average in Engineering and was given ninety-three in Rhetoric 1 by an instructor who came from Harvard; and Carlton who was elected to senior society and has had three years of uninterrupted training at sorority open houses; and Fulton whose uncle wrote a book and who is a prize athlete over whom seven organizations went crazy when he entered, and who finally joined the only first class fraternity in college—I'm sure the notes I wrote them were lost in the mails, or I should have heard from them.

Nancy says that I'm wrong in blaming the government, and that probably all these men got the letters that I wrote and failed to answer them through ignorance or carelessness just as some fellows keep their hats

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on when they talk to a woman, or fail to call after they've been invited to dinner, but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.

''{{smaller|October}}''

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{{di|I|fl="}}'VE just been up at their country place visiting the Simpkinses," George remarked to me this fall. "Cadillac, motor boat, house party, fine board, no laundry bill, nothing to pay; pretty soft."

I had met Simpkins at the end of August, and he had told me what a grind the summer had been to him. "I've had to work early and late," he said. "That family of mine had a tearing good time up north with their friends, but the bills were tremendously heavy, and you know somebody always has to pay."

The Beta Tau Sigma party, the papers said, had set a new standard for social events in this community. Nothing was lacking to make it a success—cabs, evening clothes (mostly rented), favors, theatre party, seven course luncheon—it cost a

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pretty sum. I wondered who was paying; father at home getting up early and going to bed late? Sister teaching, or clerking, or nursing? Mother going without the new gown or the vacation trip of which she was very much in need? These things more often than otherwise mean sacrifice; for some one has to pay.

Parker cut a pretty wide swath last year in college. He had the latest clothes; he never missed a good show—or a bad one; if anything was going on he could be found sitting in the front row, and there were unpleasant rumors about his associates. I knew his being in college was pinching at home a good deal, but his folks were quite willing to make the sacrifice in order that he might have the advantages that they had been denied. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had paid his part by boning on his college work. Mother could perhaps have afforded to deny herself a spring bonnet if son had needed the money to buy a Phi Beta

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Kappa pin; but as it was he finished the year in debt to every one and with a scholastic average of fifty nine. Those who were paying got little for their money.

For every good time you have, for every luxury you enjoy, for every dissipation in which you indulge or graft which you take advantage of, somebody is having to pay. You may charge the account at times, but ultimately the bills come in with interest.

It is better on the whole for each man to pay his share of the bill. No one respects a boy who is always eager to sit in, but who never reaches, or reaches far enough, for the check. He's a yellow sport and an unworthy son if he doesn't play the game fairly, economize occasionally, and square his half of the account by a return of manly character and good scholarship.

''{{smaller|October}}''

—38

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{{di|U}}NTIL he was forty a neighbor of mine lived a happy, active, useful life. He had a good job at which he earned a salary sufficient to support his family comfortably. He was interested in community affairs, he was a useful citizen, he was enthusiastic over paying for the pretty house he had built, and his future seemed bright and satisfying.

Then, unfortunately, his aunt died and left him fifty thousand dollars. He gave up his job immediately, quit work, and set out to enjoy himself. The income from his legacy was scarcely as much as his salary had previously been, and as his leisure increased his desires multiplied quite disproportionately. He became discontented, nomadic, a lazy, useless citizen, who is happy nowhere. He spends his winters in Florida and his summers camping out in the woods or drift-

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ing up and down the river in a motor boat. He is bringing up his two boys to be unhappy loafers like himself. But he is a pathetic figure. He has not learned the lesson that there is no real happiness without work. The most unhappy discontented people I have ever known are those who have money enough to live on without following any regular daily occupation, and who put in their time looking for pleasure. The woman who has no occupation but bridge whist is a miserable creature, and the man who is trying to pay his obligations to the world by playing golf or billiards is an unhappy, discontented grouch. The most wretched men in the world are those who give up work before they are compelled to do so.

Sometimes when the days are hot and long and the tasks are hard and life seems too full of duties for us to fulfill them all we might be helped if we stopped long enough to realize that real happiness is always synonymous with work. It is the hard job, the difficult

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and often the disagreeable task that brings us joy in the accomplishment.

The greatest blessing that God ever bestowed upon fallen man was the privilege of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. It was the best possible substitute for paradise.

''{{smaller|October}}''

—42

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{{di|I}} HAVE had to do with almost every variety of undergraduate during the last twenty years—the coarse, the illiterate, the sullen, the impertinent, the vicious, and the dissipated—I can do business with any but the liar. I do not know on what ground to meet him.

I was talking to Brown with regard to his study list. "Have you turned in your change slip as you were asked to do last week?" I inquired.

"Yes," was his quick reply. "I gave it to the Dean on the day I saw you."

"I will just speak to him about it," I continued, reaching for the telephone receiver, "and be sure that everything is all right." Brown dropped his head for a moment, but as I called the number, he spoke.
{{nop}}

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"You needn't ask," he said, "I lied to you; I have the paper in my pocket yet."

It was simply to save himself from censure that he had told the untruth. He had been careless and procrastinating; he intended to do the thing immediately on leaving my office; it never occurred to him, as it seldom occurs to the ordinary young liar, that any one would check up on him. I could with difficulty bring myself to believe him again.

"If you will reinstate me," a boy said to me last semester, "I shall not cut any more this year. Don't you believe me?" he continued, when he saw that I smiled.

"I should, perhaps," I answered, "if you had ever kept your word with me before."

A young fellow can lie, get away with it and brag about it for a few times, but ultimately people find him out. The unfulfilled promise, the broken engagement, the duty that was assumed and then never fulfilled all react on the individual. These things seem trifling at first, but such a man comes

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in time to realize that his reputation is gone, nobody trusts him, nobody believes him; and a man whom nobody trusts is a failure.

Truth is a virtue; it is more than that; it is a cash account in the bank against which one may always draw. The liar's statements come in time to be discounted even when he is telling the truth.

''{{smaller|October}}''

—46

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{{di|S}}OMETIMES we feel in these commercial days when everyone seems to be engaged in piling up money for the furtherance of his own selfish personal ends that the age of sentiment and chivalry is gone, that there are no gentle gallant knights, no faithful unselfish lovers; but it is not so. It is only because our sight is dimmed or our senses dulled that we do not see the romance or feel the sentiment or catch the music that is about us.

Out on the back campus last Tuesday morning a little scene was enacted—the singing of a few songs, the making of a few brief speeches, the digging of a spade full of earth to celebrate the beginning of a new University building. To the thoughtless on looker it might have seemed a very mechanical procedure, but in reality it was as touching and

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tender a tribute as was ever paid by a man to the woman he loved. It was a beautiful climax to a beautiful companionship which had lasted through many years.

In the early days of the war of the Rebellion an officer of the northern army was stationed in a southern city. He met there a young southern girl to whom he became devoted. They were married at the close of the war, and she came north with him to make for them a home. They lived together happily for many years. Through struggle, and toil, and poverty, and sorrow to success their devotion to each other was beautiful to see. Through all the years which they spent together there was no diminution of his faithfulness, of his courtesy, of his adoration, or of hers. She was to him always the young beautiful girl whom he had won in the south; he was to her a faithful and gallant knight. Even when she died he remained her tender lover.

The little ceremony on Tuesday was the

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breaking of ground for the building which is to be erected in her memory and into which is to go the bulk of the modest fortune which they together accumulated. It is a noble gift, the thought of which is inspiring. It robs one of cynicism; it strengthens one's faith in the realities of life and of love.

"What a fool a man is," someone says, "to give the savings of a life time to an institution supported by the state." But in reality those who sacrifice and give to a cause or to an individual whom they love are the only wise men. By his sacrifice and his generosity this man has dignified love and made it real; he has strengthened our faith in the goodness of humanity; he has enriched his own life, and he has added a touch of sentiment and idealism to an institution where such things are all too rare.

''{{smaller|October}}''

—50

-51

{{di|H}}IS real name is Sam, but we named him "Cucus" because when he first arrived from his birthplace in southern Italy and began his daily round with his push cart delivering fruit and vegetables at our back door, he had his own difficulties with our unmusical language and cut short the unmanageable cucumbers to "cucus".

His honesty, his soft, pleasant voice, and his ingratiating manners won trade for him, and it was not long until he was driving a wagon of his own with his name painted in gold along the side. He learned to speak a little better, and at night school he learned to write a very round and a very readable hand.

He had his own troubles, too, as other business men have had, and sometimes he

-52

told them confidentially to me. His consignments of fruit were not always good, he could not always dispose of his stock before it became stale, and sometimes landladies did not pay him or unregenerate students gave him bad checks.

It was about such a check that he spoke to me a week or two ago. There had been some error, or misunderstanding on some one's part, but whatever it was Cucus was out eight dollars which he could ill afford to lose. He had somehow developed a feeling that I need but say the word and any recreant undergraduate would immediately come to time. When he had told me his story, I found that his was not a difficult matter of adjustment. I agreed to manage it for him, received his gracious thanks and a handful of fresh carrots, attended to the little business the next day, and forgot about it.

Yesterday I found a note from him in my morning mail. The spelling is his own; the

-53

"Urbanana" probably an echo of his favorite morning announcement at our back door.
{{dhr}}
Champaign, Illinois.
{{right|offset=2em|Oct. 18 - 1916}}

Mr. Thomas Arkle Clark

:University of Illinois

::Urbanana, Illinois

My dear Mr. Clarke

I droped you this few lines to let you know that Mr. Devine paid me today so I have get my money from him. I am thank you very much, and I remain your very sincery freind
{{right|offset=2em|Sam}}
{{dhr}}
I held the letter in my hand a long time, thinking. I do business mostly with cultivated, educated people; I wish they were all as thoughtful and courteous as this Italian fruit vender.

{{c|{{smaller|''October''}}}}

—54

-55

{{di|T}}HE little cab driver who used to come for me when, on rainy days, I took a taxi to save myself from the inclement weather was a cheerful soul. He was always careful, always courteous, always on time, always considerate of my comfort. He met me late one especially stormy night when the thermometer was down and the wind was cutting like a razor through the heaviest garments.

"Don't you get sick and tired of this dog's life?" I asked as he tucked me snugly into the back seat.

"Oh, no," he replied smiling, "you see it's my job."

The memory of his cheerful face and his suggestive words has helped me often since. When the days have been long, and the callers irritating and the problems difficult to

-56

solve, when I might have grown discouraged over the honest effort which resulted only in failure, I have tried to take it cheerfully because it was my job.

I don't know what your job is, for the problem of no two men in this world is quite the same. It may be getting to class regularly every day, or keeping up your college work while you earn a precarious living. It may be pursuing a difficult study or teaching a stupid class that you do not enjoy, or leading a clean life when a thousand passions are urging you on to the rocks. It may be fighting homesickness or discouragement or despondency or moral temptations or mental lethargy. I don't know what it is, but you do.

Very likely yours is not an easy job or at all times a pleasant one, and there will be all sorts of temptations to slight it, to evade its responsibilities, to put off its unpleasant, disagreeable features, to complain because it is more galling and exacting than other

-57

men's jobs. Usually, if we could only know we should discover that every job has its difficulties to be overcome and the reason we think otherwise is because we have never done the job.

No matter how difficult your job is, you will find it half done if when it presents itself you go at it cheerfully, energetically. The work that is taken up with determination and enthusiasm loses half its difficulty. And the best part of it all is that having done one job well you are getting yourself ready for another. It is an old, tried proverb that nothing so succeeds as success; nothing so strengthens us as doing some difficult task well.

I met the little cab driver yesterday; he had a new job and a better one, probably a more exacting one, but he was meeting his new problem in just as happy and cheerful a way as ever. He gave me courage.

''{{smaller|October}}''

—58

-59

{{di|T|fl="}}HE furnace is out of business again," he said to his roommate as they came into the cold room after drill. "I'm going to leave this shack. It hasn't been above sixty this fall. Put on the light, Mac, it will at least look warm."

"Say," he said a little later, as he rummaged in the drawer of the washstand, "are there any clean towels? I don't believe we've had one since last September. That counterpane on the bed looks like a study in charcoal. I suppose I didn't take my shoes off when I lay down, but it looks as if she might give us a clean one once a year, anyway."

He walked over and kicked the radiator vigorously in an attempt to stir up a stoker, but with no effect.

"I'd like to know how a fellow's going to

-60

study here," he went on, "with all the noise that goes on down stairs. Did you hear 'sister' last night hitting the piano and warbling to her young man while we were trying to bone on Calc? I guess I wasn't especially polite."

"Now look at the side rail of that bed. It's as sway backed as an old horse. There's another castor smashed, too. If you simply touch a thing it goes to pieces. I'll bet her great grandmother bought these things second hand when she went to housekeeping. Do you suppose she ever dusts? I wrote your name in the layer on the window sill two weeks ago, and it's there yet. And the bath room—"

"Never mind turning out the light, Mac," he said as they started down stairs, "we'll not be gone long."

"My dear," the woman downstairs was saying to her husband, "those students are simply unendurable. Mr. McGregor came in after twelve last night and made so much

-61

noise that he waked everybody. I never slept the rest of the night. They were really rude to Mabel's callers, too."

"The carpet in their room was new two years ago, and it won't last until spring. They've ruined grandmother's bed. There isn't a bath towel in the house; I'm sure they take them to the gymnasium. You'll have to speak to them about that boxing in their rooms. They have knocked the plas tering loose on the parlor ceiling, and the way they were pounding each other around the other night, I thought they'd come through the floor.

"They smoke dreadfully, and you can smell tobacco all over the house. Their language isn't what we've been accustomed to. I was really ashamed when the minister called Thursday. I told him it wasn't you, and that we did our best to exercise a good moral influence over them. I wonder sometimes what sort of parents they have."

"And George," she went on, "they've sim-

-62

ply ruined our walls. We shall have to have that north room repapered before we can rent it again. I'd put them out if they weren't behind with their rent. The electric light man called today, and his bill is simply appalling. I believe they leave the light burning all the time."

And as soon as she heard the boys go down the stairs she crept up to their rooms and turned out the light.

''{{smaller|November}}''

-63

{{di|T}}HERE are a good many respect able people who think that a champion football team is of more importance to a college than a million-dollar library or a faculty of prize winning Ph.D's. I should not go quite so far as this myself, but I am still convinced that a good football team is an asset worth while.

It is fine to watch a football game on a crisp November day when the sky is clear, and the air is invigorating, and the bleachers are running over with youthful enthusiasm; but it's no snap being on the team. The men on the team see nothing of the beauty of the sky or of the sun making the clouds glorious; they feel only faintly the enthusiasm of the crowd. To them the contest is a cruel, exhausting physical fight.

It is short, of course, and they enjoy it,

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perhaps, but it is a sport the training for which is most severe. A football coach is not always careful to be polite and kind; he must drive the men to their utmost capacity, and his words are often brutally goading. The men come in at night after their three or four hours of practice with discouraged hearts, and bruised muscles, and wrenched tendons, and fractured bones, and tired sore bodies to take up the real work of college. The glory and the hero worship they get out of it are not often commensurate with the sacrifices which they must make.

And we? We criticize the plays and the players, we are irritated because the score does not rise to the heights we had hoped, or we cheer passively if something pleases us. Few of us justly estimate the work that the fellows do or give them the credit they deserve.

Granting all the adverse criticisms which may be urged against the game, and they

-65

are many, there is no other single influence which does so much in a big institution like ours to foster democracy, to place undergraduates of all classes upon the same footing, to develop a feeling of loyalty to the university, and to unify the whole undergraduate body as does the football team.

{{c|{{smaller|''November''}}}}

—66

-67

{{di|O}}UR neighbor across the street, who was the mother of nine children all of whom were a credit to themselves and to the community, used to say when asked how she succeeded unaided in rearing her family so successfully, that there was nothing better for children than a good dose of neglect. I have wondered sometimes if the fact that youngest sons and only children have so little independence and initiative is not because they have never been let alone. The host of parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles which incessantly hovers around makes any moments of heavenly neglect impossible. The child is never given a chance to think for himself or to work himself out of a difficult corner.

A student with whom I talked only a short time ago assured me that he thought

-68

the best service I had ever done him during the four years of his undergraduate course was to leave him alone—to refrain from giving him advice when he knew I wanted to do so and when there was evident reason for it, to keep from calling him to account for his wrong doing when he knew that I was aware of what he had done and disapproved of it. If I had reproved him he would have argued; as I did not, he changed his conduct.

It is a difficult lesson for parents and teachers and organization officers to learn, but it is often true, nevertheless, that the best way to reform children is not to notice them; the best way to teach students a lesson is to set them an example and say nothing; the best way to impress freshmen is not to lay down so many rules and to preach less. I have often felt that the reason men outside of organizations frequently have a higher scholastic average than those inside, is that, like the old lady's children, they have

-69

been given a dose of neglect—they have been allowed to work out their own salvation. When we know that some one will coddie us and wait on us and run after us and think for us—when some is always at hand to bear our sorrows and carry our burdens and pull us back from danger we grow to expect it. I know husbands who could not pack a hand bag if they were going on a journey; I know seniors who can not get up in the morning without being called; I know freshmen who never get out the books unless they are told. If our education is worth anything it ought to teach us to be independent.

We need a little more neglect.

''{{smaller|December}}''

—70

-71

{{di|H|fl="}}ELLO, Central. Give me two-o-two-eight, please."

"Is this two-o-two-eight?"

There was a sound of confusion at the other end of the wire as the telephone receiver clicked—a mixture of tortured piano and riot and rough house combined, out of which a harsh voice sounded.

"W-e-l-l?"

"This is Mr. Clark."

"Who?"

"Mr. Clark. I—"

"Well, what in the hell do you want? Shoot it out."

I finally succeeded in making my identity clear, and the voice softened perceptibly. What I really did want was to deliver a very important telegram to an undergraduate student.

There is little doubt that the telephone

-72

has helped to facilitate business, and that it has brought the country people nearer to each other and nearer to the town. When I was a boy and wanted to ask a girl to go out with me to singing school I had to saddle a horse and ride three or four miles to see her; now all that is necessary for a young fellow is to call her up over the telephone and ask if she has a "date" for Friday night. Whatever the telephone has done to encourage matrimony and to "put the punch" into business, it has not had an improving influence upon our manners. We employ language and tones when using the telephone which we should never dare to use if speaking face to face with a person. We insult helpless telephone girls and gro—cer boys and engage in altercations with officials in a way that would not have been possible before the days of the telephone. We ask the most unnecessary, inane, and personal questions at times most in opportune. We babble and patter and retail gos-

-73

sip and carry on flirtations to a shocking extent.

I have been rung out of bed at midnight to give someone the name of the president of the Menorah society, and I have been called away from a dinner party to settle a dispute between two women whose names I had never heard before as to whether or not a son of the Kaiser had been killed during the present European war. One is likely to find a man in bed or at meals if one times his calls properly, and though we should never think of calling at his house at lunch time or at midnight to settle our trifling business, we do not hesitate to call him on the telephone.

A friend of mine whose family was seriously ill last year remarked that she could have managed everything quite comfortably if it had not been for the telephone. It rang continuously from daylight to dark until it drove her half mad and wore her out. Finally she had it taken out and went to

-74

the neighbors when she needed to telephone. The worst of it is that most of us, though we complain of them, at one time or another are ourselves guilty of these discourtesies.

{{c|{{smaller|''December''}}}}

-75

{{di|T}}HE boy who sold me [[the New York Times|the New York ''Times'']] on the train at Altoona last week short-changed me consciously, intentionally, with a guileless innocent look on his face and a "Thank you" on his lips as he tried to disappear without being caught. He was as polite as an Italian waiter when he handed back my money.

When I was a boy of fifteen on the farm I sold a load of hay to an old neighbor who had been my teacher in the country school and for whom I had had great respect. When the hay was loaded upon the wagon and he was ready to drive away he put his hand into his pocket, looked surprised, and said, "There, I forgot my pocketbook; I'll pay you the next time I see you." Even with my boyish inexperience I saw through his subterfuge and realized that he was sim-

-76

ply short-changing me. He had had no intention of paying me when he left home, nor did he do so for months afterward. I never had any confidence in him again.

It is the same sort of dishonesty that we see about us. Jones borrows ten dollars of you, agrees to pay it on the fifteenth, and you never see him until commencement; Smith goes to the Orpheum, does not get his paper done, and tells the professor that he forgot to bring it, but that he will hand it in at the next recitation; Brown gets an excuse for cutting classes because he was ill when in fact he was strolling on the back campus with a girl. After every vacation a large number of spurious checks come in from the merchants about the campus drawn by students who had no money in the bank and who knew when they drew them that they did not have.

The boy who cuts his term papers short or slights his assigned reading or fails to attend class exercises is in the same cate-

-77

gory as the fellow who hands you counterfeit coin or who gives you short change for his own profit. He is a poor business man; he has a short sighted view of his own best interests.

Ultimately a man will fail unless he plays the game squarely. To do otherwise is to short-change one's self.

''{{smaller|December}}''

—78

-79

{{di|T}}HREE young girls came hastily and noisily into the car as the train moved out of the station. They had barely escaped being left. The Christmas vacation was over, and they were going back to college. As they disposed of their various belongings, settled back in their seats, mussed up their hair a little more becomingly, and made discriminating use of their powder rags, fragments of conversation began to float through the car. I buried myself in the book I was reading, but I found it impossible not to hear something of a "peach of a vacation" mingled with grand opera and Farrar in [[Carmen (1915 film)|Carmen]], with New Year's Eve at the Congress Hotel, with a lovely Delta Upsilon formal at Northwestern, and with an all-night party at the South Shore Club.

"I am simply dead," one of them said,

-80

"and I have a peck of back work to hand in tomorrow." The babble of conversation ceased shortly, and the silence became so great that I turned to find the cause. They were asleep, their tired, pallid faces and the dark rings under their eyes showing all too well what a lovely, restful vacation they had had.

The man who said that it takes the strongest constitution to stand the average trip for the health might have added that it takes the strongest student to stand the ordinary vacation. A woman whom I once knew when asked if she employed a servant girl remarked that she had had one, but that she was just then doing her own work. She hoped as soon as she was strong enough to try one again. I have often felt that it might be a good thing to require students to pass a physical test to determine whether or not they are strong enough to indulge in the dissipations of a vacation. The line of pale, sad eyed, tired, and physically knocked{{peh}}

-81

out undergraduates who come into my office after every vacation may have had a "peach of a time", but they very seldom reveal much of the bloom on their return. A real vacation ought to be stimulating and restful, but it oftentimes leaves students exhausted, unprepared for their work, and worth nothing for days after they get back. Instead of finding themselves eager and ready for hard work, they come back to rest up.

There is no more severe test of a man's character than the way in which he spends the time that is his own and the way in which he puts in the hours or days of leisure and vacation. Most of the moral delinquents whom I know strayed away from the path of virtue and self-control when they had nothing else to do—when they were having a vacation.

''{{smaller|January}}''

—82

-83

{{di|W}}HEN "Mac", the janitor of the gymnasium, died all college exercises were suspended, and students and Faculty filled the Auditorium to show their respect for the simple-minded man, and to do honor to his memory.

Mac was a Civil War veteran who had settled down to a quiet life on the farm after he had left the ranks. Later he had moved into town, and picked up a job as general care taker at the gymnasium. He proved himself a faithful, unselfish laborer, who did his work well, and who came at the call of every student and instructor.

He met the exigencies of broken shoe strings and forgotten locker keys and torn paraphernalia with a quick and interested willingness that made him a necessity at evening practice, or when the fellows were

-84

preparing for a game; and he bore the overbearing treatment of the freshmen with the utmost patience. The long shrill whistle or the well-known cry of "Hey, Mac," would bring him running from the remotest corner of the gymnasium to any one in trouble.

But notwithstanding the fact that he was only a servant, when a jealous quarrel grew up between Roberts and Wilson, which threatened to disrupt the team, it was Mac who brought the fellows together. It was Mac who "discovered" Austen, the shy country boy who broke the intercollegiate record in the quarter mile; and when young Rockwood was fast going to the bad it was the quiet word that Mac spoke that brought him to his senses, and made him think. When Colvin was getting hopelessly down in his studies, it was Mac who put ambition into him, and got him to work. A look or a word from the old man would stop the loud talking, or stifle the coarse jest in the dressing rooms. He watched the games always

-85

on the home grounds and his encouragement in defeat, or his praise in victory, came to mean as much to the fellows as the words of the coach. In a thousand ways his influence was felt for good scholarship, and clean sport, and a clean life.

Even the young instructors respected his opinions, and told him their troubles, and asked his advice as they were getting into their gymnasium suits, or their tennis clothes, in the locker rooms. During the sixteen years that he had been about he had come to be looked upon as one of the college traditions, so that when strangers Visited the college no one felt that everything worth while had been seen until Mac had been pointed out.

His death came unexpectedly at the end of a hard day's work, and we were wholly unprepared for the shock. After the funeral ceremonies were over a number of us gathered in Fred Bernard's room in one of the dormitories to talk it over. We dwelt

-86

tenderly on his humble virtues, and a lump came into our throats as we thought of his willing services. Then Fred spoke—Fred who was senior society president; and the most influential man in college. "It isn't so much what a man's ''work'' is as what ''he is.'' It isn't a man's position, it's his influence that makes him great. What we get out of books is all right, but it's ''men'' that count, and Mac was a man."

{{c|{{smaller|''January''}}}}

-87

{{di|T}}HE business man's good resolutions are filed and recorded on the first of January; the college student formulates his at the opening of the semester. His failures and shortcomings are still so vividly before his mind that he has something of the same virtuous feeling as the inebriate has the morning after the night before.

"Never again for me," Bradley said to me when we were talking over his grades, "I'm no bone head, and next semester I shall be up with the dawn and be waiting for the professor at the class room door with my work in hand. No more cutting or back work."

Then followed a recital of his various scholastic woes and misfortunes, all of which had resulted from his only too easy habit of procrastination and late sleeping{{peh|—}}

-88

of delayed term papers, and postponed collateral reading, of neglected "sources" and forgotten notes. In the future he was to be a changed man.

It is difficult to correct the mistakes of today; it seems easy to avoid the errors of tomorrow. There is no one so kindly disposed toward virtue as the man whose immoralities have just brought him disaster; there is none so temperate as the man who is racked with the pain of last night's orgies; and no one so keen for intellectual achievement as the student who has just flunked.

It is the man who gets his work done today, not the one who swears he is going without fail to do it tomorrow, whose good resolutions count for anything. It is not the future but the present with which we should concern ourselves. There are few things so unsafe to deal with as futures. I have no doubt that Mr. Longfellow had the good resolutions of the college flunker in mind

-89

when he dropped so easily and gracefully into verse:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}Trust no future howe'er pleasant;
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act—act in the living present."
}}

As I stopped off at Kandy's to get shined up a little yesterday I caught sight of Bradley through the open door of the billiard room deep in his fourth game of billiards, his outside reading neglected, his good resolutions forgotten. "What's the use anyway?" he was thinking, if his brain was in operation at all; "It's one hundred and fourteen days until examinations."

''{{smaller|February}}''

—90

-91

{{di|B}}ILL WITHERS and I—Bill lived just across the road from us—had been reading "[[Bentley Burrows]], or The Skeleton Hand", a tale of ghosts and bandits and general horrors continued from week to week in the ''[[Saturday Night]],'' a literary journal which our hired man bought every week at Cole's drug store in town. Shivering with fear, I was just finishing the last chapter in the dusk of a dull November evening, when I heard a knock at the door. I called "Come in", as was the polite custom in our community, and to my horror a real bandit entered—leather leggins, big revolver, bristling moustache, and all. I was frightened for a moment, and then I caught sight of a lock of curly red hair sticking out through a hole in the sombrero and a freckled ear

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protruding. It was only Bill Withers wearing a false face and trying to fool me.

I have had the experience often since.

I called at a fraternity house recently when rushing was on. Through the dim light I could see that all the fellows were wearing false faces. Above the din of the rag time whanged from the long-suffering piano I could detect the hollow, unnatural voices issuing through the masks that the men were wearing. The older fellows, more skilled in their strategy, had adjusted their disguises with greater cleverness than the others, but even the freshmen, their false faces sometimes awry, were attempting to cover up their real selves.

I ran onto Jim Burton one Sunday this summer at church with his parents. He was looking pious, attentive, and altogether unsophisticated. As he leaned over to pick a hymn book from the floor I could see how crudely he had adjusted his false face, for underneath he was the same irreligious, ir-

-93

reverent, irresponsible youth whom I had known at college.

I was watching Mary Gay at a party last week, rosy cheeked and bright eyed, and I thought I had never seen a happier and a more animated face. She was smiling on every one and showing a vivacity and an interest that held a pleased crowd about her. A few minutes later I came upon her unobserved as she was standing before the mirror in the hallway surreptitiously adjusting her false face, and I could see how pitifully bored and tired she looked.

These false faces which we wear or see every day seldom deceive anyone. They are like rouge or oleomargarine or hair dye or face powder—no one ever thinks them real. We put them on to make ourselves beautiful or impressive to our teachers or our sweethearts or the tax collector or the home folks or the minister or our Creator, but more often than otherwise the lock of red

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hair escapes or the freckled ear sticks out and gives us away.

{{c|{{smaller|''February''}}}}

-95

{{di|I}} WAS waiting my turn at Gaston's while the freshman polished off an Ag instructor, when Kohl, who, though he is a junior, is still an enthusiastic supporter of his home town, came in to borrow the [[Centralia Daily Sentinel|Centralia ''Daily Sentinel'']] to read the personal column.

Curiosity got the better of my early training in manners, and I glanced at the paper. He was reading:

"James Heffington is playing the cornet for Linn Byers.

Postmaster Bill Whitney has had a new sign painted for the postoffice.

Miss Jessie Siegler will entertain the embroidery club at her home this afternoon.

McKinley Miller visited over Sunday with friends in Odin.

The Baptist Sunday School will give an ice cream supper Saturday evening at the

-96

home of Frank Chumbley. Come and bring your friends."

"That Heffington kid is some cornet player," Kohl commented when he saw I was looking. "He'll be a soloist in the University band one of these days. I've been wondering, too, for a long time whether or not Mac Miller was still thinking about that girl over at Odin. I knew her when we were in grammar school. It's some town I live in."

The life in college is likely to wean us too quickly from the old home folks and the old home life. We may come foolishly in time to feel that there is no training worth while but that which we get in college, that there is no education but that which we get out of books. We who are in college are living and feeding too much upon theories, so that it is good for us occasionally to get a taste of the simple, commonplace things of practical life. There is nothing that will give us this better than the home paper.
{{nop}}

-97

While we have been learning calculus and economics; the theories of versification and genetics; conversational French and Ibsen, it is helpful to be reminded that the home-folks have not been altogether standing still—that Frank Chumbley is developing social finesse and religious fervor in circulating the ice cream, that Jessie Siegler is cultivating a love for the beautiful through the embroidery club, and that McKinley Miller is taking an elementary course in home economics by correspondence and by an occasional private lesson from the girl at Odin.

There is no agency like the home paper for developing a broad human interest and for keeping us in touch with the friendships and the ideals of our youth.

''{{smaller|February}}''

—98

-99

{{di|I}} MET him as he was coming out of University Hall just released from an examination in English 20. He was hot, revolutionary, protestant. The test had been imbecile, unfair, unreasonable. He had studied conscientiously, he said, only to be disappointed in what he had gone up against. He had got nothing that he had expected, and he was against the whole system.

A surgeon friend of mine told me once that when he performed his first independent operation for appendicitis instead of finding the offending appendage as he should have done just under the spot where he had been taught to make the incision, after an exciting game of hide and seek among the viscera, he discovered it tucked securely away behind the innocent patient's liver, from which spot he dug it out with

-100

some difficulty. Of course it was an idiotic and unreasonable place for an appendix to be in and no doctor ought to be expected to get the right answer under those conditions,—but unless he does he is likely to lose his patient, and flunk the quiz.

My experience has been that in real life we seldom get the problems we are looking for. The questions that are put to us are not like those in the book, and the examinations we must pass are very seldom the ones for which we have made such painstaking, diligent preparation. It is very desirable to know what the book says, but it is quite as necessary to have cultivated judgment and the power of independent thought.

What are examinations for?

The more difficult and unreasonable they are—and in college they are neither to any extreme—the more they are a test of a man's judgment or his resourcefulness, or his independence and originality. The right sort of preparation for an examination ought to

-101

Examinations give a man a broader and a more comprehensive view of the subject in question than he has got through his scrappy daily study; it ought to help him to organize his facts and to get a final grasp of his information.

An examination is most of all a test of a man's character, for it shows as nothing else can that a man is yellow and crooked, and a quitter, or that he is game, and square, and an intellectual fighter who can meet and conquer unexpected difficulties, honestly and independently—without cribbing and without whining.

And remember that in real life it is always the unexpected question that we must answer.

''{{smaller|February}}''

—102

-103

{{di|A}} GOOD deal of the literature for children which I have read during the last twenty years promulgates the idea that virtue is entitled to and gets its immediate, adequate, and usually its pecuniary reward, and that evil doers live a dreary and unhappy life and come to a horrible end. If one is honest or unselfish or truthful or does his duty under temptation, there is always the generous employer to send one on an unexpected vacation or the long-lost uncle to return with gold watches and filled purses for trips to Europe.

The college student it seems to me must often have been brought up on this sort of reading matter, for if he does not crib in examination, even though his facts are drawn from his imagination, he is likely to feel that this virtue should be rewarded by

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his being passed; if he tells the truth about any dereliction, he thinks he is being treated unjustly if he is not entirely forgiven; if he works unselfishly in politics or on a class committee, he is aggrieved if he does not get a "rake-off" or a gold watch-fob. No undergraduate would now think of working on a college publication if he did not expect ultimately to get in on the division of the surplus. His is the virtue that calls for tangible reward.

I have not always found it so in real life. It was something of a shock to me when I was a boy to find that when I called the attention of our bank cashier to the fact that he had over-paid me, he was irritated to have been detected in an error rather than grateful for having been spared a small loss.

"I told you the truth, and now I'm fired," a student said to me not long ago. The satisfaction of having done right was not enough for him, he wanted the gold fob;

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and the fact that I knew the truth before he told it to me did not change things in his mind; he thought himself entitled to the rake-off.

In many instances, perhaps in most instances, virtue does bring its definite reward, and the evil doer is punished, but one does not have to go far to find the derelict who is riotously happy and successful, and the faithful, honest soul who gets no recognition. Anyway, why should not one do right because it is right, and be honest and truthful and clean because he has principle? One's self-respect, the strength and joy that come from living up to the ideal, are after all the best rewards of virtue, and if one expects no other he will not be disappointed.

''{{smaller|March}}''

—106

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{{di|A}} CARDINAL was singing in the lilac bushes when I awoke this morning. Yesterday afternoon, all down Illinois Street students were practicing baseball; and in the vacant lots surrounding the University Club, young instructors, tearing themselves away from their lofty vocations, were having a game of catch. As I walked down John Street in the evening I was crowded into the parking by the strollers unconscious of any one but each other. On the Sig porch the fellows were gathered, singing lustily, and across the street at the Alpha Tau house I could hear some one torturing the baby grand. Away to the {{hinc|north-west}} in the region of the Phi Delt house there was the sound of cow bells and of a wild bunch of students yelling. I knew that spring had come.

It is a time of new life, new impulses, new

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desires. Uncontrolled and riotous, they sometimes lead one into unwise and unconsidered exploits, into foolish adventures and undefendable expenditures. It is harder to live within one's income in the spring than at any other time. The shop windows are full of alluring spring clothes, and succulent spring vegetables, and one develops a generous-hearted feeling not warranted by his exchequer. I know how dangerous it is to go down town in the spring.

It is a time to beware of book agents with their attractive prospectuses, of the promoter who wants to make you rich, of the good fellow who invites you to the little party. It is the time, too often, of the weak will, of the forgotten task, of the delayed duty.

It is the time of the soft, mellifluous words, of tender sentiment that wanes often before autumn. It is the season of easy promises. If I were a young girl I should

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never believe anything a man told me in the spring. The season intoxicates.

It ought to be for youth as for nature the time of a new birth—of new resolutions, of new ambitions, of higher ideals. It ought to bring new strength to work, new desire to excel, new energy to plan and to accomplish. It is anomalous that for many it should be a loafing time, a time of selfish indulgence, a time wasted.

Winter is gone and spring and youth and opportunity are here. Make the most of them.

''{{smaller|April}}''

—110

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{{di|T}}HEY were having their weekly clean up at one of the rooming houses on John Street a few days ago, and as I walked by I saw one of the fellows raise a window and empty a waste paper basket out into the air. The wind caught the contents, and Sunday supplements and first drafts of themes, and scratch paper, and excelsior went whirling off to land in a score of door yards and to litter up a dozen fence corners.

I have no doubt but that many a man who uses his neighbor's back yard as a dumping ground could write, perhaps has already written, a stirring paper on the beautifying of our cities, but he still continues to throw his cigarette stubs and his Hershey chocolate wrappers, and his empty pop corn bags into the street or to drop his newspaper wherever he happens to have tired of it; it is not his

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business, he affirms, to keep the streets clean.

I am sure that many of our citizens would find it a profitable investment to buy a paper baler, and to gather up and sell the waste paper that blows across their premises from the careless hands of those whose civic pride has never been adequately stimulated.

It takes more than a clean-up day or a superintendent of streets to make a clean or a beautiful city. It takes the constant co-operation of every man and woman and of every school child. If we would all keep our walks clean and our yards neat, if we would gather up the paper and the trash that we see lying or blowing about, rather than help to scatter it, we would soon see a material improvement in the appearance of these two towns. If there is any community which should present an ideal appearance, it is a {{SIC|colllege|college}} town. We are studying sanitation and sociology and economics and ethics but for too many it is mere theory and not practice. One needs no more than half an

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Civie Pride eye when walking down Green or Wright streets in Champaign or Illinois street in Urbana to observe what an untidy, slatternly appearance we make, and all because the individual citizen has mot developed any civic pride.

''{{smaller|April}}''

—114

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{{di|W}}HEN the Barrows family filed into church—father, mother, and the seven little red-headed Barrowses,—we always knew that the services were pretty well under way. I used to think sometimes that the minister planned his sermon with their coming in mind, and allowed time for a pause or a breathing spell while they were getting comfortably arranged in their pews.

The congregation was never quite settled until they arrived, for they attended regularly, though they were punctiliously and dependably late, like some instructors to an eight o'clock or like the Big Four between Peoria and Indianapolis. I used to wonder why, although we lived two miles farther from the church than they, we always arrived on time for the opening hymn and the collection while they escaped half the ser-

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vice. It was so regular that their belated arrival seemed planned, deliberate, quite intentional.

I have learned since that being late or being on time is all a matter of habit, just as one learns to put on one's clothing in an orderly way without following a recipe.

It is usually the same persons who regularly come late to church or who tiptoe into the class room ten minutes after the last bell has rung, or who annoy the sensitive soprano and the whole auditorium full of people by stumbling into their seats while the program is under way. And the people who are late are usually in a hurry. I meet them daily going up the stairs three steps at a time, rushing breathlessly to catch a disappearing car, or coming in hot and perspiring in a vain attempt to make up for a late start.

We have all suffered from the selfishness of the man chronically behind his schedule. A friend of mine who is punctiliously prompt in meeting all of his engagements says that

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he has developed corns from having his feet trod upon by late-comers who walk over him getting into their places. It was a cynic, perhaps, who said that he had wasted more time by being on time than by any other process, but his cynicism has in it more than a modicum of truth.

These people who are forever behind in meeting their engagements and who thus handicap and disturb and delay those who are conscientious and methodical are not busier than their neighbors; they simply delude themselves in the belief that that which has previously taken a half hour to accomplish they can this morning do in ten minutes. They never learn by experience. They continue to retard the progress of every enterprise with which they are connected. They ought to start earlier, take an earlier train, or cancel the date.

''{{smaller|April}}''

—118

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{{di|I}}T is surprising how many men find it difficult to get their hats off their heads, or their cigars out of their mouths when they go into a public office or when they meet a lady on the street. Some men seem glued to their hats, in the house and out; possibly that is why so many Americans are bald. The fellows who sit in the house with their hats on, or smoke in your face at a ball game, or crowd you into the gutter as you walk down the street are quite as often as otherwise those from whom we have a right to expect better things,—they are the leaders, the fellows who come from the most celebrated centers of social aristocracy.

The man who sat next to me at table in the hotel at Alleghany City not long ago showed the keenest interest in the moral uplift of the community, but he excavated his

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baked potato with a tea spoon, and harpooned the bread with his fork. He did both expertly and well, so that it seems unreasonable for me to have been annoyed by it. He was a good citizen, no doubt, even though he had crude manners.

A friend of mine a few weeks ago invited a number of undergraduates to dinner. Half of those who were invited did not respond to the note of invitation, two who accepted the invitation did not come to dinner, and no one has since made any apology or explanation; yet most of these boys have had every chance to know what is mannerly and conventional.

Of course a State University like Illinois is to teach, as the catalog says, "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," but if a man gets through the course without knowing

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how to answer an invitation to dinner, when to take his hat off, and how to feed himself conventionally—if he doesn't learn good manners as well as accurate scientific principles—he'll get on in the world badly; he will have omitted a training which is quite as practical as anything in the mechanic arts.

{{c|{{smaller|''April''}}}}

—122

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{{di|I}} HEARD a man say once that he did not want to send his grown son away from home because the boy's going would separate him, he felt, from his mother's influence. It was a foolish thought. There is nothing in time or in distance that can separate one from such an influence. You can feel it today with ten thousand miles or twenty years intervening as strongly as you did when as a child you lay with your head against her breast and felt her gentle hand upon your hair. You can hear her voice and see her face as if she were now in the room with you.

"I lost my mother forty years ago," an old man said to me recently, "and yet I have never ceased to feel a daily sense of loneliness and loss." And so many of us feel.

And yet no matter how long she has been gone or how far away she is, you know very

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well what she would say if she were with you today, and what she would have you do. She wants you first of all to be good—to be clean and honest and strong and self-controlled. She wants you to do the day's work manfully and well without whimpering and without complaint. She may never have said these things to you in so many words, but you know without the words' having been spoken.

If through your endeavor there should come to you honor or recognition, her heart will thrill with joy to you inconceivable; if unhappily you should encounter defeat or disgrace, the pain which she will suffer you will never quite understand. Her love and her faith will follow you through every diversity of experience, and no matter who deceive or turn against you, she can be counted on.

"My boy is a good boy," mothers say to me often in the innocence of their trust. "I know he hasn't a single bad habit."
{{nop}}

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I am not surprised that most college men turn out well for, for so many years, I have seen what faith and confidence their mothers have in them and what hope is built upon their future. He would be craven indeed who lived down to a lower level than she set for him.

—126

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{{di|L|fl="}}ET me see your tongue," our old family physician used to say to me when as a youngster I went to him for advice as to the various ailments which were wont to beset me.

"A clean tongue tells a good deal about a boy's bodily health," he was given to saying.

In like manner I have found since those days that a clean tongue is a pretty accurate index of a boy's moral condition. I have not infrequently been startled, not to say ashamed, at organization dinners, at fraternity firesides, and at class smokers to hear the risque talk that is current. I have wondered if the systems of these men might not be the better of a moral cleansing, as a mother I once knew used to wash out the mouth of her son with soap and water after he had uttered a dirty or an irreverent word.

An acquaintance recounted to me only a

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few weeks ago his experience at the meeting of an undergraduate technical society organized presumably for the purpose of furthering educational progress, where the papers and the talk, and the illustrations were filled with suggestions that were unspeakably vulgar; and the worst of it all was that many fellows seemed to look upon this as clever and witty. It often takes a discriminating mind to sense the difference between that which is foul and that which is funny, and sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, the older man and even the teacher is as serious an offender as is the undergraduate. "We need a few snappy ones," the fellows say, "to liven up the crowd," but it is a poor crowd that requires vulgar narrative to animate it.

I was not long ago at the funeral exercises of a man old in years and wide in experience. There were present to do him honor and to speak words of praise of his life, statesmen and teachers, and business men prominent

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throughout this country. A volume of eulogies of his work and his {{SIC|carrer|career}} was afterwards published, but the most forceful and effective thing uttered about him was said by a working man who had been associated with him for many years.

"I have known this man for forty years," he said, "and during this time he has never to my knowledge spoken an unclean word or made an impure suggestion."

"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," the apostle said, and so a clean tongue means clean thoughts, a clean life, high ideals, high purposes, and these things together spell an immeasurable influence for good.

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

—130

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{{di|I}} HAVE always been interested in the fact that the undergraduate who goes into any outside activity usually explains his action, even when it involves derelictions or irregularities, on the ground that he was induced to do so on account of his love for his Alma Mater and the good he could do the College.

I have spent hours this spring with a mentally lethargic junior who wishes to get off probation in order that he may compete in athletics, his sole purpose, so he alleges, being that he may bring honor and distinction to the college. Having loafed away his hours of intellectual grace, he feels that he could more than redeem himself if he were allowed to hurl the discus or do the one hundred yard dash. He feels that the insti-

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tution is honored more by his physical achievements than by his mental. Ten seconds flat is more to be desired than a grade of 83 in Poly Science 4.

We are to have at the University within a few days hundreds of high school boys, most of whom are nearly ready to enter college. Whenever I have asked the purpose of bringing these young fellows here in the midst of term time, I have invariably got the reply that it was all for the college good. We are to show these visitors what college life is like; we are to attract them by giving them a fair idea of what we have to offer and what they will have to pay for it in time and thought and money if they come.

I wonder if we do it?

If the boy goes home convinced that college life is a mixture of May-pole dance and circus, of vaudeville and fox trot, of base ball and band, the college may not have profited as much as we might desire. For most students the college life is a serious

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The Good of the College life filled with difficult problems and hard work and duties and obligations which require the most of a man's time.

It is good to have the high school student here, I am sure, but if he goes home without carrying with him some impression of the serious life and the serious work of the successful student, he will have gained a wrong impression of college, and his coming will in no way contribute to the good of the college.

The responsibility is upon those who entertain him to show him a good time and yet to give him a fair idea of what a successful intellectual life in college really requires.

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

—134

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{{di|I|fl="}} WONDER if George will write" Nancy said to me at the breakfast table one morning last winter. George was a recent guest of ours who had been eating our breakfast bacon for a few days and occupying my comfortable bed while I bunked on a hard cot in the cold attic.

"Very unlikely," I replied, for I am older than Nancy, and have had experience with summer school lectures and {{hinc|interscholastic}} visitors and delegates to societies and conventions who have lodged with me for a season and have never afterwards been heard from. My faith, therefore, was weak.

Most men pay their taxes—and some pay their class dues and their laundry bills—but too few pay the little debts of courtesy which

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they owe to those who have entertained them or who have shown them thoughtful kindnesses. In time we answer a business letter, or an invitation to dinner, but to our friends, unless we want something, we seldom write. There are various reasons for this. Unless when the inspiration or the kindly thought seizes us we "take our pen in hand" we are likely to procrastinate; tomorrow, we argue, will do as well as today. Sometimes the happy phrase does not occur to us; we do not quite know what to say, and we are afraid we may say the wrong or the awkward thing. Perhaps it may be selfishness that holds us back from voicing our thanks, or our congratulations, or our words of condolence to our friends, and the letter is not written and the debt is not paid. Sometimes it is ignorance or inexperience or self-consciousness; we do not realize that the conventions of society require that we should pay these obligations, just as we must call after we have been to a dinner

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party, or must pay the gas bill before the tenth of the month if we expect the discount.

Nothing brings more pleasure than the unexpected personal letter, the gracious note of thanks, or a line of congratulation when one has met with happiness or good fortune. It's like getting an unexpected check from home, or having one's salary raised, or finding a five dollar bill in an old pair of trousers.

Don't come in on a freight train. Christmas letters should get off before Easter; letters of congratulation should not be delayed until the event has lost its joy or has been forgotten. If {{hinc|Interscholastic}} is in May, you should write your letter of thanks before August. Even from a purely selfish point of view it would be a good thing to learn and practice the art of paying these social debts. There are few things that bring one surer favor, or that give one better standing with one's friends than a reputation for thoughtfulness in letter writing.
{{nop}}

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I met George in Detroit last week. He told me that he had enjoyed my bed and Nancy's bacon, and he apologized—he really ''had'' intended to write.

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

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{{di|I}}T was an interesting crowd at the game; but those inside who filled the bleachers to the topmost row and followed the cheer leader in wild shouts were not more interesting than were those outside the field trying to see the game without paying the customary tribute to the gate keeper.

There were delivery boys perched on top of their wagons, middle-aged men on step ladders, out-of-town sight-seers standing on their Fords, and scores of the local riffraff swarming in the trees or looking through the fence in an endeavor to see the game without paying for it. Occasionally, more's the pity, one could detect a stray student, impecunious, or frugal, or improvident, whose face lighted up as Jack caught a difficult foul, and once I caught sight of a highbrowed instructor, stoop-shouldered from the

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heavy books he was carrying, crane his neck as he paused to satisfy his curiosity as to why Phil Armour was jumping into the air and waving his arms so frantically.

It is a popular sport, this trying to get something for nothing, but it has its dangers. A young chap who was balancing himself on the top of a motorcycle, unable to restrain his enthusiasm when the ump pronounced "Slip" safe on second, lost his equilibrium and in falling pulled the step ladder from under one of the middle-aged gentlemen, and they both fell in the dirt.

It has its dangers, I say, and it does not always win one's respect, whether it be the man looking through the fence at a ball game or the student getting a passing grade by copying from the neighbor's paper.

There are various ways of ldoking through the fence. The man who is always broke when it is his turn to pay, the fellow who borrows and forgets to return the amount, the student who accepts an office or an honor

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without assuming the accompanying responsibilities, the employee who loafs on his job are all watching the game through the fence.

"It is easy for the man to talk," you say, "who has the money to get into the game; but how about the fellow who is broke?" An old neighbor of mine never saw a baseball game nor held {{SIC|office,,|office,}} yet he lived an honorable happy life and died respected. One can walk to Savoy or stay at home and read [[Author:O. Henry|O. Henry]] or work in the garden. It is more honorable not to see any of these games of life at all than to see them through the fence.

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

—142

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{{di|E}}VERY spring at {{hinc|Inter-scholastic}} the University community is overrun with high school boys most of whom see for the first time a great University and get their first impressions of what they suppose is real college life. They come here for a good time, and it is up to us to give it to them, even if we have to take to the bath tub as a sleeping place or curl up on the soft side of the library table while our guests are resting comfortably on our Ostermoors. That's part of the penalty of being a good fellow.

But these boys are here to be educated. They'll see the armory and the sorority houses, and the Gymnasium and the Stock Pavilion, and the Woman's Building and the regiment, and the ball games and the ''Illio'' and the circus; and seeing the circus last they are likely to go away with the impres-

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sion that college life is a sort of glorified Orpheum show mixed up with a little athletics and a beauty section—that the whole thing is a continuous circus in which no one really works but the janitor and the spot-light man. They seldom see the work that is undone, the problems that are unsolved, the papers that are unwritten, and the books that are crying to be read, and know nothing of the regular grind of college life—of the horrible scramble to catch up that begins, in spite of tired muscles and racked nerves, almost before the door is closed upon their departure. At home they have heard little of college life excepting of its escapades; here they are likely to see little but its exaggerated diversions. And so in the exuberance of youth, in the desire to entertain, actually and metaphorically, we take these strangers in. We give them an entirely erroneous idea of real college life and of the daily routine of work which forms the major part of undergraduate ex-

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istence. Sometimes, too, in a misguided effort to let these children see it all and to gratify morbid curiosity the enthusiastic host yields to the pressure to show up the baser side of undergraduate life, and sends the prospective freshman home with lowered ideals.

College life is not all fussing, and Fatimas, vaudeville, and athletic victories; it is in fact at its best very largely hard work and serious thought, and demands a man's best efforts. Why not show these high school boys, then, the laboratories and the drawing rooms where the fellows do real work; why not show them the Y. M. C. A. and take them on Sunday to hear a good sermon from one of the student pastors? Why not leave a few books lying around to suggest that the real college man does pretty regularly work and that college is not all a frolic? Otherwise when he gets into college next fall or later and finds out what the real situation is he will probably

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say to himself bitterly and not piously, "I was a stranger, and you took me in."

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

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{{di|I}} WAS ten when I held in my hand two round dollars, the first money that I had ever earned by my own toil. It seemed an immeasurable sum as I gazed at it, wondering how I could best spend it.

My father laid his hand upon my head saying, "Well, lad, I wouldn't spend it all on myself if I were you. Buy something for your mother." Then he gave me a little talk about mother and what her love and sacrifice and teaching had meant to me. The next time we went to the little country town where we traded he took me along, and I bought mother a new dress with part of the money I had earned by dropping seed corn in the long furrow as our neighbor turned the prairie sod. The dress was calico,—a light brown with pale blue flowers, and there were ten yards at ten cents

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a yard. I got keen pleasure in seeing her wear it, and I learned for the first time the joy and satisfaction of sacrifice.

The child who has every wish granted, every want provided for, daily sacrifices made for him, and who makes none himself grows selfish and unappreciative. So, too, does the college student. In a State University especially, where the student gets everything for practically nothing, where he expects credit or payment for whatever he does, he is likely to grow abnormally selfish and arrogant.

I heard an ill-bred undergraduate say once in referring to his father that it was his policy to get as much out of the "old man" as he could. So, often, the undergraduate feels with reference to his ''Alma Mater.'' Two dollars to the memorial fund seems like throwing good money away. That much money would take one to ten Orpheum shows or buy twenty chocolate bostons, or innumerable cigarettes. It is a

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sacrifice not to be thought of. If ''Alma Mater'' wants bells let her pay for them herself.

And yet I have known self-supporting students in institutions where the tuition was ten times what it is at Illinois who gave fifty dollars gladly to a class memorial and who earned it by hard toil.

We can spend ten dollars for a dance or twenty dollars on a house party, or any amount on tobacco or lunches or self-indulgence, but two dollars for ''Alma Mater''—well, what do you take us for?

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

—150

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{{di|T|fl="}}HE Chemistry building is full today, "an undergraduate said to me late in May as we were walking past that structure.

"What's the show?" I asked.

"Oh, it's the loafers and the procrastinators trying to make up for lost time."

It is a misconception not confined to youth that if you let Opportunity go by you, you can catch her easily by cutting round the corner.

"My son failed in two subjects last semester," a father wrote me this week. "Since he has now got the hang of college, will it not be possible next semester for him to carry these two subjects in addition to his regular course?" Having carried but nine hours one semester, most loafers feel confident that they can easily carry twenty-five the next.
{{nop}}

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"I can make it up before the end of the semester;" "When I get out of college I shall find time for these things;" "After I am married I intend to cut out all my bad habits." How familiar these things sound. It seems a simple matter to redeem our lost time. If we have social or intellectual or moral delinquencies we expect, all of us, to atone for them in the near future.

Every sinner condones his evil life by promising himself that he will ere long become a saint; every loafer expects soon to brace up, to develop interest, and get down to hard work and win success; every intellectual delinquent looks forward to the time when his studies will be creditably completed. We all expect, no matter how late the day, to redeem the lost opportunity; but it is next to impossible.

There is no young person in college today, if he amounts to anything, who will ever have as much leisure time as he has at this moment; who will ever have as easy a chance

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Redeeming the Time to be wise and good and happy as he has today. The time and the opportunity that is lost is seldom if ever redeemed. Those who wait until the last to do their work, to make their reforms, usually fail. Behold now is the accepted time, behold today is the day of salvation.

Every one has some important work that calls him. Get at it today.

{{c|{{smaller|''May''}}}}

—154

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{{di|I}} HAVE always liked sport and sportsmen. I have never admired the man who goes into a game of any sort and who does not play it squarely and who does not take the results without whining and detailed explanation of how it all happened.

The man who takes a chance, or makes a bargain, or accepts a condition, or gives his word, and who then resorts to subterfuge or who shirks his obligations because the cards turn against him or conditions prove unpleasant or more strenuous than he had counted on, is a poor sportsman. He plays the game badly. It has seemed to me a not unimportant part of a man's training to learn to lose and not to snivel.

The fellow who calls a fault when his opponent's ball just cuts the line, the golfer who surreptitiously shoves his ball over

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with his foot to get a better lie or who slyly drops a stroke out of his score, the whist player who reneges or indicates in some way to his partner what is his best lead, the student at a class rush who tries by dirty tactics to injure his opponent or to put him out of business may be shrewd, perhaps, but he is no sportsman.

"This examination business is a game and a gamble" an upperclassman said to me yesterday. I could argue the negative of the proposition, but granted that his statement is correct, why not be a sportsman and play the game squarely?

Whether examination is mainly for mental discipline or merely for the assembling of curious or interesting facts matters little. It is a gentleman's game, and we should play it fairly.

The fellow who gets his data from another man's paper or from notes in his vest pocket, who smuggles a text-book into the class-room, or who whispers information (usually

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Playing the Game inaccurate) to his pals, who cribs his themes, or copies his home plates from some one else's work might possibly not break open a gym locker to steal a pocketbook or to secure a needed pair of running trousers, but even if he is not really a crook he is at least no sportsman. He is taking advantages of his opponent and is playing an unfair game.

"But a fellow has to pass," you say.

That is just what I am not willing to say any more than I can admit that one must always win at any cost. What one really has to do if he would get the most out of this educational game is to play according to rule, to be square and honest; to do his level best and take the consequences. There is a far worse thing than losing.

''{{smaller|June}}''

—158

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{{di|T}}HE operation had been a serious one in which life and death had hung in the balance. It was over now, and the boy who had lain white and still stirred uneasily, struggling to come back from the far away country of unconsciousness in which he had been wandering. He opened his eyes once or twice and looked about vaguely. Presently he recognized the face of the physician bending over him and spoke.

"Is it all over, {{SIC|doctor?" Was|doctor? Was}} it worth while?"

"It is all over, Tom," the older man replied gently, "and it was very much worth while. You stood the test, and you are going to be well and strong soon."

It's a question we ask often, when we have been through a struggle or a mental or a moral or a physical trial, and it is a

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question I have no doubt many of you are asking as you come to the end of the college year or the college course. It has cost father in many cases more cold cash than he could well afford, and it has cost mother some heart aches and no little sacrifice I guarantee, and it has cost or is costing you some struggle of one sort or another and some of the best years of your life.

Has it been worth while? That depends.

"I traveled a straight road when I was a freshman" I heard a '17 man say a few days ago, "but I've learned a few things this year, believe me." But as I listened unwillingly to the vulgar detail I knew that the money was wasted, and the time lost, and the years not worth while.

What is the test? It isn't always high grades; I've known a lot of decent fellows who flunked Math. 9 or who couldn't get by Chem. 13a, and one of the worst bums I ever knew made an honorary society. It isn't always college activities, for sometimes

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when he gets a place honorably he goes to sleep at the switch. It isn't popularity, for often "good fellow" is only another name for vulgar sport.

This year or two years or four years of college,—what has it done for you; how has it changed you? Has it brought you friends, an increasing love for things that are clean and wholesome and beautiful, a broader and a kindlier outlook, mental discipline, ideals, character? When you go to the work of your life next week or get off the accommodation train at the little country town where you were born, is it with greater courage, and cleaner morals, and higher ideals, and increased possibilities of success? If so, you've passed the test, and college for you has been gloriously worth while.

''{{smaller|June}}''

—162

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{{di|T}}HE senior craned his neck and looked curiously and interestedly at the old grads returned to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. They seemed a rather battered lot to the young fellow just preparing for the struggles of life. The men were heavy or bald or gray, and the lines cut deeply into their faces. Some of the women were still pretty, but—but they were not young. It was depressing to him to feel that as success came youth seemed to vanish.

I remember in my freshman year asking an indifferent senior what he was expecting to do after graduation. "Something easy and profitable," was his reply. "The work can't be too light nor the salary too big for me." He is not now earning a thousand dollars a year. He has never realized that success means struggle and sacrifice and re-

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sponsibility; that it means doing the hardest things one can find, and sometimes doing them for little compensation. And struggle and sacrifice leave their marks. The wrinkles and the gray hair and the rounding shoulders are usually but the signs of developed character and accomplishment. They are the honorable scars of intellectual and moral battle. Few who succeed escape them.

A friend of mine who was staying at a high-priced summer place last year remarked to his wife how few young people there were at the hotel. "That isn't strange," she replied. "One has to be middle aged to have made enough money to come here."

The reunion was a happy one; men and women came thousands of miles to enjoy the pleasures and to live over again the joys of youth and irresponsibility. Most of them had accomplished a good deal, but the marks were there,—clearly, undeniably, and

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they will always be. If our characters have developed, if we have struggled and sacrificed and fought, our faces will tell the tale.

The story is told of a well-known public character that when he held in his hand a photograph of himself with all the lines smoothed out and all the wrinkles obliterated, he objected. "It cost me fifty years of hard struggle and endeavor to put those lines in," he said, "and I don't want them taken out."

Perhaps those who took part in the reunion did not look young to the senior, but they showed character; they had been through a fight and had won the battle.

''{{smaller|June}}''

—166

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{{di|M}}Y first conscious memory as a child is of standing in the open doorway on a spring morning and of looking out upon a world to me unknown. There was before me a pleasant flower-bordered path leading down through a shadowy valley, and beyond all this the hills frowning dark and mysterious. It was an untried world that beckoned to me and that stirred within my childish heart longings to get out into it. It was my first Commencement.

You stand on Commencement day much as I did then, eager, curious, uncertain, holding out your hands hopefully to the future. It is a good many years since I had that first view of the world. I have been down the flower-bordered path of youth. I have seen something of the shadowy valley of sorrow and hardship and sacrifice, and I

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have tried to struggle up the hills beyond. I have not found it a bad world. If the flowers along the path faded or disappeared it was perhaps because they were not tended, or I did not sow the seed. If I failed it was as often my own fault as otherwise.

There are those who will tell you that the world into which you are going is a sort of world different from the one in which you have been living these four years; that you will never know real life until you get out of college; but those who say this have seldom realized what real college life is. They have joked with their work, they have shirked moral and mental responsibility, they have not looked duty squarely in the face, they have not taken their obligations seriously, and until they do they will never know real life in college or out of it.

At a meeting of college graduates not long ago I was struck by the contrast be tween the speeches of two men whom I had

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known fifteen years before. One man has found the world exacting, unreasonable, unjust, and cruelly difficult. The other thought it a beautiful place; kind, gracious, and considerate as an old friend. He said he had been lucky.

As I sought an explanation, it seemed to me to lie in the college life and development of the two men. The first one had been a loafer who just managed to slip by at examination time. If he passed he gave a party to celebrate his luck; if he failed he did the same thing to drown his sorrow. He had cultivated neither ambitions nor ideals; he had congratulated himself that in his various derelictions he had never been caught, and he was hilariously satisfied merely to pass his work.

The second man had done his work honestly and well; he had studied whether he was expecting a quiz or not, and he had practiced physical and moral self-control even when he was not in training for an

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athletic event or at home during the summer going to church with mother; he had played the game honestly with himself and with the college.

You who are going out into the world will not find it all a flower-bordered path. For you there will be, I have no doubt, often the dark valley and the steep rocky hills. Go to your work with honest hearts, with eagerness to struggle, with courage and hope in your success. If you fail at first or if your progress is slow, do not despair. You have youth, and strength, and training, and if you have in addition ideals and faith in yourself, you will succeed, and you can look back as the years follow each other rapidly to a happy, successful Commencement.

''{{smaller|June}}''

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{{ppoem|class=poem|
'Twas the voice of the sluggard,
I heard him complain:
{{fqm}}You have waked me too soon,
I must slumber again."
}}

{{di|I}} HAVE never known what loafer it was who inspired these ancient lines, but I have always suspected that the fellow who wrote them had met Higgins. Higgins was a direct descendant of one, of the seven sleepers; he was on the most intimate terms with Morpheus, and Somnus, and ether and all the other gods and agencies which induce prolonged and refreshing sleep.

I have called him over the telephone at noon to be told by the freshman who answered that he was not up yet. I have dropped in at his fraternity house at nine in the evening to be informed that he was rather tired and had gone to bed early. I

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have found him dozing before the fire at three o'clock in the afternoon, a cigarette between his lips. A loafer always smokes, though of course a great many people who smoke are not loafers. I have often wondered what became of him; he didn't graduate, and he's probably dead, or asleep at the switch.

We read a great deal about the dissipations of college life—of the real devils who drink and gamble and indulge in unnamable immoralities, but most of it is "bunk". The real menace of college life today is the loafer—the fellow who smokes himself into stupidity before the grate fire, who wastes his hours in billiard halls and ice cream parlors, at vaudeville and moving picture shows, and in strolling about the town and the campus imagining himself in love. It is the man who sits up late at night doing nothing worth while, and who sleeps late in the morning to get over it, who does the

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college and himself more damage than any other class of students.

The loafer can't or won't work himself, and he is seldom satisfied to loaf alone. He is a procrastinator without enthusiasm or plan or system in his work. It has never occurred to him that college is a real business to which he should give his serious attention. He could not study regularly three hours a day on a bet. He encourages cribbing because it is his main dependence at an examination, he puts a damper on intellectual progress, and he pulls down the scholastic average. There is no place for him in college or out of it. His only salvation is to get a job where he will have to work hard sixteen hours a day.

''{{smaller|July}}''

—174

-175

{{di|I}} HAD a talk during examination time with a young fellow who was to receive his bachelor's degree, but who wished to be excused from attendance upon the exercises of Commencement.

"I don't care anything for your fool exercises," he said. "There's a lot of things I'd rather do than go through that sort of red tape."

"Have you no sentiment for the University?" I asked.

"No," he answered. "I came here for a degree, and now that I have earned it, I think I am entitled to it without any further foolishness."

His is not an uncommon view point. He had come from another college. He had been at the University during his senior year only, and there was no romance or sen-

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timent or loyalty in his feelings; he had developed few associations, he had been touched by few traditions; he was stirred no more at the sight of the old buildings and the smooth sward and the graceful elms of the campus than he might have been by the sight of Mr. Ford's factory where the jitney bus in which he had ridden had been manufactured. He was after information, and the more he could get for his money, the better he was satisfied.

He had never gotten into things.

Few colleges will give a man a degree until he has been in residence for a certain time. There are, perhaps, many reasons for this, but one of them, at least, is that he may have time to get something of the spirit of the institution, to develop a feeling for it, to fall into its customs, and to get into things connected indirectly with its operation.

Students who do their work in summer sessions are often either from desire or ne-

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cessity more practical, more serious, more eager for mere information than are regular students. They too often get little or nothing of the real life of the institution outside of the class-room, and so they frequently develop little or no feeling for the college. There are no tender family or home relations in the college life for them,—they are being fed at an intellectual boarding house or a quick lunch counter.

There are many activities about the campus at every session, and into these the student may very well go. They will broaden his sympathies, widen his horizon, and give him a feeling of ownership in the institution which is to be his alma mater.

"What good can I do these things?" a man asked me yesterday.

"Very little, perhaps," I answered; "but they can do you immeasurable good, if you will let them."

Even though he is in college for only a

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few weeks, it will do every man good to get into things.

{{c|{{smaller|''July''}}}}

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{{di|I|fl="}} DON'T care for my work; it doesn't suit me. If I could only find something I liked and was interested in, I think I might get on," a shiftless sophomore said to me a few days ago.

As he spoke I called to mind the figure of an old man I had seen the last time I passed through the country town where I spent my childhood. He was sitting on the station platform whittling and watching the train go through. He was bent, unshaven, unkempt,—the living picture of failure.

I saw him first when I was seven and he a strong young fellow of thirty. He was running the grain elevator then with good business prospects, but he didn't like it; it did not seem to suit him. He had talents. He sang in the church choir, he led the village band, he presided at public meetings.

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He gave up the elevator shortly and opened a grocery store. He tried farming and market gardening; he ran a news stand; he was postmaster, but he never put his best effort into any one of these activities, because he was not interested; he thought it was not what he was cut out for. He couldn't just get down to it.

He drifted from Presbyterianism to Christian Science; his political favorites ranged from St. John and [[Author:Grover Cleveland|Grover Cleveland]] to [[Author:Theodore Roosevelt|Theodore Roosevelt]]. He stuck to no principle or profession, he got nowhere because he could not find anything that really held his interest. Men with half his talent and one-fourth of his opportunity far outstripped him, and because he was never willing to do well the thing at hand, he found himself at seventy no further than the station platform. Through all the years he had been watching the train go by because he could never make up his mind where he wanted to go.
{{nop}}

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I see students like him every day. They have opportunity to get training, but they are not satisfied; they are looking for some more interesting, more suitable, less exacting work. They hold back or shift about with the hope that they will discover some intellectual occupation that will so thrill them that they will go to it with constant enthusiasm and without personal effort. They fail because they can't get what they like, not realizing that it is possible to learn to like almost anything and obligatory to do our work whether we like it or not.

The man who succeeds does more difficult, disagreeable, unpleasant, uninteresting things in a week than are crowded into a whole college course. He doesn't whine and look about for something soft—he goes to it.

''{{smaller|July}}''

—182

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{{di|R}}AN across grandmother's geograph this morning, ''[[The Village Elementary Geography]],'' standing primly beside Bob's ''[[First Year Latin Lessons]].'' Bob is my nephew. Grandmother's book is yellowed with age, but, save for a few thumb prints, the pages are clean and without dog ears. It is still covered with the bright calico which her grandmother sewed on for her to keep the book from being soiled or injured when the little girl carried it to school.

Grandmother's name and the date are on the fly leaf written in a cramped childish hand, for grandmother was only eight when she got the book, and the date is near the beginning of the last century. They had respect for books in those days.

Robert's book presents a somewhat different appearance. It was bought only a

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few months ago, but the cover is torn and battered and hangs by a thread. Inside, pages are mutilated or missing, and pen sketches and hieroglyphics are scrawled across the text making it almost unreadable. As I turn through I find dignified Cicero wearing a sombrero and smoking a pipe, and Caesar with a beard done in India ink. The book has suffered every insult and indignity possible to be thought of by a child of fourteen. Robert knows more than grandmother did at his age, but neither he nor the children with whom he associates have much love or respect for books.

As for me, I should as soon see a dear friend abused as a book I have worked with and come to know and to understand. I do not mind the ordinary wear of use and age any more than I am annoyed by wrinkles in the faces of my friends who are growing old, but intentional indignities hurt me.

Is it because books are so plentiful or so cheap that we care so little for them? Is it

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because they cost us now no sacrifice, no struggle, no tender thought or anxious anticipation that we think of them so lightly and toss them about so carelessly? I have heard grandmother tell how happy she was and how proud when her father first put the little geography into her hands. Neither children nor college students often feel so today.

We give courses in the appreciation of poetry and music and art; we have made rapid advancement in teaching children since grandmother's time. Why do we not still teach them to love and respect their books?

''{{smaller|August}}''

—186

-187

{{di|M}}OST men could have a leg cut off or receive a refusal of marriage from the girl they love with fortitude and resignation; it is the trifling irritations of life that try our courage and wreck our nervous systems. We can meet death without winking an eye lash, but cold pancakes for breakfast or a lost collar button unfits us for business for the day. Our friends and our reputations are often made or lost by the way in which we meet the seemingly insignificant situations of life.

I knew a man once who lived with his wife twenty years. They stood by each other through all sorts of sorrows and disasters, but he finally applied for a divorce. She had a persistent habit of taking his soiled handkerchief out of his pocket each evening and substituting a fresh one. It

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was a violation of his rights, which could not be brooked, and which bade fair to sour his whole disposition; he tried in vain to break her of the practice, and, failing in this, sought release from the annoyance through the divorce courts. Yet they had met with heroism and fortitude the serious things of life.

It is seldom the vital or the important occurrences which try our tempers or upset us, or make home heaven or hell for us; it is the trifling thing, the unexpected annoyance or omission.

Many of these things are largely matters of personal temperament to which we yield without a struggle. We even become elated or take pride in the fact, at times, that there are certain things which we do not like or which we can not stand. Some men boast of their little foibles or irritations as if they were an asset rather than a liability.

I heard a man admit the other day that a corroded pen, or a dry inkwell, or a waste

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paper basket put thoughtfully out of reach by the janitor did more to disturb his equanimity than a dozen difficult customers would have done.

In my undergraduate day I saw an otherwise well balanced instructor,—an experienced middle aged gentleman,—thrown into a frenzy because his hat dropped twice from the hook on which he was trying to hang it. He would have met a crisis in life with composure and complete placidity.

Perhaps when we learn to estimate men's characters justly it will not be wholly from the great crises which they meet, but by the trifling irritations as well which they are able to overlook or to control.

''{{smaller|August}}''

—190

-191

{{di|D}}URING the last few days while the sun has been pouring down upon us and the thermometer has been climbing up to the one hun dred mark no one has seemed willing to let his neighbor forget the weather.

"Is it hot enough for you?" the grocer's boy queries as he runs in with the day's provisions. "Pretty hot day," a professor ventures, mopping his dripping dome as he speaks. "Some weather," the student says as he makes his exit from the class room.

Keeping cool is quite as much a matter of temperament as of temperature; it is a state of mind as well as a condition of the weather. The people who stand the heat the worst are those who never allow themselves to forget it, who talk about it continually, who are never still, who rush from one place to another in a frenzy of desire to

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find a cool spot; who fuss and fume and fan until they are red in the face and running perspiration. The best way to keep cool is to go about your work methodically, be as quiet as you can, and forget the weather.

It is much the same way with the other worries of life. We grow hot over the slights and insults, we are agitated over our misfortunes as we talk of them, and let our minds dwell upon them, and exaggerate them. We are constantly tending the fires of anger or resentment or they would shortly burn themselves out.

The man who under stress, and irritation, and misrepresentation can keep his balance, can control his temper and his tongue, can subdue the rising emotions, has conserved his own strength, has made it possible for himself to do more and better work, and has more than half defeated the purposes of his opponent.

"How can you sit so calmly and say nothing?" I asked a friend of mine not long ago,

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who was the subject of a bitter, untruthful personal attack. "Because the cooler I keep, the hotter and the weaker his words become," was the answer.

So far as we can, we may better take the hot words and hot days quietly, without comment, without physical agitation. There is a force and a strength in keeping cool.

''{{smaller|August}}''

—194

-195

{{di|T}}HERE was a letter in the mail yesterday from a firm in Chicago asking me to recommend McGuire. The requirements were that he should be a man of honesty and integrity with energy and initiative. It was a hard rôle for Mac to play, and I laid the letter aside to ponder over my answer and its phrasing. I wanted to be both truthful and kind.

Mac was the sort of man who doesn't care what people think. He expected to get by through his own cleverness and adroitness rather than by honest effort. He never worked unless he had to do so, and then as little as possible. If I had ever wanted him suddenly, I should have sought him in the most frequented loafing place about the campus. He was "no student", he admitted, but he was sure he was "getting as much out

-196

of the course as some of these grinds." There had occasionally been some doubt as to whether what Mac got from the course came from his own brain or from some one else's paper, but he had never really been caught.

His written exercises were carelessly done and usually late; if he felt that he could pass the course without it, they were never written at all. He was a man of excuses, desiring always extensions and special privileges. No, I could not say that he was honest, and though he had brains, he had neither energy nor initiative. He was in reality an unreliable loafer, and a difficult man to recommend.

A friend of mine once said to a young fellow who had asked him for a letter of recommendation, "If you will write one about yourself that is true and complimentary, I will sign it." I think, perhaps, it is not a bad test of a man's character for him to sit down and fairly and honestly analyze his

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qualifications, to see if there is anything he could write about himself that is true and complimentary, to put down in black and white the real personal facts, and then face them.

If your work in college has been irregular, commonplace, and sometimes a failure; if you have been delighted merely to get by; if you have gained the reputation of being a loafer rather than a grind, of being a clever shifty fellow rather than straightforwardly square and honest, the man who writes your recommendation will also have a hard time.

What could you say about Mac, if you were called upon to write a letter of recommendation for him; and what could you write about yourself?/last/

''{{smaller|August}}''

—

—cov

User:SnowyCinema/P/The Sunday Eight O'Clock

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