nable him to get out into society, was that it? Well,
yes, he must admit there was something in that. Washington had social
advantages, to be sure, and $150 a month would enable him to have some
of that life which a young man was entitled to and at the very same
time be getting his legal education. _Well!_ That young man did _not_
get what he wanted.

That young man had the wrong notion of life. Of course, no man would
do anything for him. Until he changed his point of view utterly,
success was absolutely impossible for him. What that young man needed
was the experience of going back to New York and having to apply for
position after position until his shoe soles wore out, and he felt
the pangs of hunger. He needed iron in his blood, that is what he
needed. All the colleges in the world would not enable that man to do
anything worth doing until he mastered the sound principles of living
and of working.

Right before him in New York was an illustration of this. One of the
most notable successes at the bar which that city or this country has
witnessed in the last fifteen years has been made by a young man who
had neither college education, money, nor friends. He was, I am told,
a stenographer in one of New York's great legal establishments. But
that young man had done precisely what I have been pounding at over
and over again in this paper. Very well. To-day he is one among half a
dozen of the most notable lawyers in the greatest city of the greatest
nation in the world.

It is all in the using of what you have. Let me repeat again what I
have said in a previous paper--the inscription which Doc Peets
inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished
"Wolfville" with its first funeral:

"JACK KING, DECEASED.
Life ain't the holding of a good hand,
But
The playing of a poor hand well."

And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of
the talents. After all, it is not what we have, but what we make out
of what we have that counts in this world of work. And, what's more,
that is the only thing that ought to count.

IV

THE NEW HOME

Your father made the old home. Prove yourself worthy of him by making
the new home. He built the roof-tree which sheltered you. Build you a
roof-tree that may in its turn shelter others. What abnormal egotism
the attitude of him who says, "This planet, and all the uncounted
centuries of the past, were made for _