ankind
confront the educated youth as confronts you to-day. WHAT WILL YOU DO
WITH IT?

CHAPTER IX

ROUND BOYS IN SQUARE HOLES

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born
with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and
happiness.--EMERSON.

There is hardly a poet, artist, philosopher, or man of science
mentioned in the history of the human intellect, whose genius was not
opposed by parents, guardians, or teachers. In these cases Nature
seems to have triumphed by direct interposition; to have insisted on
her darlings having their rights, and encouraged disobedience, secrecy,
falsehood, even flight from home and occasional vagabondism, rather
than the world should lose what it cost her so much pains to
produce.--E. P. WHIPPLE.

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says, I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.
TICKELL.

"James Watt, I never saw such an idle young fellow as you are," said
his grandmother; "do take a book and employ yourself usefully. For the
last half-hour you have not spoken a single word. Do you know what you
have been doing all this time? Why, you have taken off and replaced,
and taken off again, the teapot lid, and you have held alternately in
the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon, and you have busied
yourself in examining and, collecting together the little drops formed
by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the china and the
silver. Now, are you not ashamed to waste your time in this
disgraceful manner?"

The world has certainly gained much through the old lady's failure to
tell James how he could employ his time to better advantage!

"But I'm good for something," pleaded a young man whom a merchant was
about to discharge for his bluntness. "You are good for nothing as a
salesman," said his employer. "I am sure I can be useful," said the
youth. "How? Tell me how." "I don't know, sir, I don't know." "Nor
do I," said the merchant, laughing at the earnestness of his clerk.
"Only don't put me away, sir, don't put me away. Try me at something
besides selling. I cannot sell; I know I cannot sell." "I know that,
too," said the principal; "that is what is wrong." "But I can make
myself useful somehow," persisted the young man; "I know I can." He
was placed in the counting-house, where his aptitude for figures soon
showed itself, and in a few years he became not only