I hear a good deal about men who won't take vacations, and who kill
themselves by overwork, but it's usually worry or whiskey. It's not what
a man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down his
health. A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the office
and sworn enemies out of it. A clear mind is one that is swept clean of
business at six o'clock every night and isn't opened up for it again
until after the shutters are taken down next morning.

Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up with
the boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles--they're both
in bad company. They're the men who are always needing vacations, and
never getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a year
is a change of work--that is, if he has been curved up over a desk for
fifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take to
fishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little spring
water, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing-house will
give you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if you
didn't have a fortnight's leeway to run loose.

You will always find it a safe rule to take a thing just as quick as it
is offered--especially a job. It is never easy to get one except when
you don't want it; but when you have to get work, and go after it with
a gun, you'll find it as shy as an old crow that every farmer in the
county has had a shot at.

When I was a young fellow and out of a place, I always made it a rule to
take the first job that offered, and to use it for bait. You can catch a
minnow with a worm, and a bass will take your minnow. A good fat bass
will tempt an otter, and then you've got something worth skinning. Of
course, there's no danger of your not being able to get a job with the
house--in fact, there is no real way in which you can escape getting
one; but I don't like to see you shy off every time the old man gets
close to you with the halter.

I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon
before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard,
and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the
longest word in the language, but there's only one letter between its
ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.

Old Dick Stover, for whom I once clerked in Indiana, was the worst hand
at procrastinating that I ever saw. Dick was a po