ne hard. When others played, he
worked, fully convinced that his play-time would come later. Where
others shirked, he assumed. Where others lagged, he accelerated his
pace. Where others were indifferent to things around them, he observed
and put away the results for possible use later. He did not make of
himself a pack-horse; what he undertook he did from interest in it, and
that made it a pleasure to him when to others it was a burden. He
instinctively reasoned it out that an unpleasant task is never
accomplished by stepping aside from it, but that, unerringly, it will
return later to be met and done.

Obstacles, to Edward Bok, soon became merely difficulties to be
overcome, and he trusted to his instinct to show him the best way to
overcome them. He soon learned that the hardest kind of work was back
of every success; that nothing in the world of business just happened,
but that everything was brought about, and only in one way--by a
willingness of spirit and a determination to carry through. He soon
exploded for himself the misleading and comfortable theory of luck; the
only lucky people, he found, were those who worked hard. To them, luck
came in the shape of what they had earned. There were exceptions here
and there, as there are to every rule; but the majority of these, he
soon found, were more in the seeming than in the reality. Generally
speaking--and of course to this rule there are likewise exceptions, or
as the Frenchman said, "All generalizations are false, including this
one"--a man got in this world about what he worked for.

And that became, for himself, the rule of Edward Bok's life.

CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS IN NEW YORK

From his boyhood days (up to the present writing) Bok was a pronounced
baseball "fan," and there was, too, a baseball team among the Scribner
young men of which he was a part. This team played, each Saturday
afternoon, a team from another publishing house, and for two seasons it
was unbeatable. Not only was this baseball aggregation close to the
hearts of the Scribner employees, but, in an important game, the junior
member of the firm played on it and the senior member was a spectator.
Frank N. Doubleday played on first base; William D. Moffat, later of
Moffat, Yard & Company, and now editor of _The Mentor_, was behind the
bat; Bok pitched; Ernest Dressel North, the present authority on rare
editions of books, was in the field, as were also Ray Safford, now a
dire