by his employer if he ever saw a snail. The boy answered that he had.
"You must have met it, for you surely did not overtake it," said the
farmer. I know an old man who seems to take pride in saying he never
worked. The first time I saw this man was in my youth. While his
father was husking corn in a field, he was seated by a fire reading a
novel. Often after that, when I would go to the postoffice in the
winter, he would be there by the fire. He moved to the city thirty
years ago, where he spends his winters sitting around a fire. He
doesn't drink or gamble. I don't think he will have many sins of
commission for which to answer; he never commits anything; he sits by
the fire. When he dies an appropriate epitaph for his tomb will be:

"He was never much on stirrin' round,
Sich wasn't his desire;
When weather cool, he was always found,
A sittin' round the fire.

"When the frost was comin' down,
And the wind a creepin' higher,
He spent his time just that way,
A sittin' round the fire.

"Same old habit every day,
He never seemed to tire;
While others worked and got their pay,
He sat there by the fire.

"When he died, by slow degrees,
Some said, 'he's gone up higher;'
But if he's doin' what he did,
He's sittin' round the fire."

The man or woman who lives in this age of the world and lives in
idleness, should have lived in some other age. When ox-teams crept
across the plains, and stage coaches went six miles an hour, idleness
may have been in some kind of harmony with the age, but now, when
horses pace a mile in two minutes, express trains make fifty miles an
hour, and aeroplanes fly a mile in a minute; when telephone and
telegraph send news faster than light flies, the idler is out of
place. Carlisle said: "The race of life has become intense; the
runners are tramping on each other's heels; woe to the man who stops
to tie his shoestrings!"

Young man, if you would keep step with the energy of the age in which
you are living, and be ever found on the safe side of life, you must
not only be equipped with education, stability and ambition, but to
make sure you should start right. If you are going to California
tomorrow, which way would you start, east or west? You say: "We would
start west." A man riding along a highway said to a farmer by the
wayside: "How far to Baltimore?"

The farmer answered: "About twenty-five thousand miles the way you're
going; if you'll