The Book of Courage, John Thomson Faris [interesting books to read for teens txt] 📗
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One of his chief difficulties he solved in an ingenious manner. In a manuscript, published after his death, his plan was described:
"He caused a wooden frame to be constructed of the size and shape of a sheet of letter paper. Stout wires were fixed horizontally across it, half an inch apart, movable back of thick pasteboard fitted behind them. The paper for writing was placed between the pasteboard and wires, guided by which and using a black-lead crayon, he could write not illegibly with closed eyes."
This contrivance, with improvements, he used for about forty years of semi-blindness.
The documents on which he depended for his facts were read to him, though sometimes for days he could not listen, and then perhaps only for half an hour at a time. As he listened to the reading he made notes with closed eyes. Then he turned over in his mind what he had heard and laboriously wrote a few lines. For months he penned an average of only three or four lines a day. Later he was able to work more rapidly and he completed the book in two years and a half. No publisher was found who was willing to bear the expense of issuing the volume, and the young man paid for the plates himself.
Friends thought that now he would have to give up. His eyes were still troubling him, he became lame, his head felt as if great bands of iron were fastened about it, and frequently he did not sleep more than an hour or two a night. Then came the death of his wife, on whom he had depended for some years. At one time his physician warned him that he had not more than six months to live. But when a friend said that he had nothing more to live for, he made the man understand that he was not ready to hoist the white flag.
He lived for forty-five years after it was thought that he could never use his eyes again, and during all this time he worked steadily and patiently, accomplishing what would have been a large task for a man who had the full use of all his powers.
An Englishman was told by his physician he could never see again. For a time the news weighed heavily upon him. Afterward he said: "I remained silent for a moment, thinking seriously, and then, summoning up all the grit I possessed, I said, 'If God wills it, He knows best. What must be will be. And,' I added, putting my hand up to a tear that trickled down my face, 'God helping me, this is the last tear I shall ever shed for my blindness.'" It was. He secured the degrees of doctor of philosophy and master of arts. He was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Chemical Society. He made many valuable scientific discoveries and inventions, saved a millionaire's life, and received the largest fee ever awarded any doctor—$250,000.
To these men difficulties were a challenge to courage. They accepted the challenge and proved themselves superior to circumstances. Thus their lives became a challenge to the millions of their countrymen who read of their triumph.
CHAPTER THREE THE COURAGE OF INDUSTRYIt is so easy to be idle or to work listlessly. Average folks drift heedlessly into occupations in which they have no special interest and for which they have as little fitness. Most people waste their evenings or use them to little profit: it never occurs to them that each day they waste precious hours. They give more thought to schemes to do less work than to attempts to increase output.
And so they show their weakness, their unfitness for bearing responsibility, their cowardice when the world is calling for courage.
Worth-while work demands the finest kind of courage, and with perfect fairness work gives back courage to those who put courage into it.
I
BEGINNING
"Yes, he's a right good worker, when you once get him started," a country newspaper editor said to a friend who was inquiring about a boy who had been in the office three months. "Watch him now; you'll see what I mean."
The boy had just brought from the express office the package of "patent insides," as the papers for the weekly edition of the newspaper, already half printed in the nearby city, were called. With a sigh he dragged these up the stairs and laid them on the folding table. With another sigh he contemplated the pile and thought how much time would be required to fold the eight hundred papers. After lengthy calculation he stopped to read a column of jokes from the top paper in the pile. At least five minutes passed before the first paper was folded. At the end of ten minutes he had succeeded in folding perhaps twenty-five papers. When the noon hour arrived not one third of the task was completed.
While he ate his lunch he was thinking of the dread ordeal of the afternoon—six hundred more papers to be folded! Would he ever be done? He was still pitying himself as he walked slowly back to the office. Just before reaching the doorway into which he must turn, he spied an acquaintance. He made his way over to the boy who had attracted him, not because he had anything to say to him, but that he might delay a little longer the moment of beginning work at the folding table.
"What are you going to do?" he asked idly of the boy, who had taken off his coat and was rolling up his sleeves.
"The boss wants me to sort that lot of old iron," was the reply.
"What, that huge pile! It will take you a week, won't it? Just think how much of it there is!"
"No, there isn't time to think how much of it there is," was the reply. "And what would be the good? Not a bit of use getting discouraged at the very start, and that is what would happen if I didn't pitch in hard. The job is going to be done before night—that is, if I'm not interrupted by too many loafers coming in to ask fool questions."
The boy from the printing office was about to resent this speech of the boy at the iron pile, but he thought better of it. "Perhaps there is something in what he says," he said to himself, as he went up the stairs. "Suppose I try to pitch in hard."
So he surprised the foreman by beginning at the pile of six hundred papers as if he was to be sent to a ball game when he finished. And he surprised himself by finishing his task in a little more than an hour.
The lesson he learned that day stood him in good stead when later he was taking his first difficult examination in a technical school. His neighbor stopped to look over the paper from beginning to end, and was heard to mutter, "How do they expect us to get through ten questions like these in an hour's time?" The boy from the printing office had no time for such an inquiry, but began work at once on the first question, without troubling himself about those that came later until he was ready for them.
So it was when, his technical course completed, he was confronted by his first great railroad task, the clearing up of a wreck that looked to his assistants like an inextricable tangle. After one good look at it he pitched in for all he was worth, thus inspiring the men who had felt the task was impossible, and within a few hours the tracks were clear.
The ability to pitch in at once on a hard job is one characteristic of the man who accomplishes tasks that make others sit up and take notice. John Shaw Billings, the famous librarian, had this ability. To a friend who praised him for the performance of what others thought to be a most difficult task, he said:
"I'll let you into the secret—it is nothing really difficult if you only begin. Some people contemplate a task until it looks so big it seems impossible, but I just begin, and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done."
II
PURPOSE FORMING
One of the interesting points the fascinated reader of biography comes to look for is the first hint of the formation of the purpose that later characterized the life of the subject. There is infinite variety, but in every case there is apt to be something that takes the purposeful reader back to the days when his own ambition was taking shape.
For instance, there is Daniel Boone. One would not be apt to select him as an example of one whose life was ruled by a purpose deliberately formed and adhered to for many years. Yet he had his vision of what he desired to accomplish when, at twenty-one years of age, he was marching from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to join Braddock's company. On the way he met John Finley, a hunter who had traveled through Ohio and into the wild regions to the south. His tale of Kentucky fired Boone's imagination, and the two men planned to go there just as soon as the trip to Fort Duquesne was at an end. It proved impossible to carry out the plan for many years, but Boone never lost sight of his purpose, and ultimately he carved out the Wilderness Road and opened the way for the pioneers to seek homes in the Kentucky Wilderness.
Alexander Hamilton was but twelve years old when he wrote from his home in St. Croix, in the West Indies, to a friend in America:
"I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I am confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hope of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity."
Not for a day did he lose sight of his purpose. The opportunity he sought came years later. He sailed for America, and began the career that led to usefulness and fame.
As a boy Robert Fulton was ambitious. He had two dreams. He wished to go to Europe to study art, and he wished to buy a farm for his widowed mother. For these objects he saved every dollar he could. On his twenty-first birthday he took his mother and sister to the home he had bought for them, and later in the same year he sailed for Europe.
When Peter Cooper was making his way against odds in New York City he felt the need of an education. But he had to work by day and there was no night school. Night after night he studied by the light of a tallow candle. And while he studied, his
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