To weakness strength succeeds, and power Press bravely on, and reach the goal, And gain the prize, and wear the crown; Come wealth and honor and renown. To thine own self be true, and keep Thy mind from sloth, thy heart from soil; A heavenly harvest for thy toil. CLASS ACTIVITIES 1. Class discussion: Which characters from the earlier selections were chosen by various members of the class? Discuss, and if necessary debate your choices. 2. What do you like in this poem? Which lines best express the poet's main idea? Which stanza? 3. Make up good definitions of "courageous," "persistence," "industrious." ADDITIONAL READINGS..—1. "Lincoln, the Great Commoner," E. Markham. 2. "Invest Yourself in Your Job," in American Magazine, 93: No. 1, 96-98. 3. "Are You Doing What You Want to Do?" H. Schneider, ibid., 93: No. 6, 54-55. CLASS-LIBRARY READINGS WORKING ONE'S WAY UP 1. "Horace Greeley, Journalist," in Makers of Our History, 266–277. 2. "A Girl of the Limberlost," G. S. Porter, in Stories of the Day's Work, 33-42. 3. "Ready for Anything," S. S. McClure, ibid., 55-58. 4. "Promotion in Business," G. H. Lorimer, in A Vocational Reader, 87. 5. "The Value of Home Training," W. N. Ferris, ibid., 171–172. . 6. "How Education Pays," Anonymous, in Opportunities of To-day, 7-8. 7. "Fitting the Man to the Job," B. J. Hendricks, ibid., 23-32. 8. "Where Your Job May Lead To," R. Neeley, ibid., 169-173. 9. "The Zadoc Pine Labor Union," H. C. Bunner, in Joy in Work, 80 IIO. 10. "Women Writers in the United States," Book of Knowledge, 7: 2043 2050. II. "The Scotch Lad Who Became a Millionaire," ibid., 20: 6275-6278. D. THE SATISFACTION OF GOOD WORK 1. THE HOME-KEEPER LYMAN ABBOTT This selection pictures an ideal worker in the best profession in the world, a profession that does not have an eight-hour day, that does not pay money wages, that often seems to be filled with drudgery. But it is a profession which is the bedrock of happiness, health, and character. There is no higher honor than to be a true home-maker. The home-keeper has a passion for cleanliness. She abhors dirt and justifies her abhorrence by the Scriptural command, "Abhor that which is evil." If dirt be not evil, she knows not what is. She hates vermin as David hated the enemies of Jehovah, with a perfect hatred. She is not a scientist; but she needs no scientist to tell her that the germs of disease lurk in dirt and are carried by vermin. But no such passion for order possesses her. Cleanliness is itself a virtue. Next to godliness? If she were quite frank with herself, she would probably change the order and say godliness is next to cleanliness. Certainly she would prefer as a visitor a clean sinner to a dirty saint, and she can find no severer rebuke for occasional petty meannesses than to say that people are acting in a nasty manner. But order is not in itself a virtue; it is only a means to an end. The end is general comfort and general convenience, and the home-keeper never sacrifices the end to the means. She endeavors to have a place for everything; she tries to train the children -but not her husband to put each thing in its appointed place. But she does not nag. If she sometimes follows a careless husband or son, picking up after him, she never does it with a sigh which says, "See how much trouble your carelessness is making me." Because her rooms do not look so spick and span as her neighbors', she sometimes chides herself for not being so good a housekeeper. But she is a better home-keeper, which is far more important than being a housekeeper. Neither her husband nor her boys need to go to clubs or to other homes for liberty; her home is as free as the club. If order is heaven's first law, liberty is its atmosphere; and if she finds difficulty, as she sometimes does, in preserving both the law and the liberty, she prefers the liberty. So there are in her household hours for meals and meal hours, although the two do not always coincide. The hour for breakfast is half-past seven; but if some morning the boys desire to make an early start for a fishing expedition, the breakfast hour is six; if another morning they can, without neglect of duty, sleep late and wish to do so, breakfast hour changes to half-past eight or nine. This requires both tact and efficiency in dealing with the cook; but when a neighbor asks her if such changes are not very difficult to manage, she replies cheerfully, “This is what I am for." Neither husband nor children ever know and rarely guess what tact and toil are required. For the homekeeper surmounts her obstacles without talking about them, except occasionally in a burst of confidence to her husband or her daughter, and then as a narrative of her triumphs, not as a history of her trials. This subordination of time and place to comfort and convenience is a part of her quite unconscious theory that life is the end and that all household arrangements are means to that end. She therefore believes that things are for folks, not folks for things, and always acts on that belief. When children from the city make a visit to her country home and ask whether they may run on the grass, she says, "Of course"; and when an older visitor, fearing the effect on the young spring shoots, asks if that is good for the lawn, she replies smilingly: "No, but it is good for the children." She has no use for books that cannot be read, chairs that cannot be sat in, a piano that cannot be played, a room that cannot be used. She has some fine books, for she is fond of them, but she does not keep them under lock and key. She would rather injure the book in teaching the child how to use it than injure the child by refusing him the book. If a careless boy or a still more careless visitor breaks a parlor chair by trying to balance himself in it upon the two hind legs, she blames the chair, not the sitter, and does not get another of so delicate a construction. Her children learn to play the piano by playing. And though they may never become musicians, they learn to love music, and in after life a piano always brings to them thoughts of their home and their mother. She has no parlor with closed blinds and drawn curtains, from which the sun is carefully excluded lest it fade the carpet, and into which visitors are received in state with a sunless and frigid hospitality. Sometimes a critical visitor surprises an unusual disorder, due to a misused liberty in the parlor, which Harry has for the time converted into a nursery, and the mother gently expresses the wish to herself that Harry were not so heedless. But to shut Harry out of the parlor she is quite certain would be no cure for his heedlessness, and that, not the disordered parlor, is what she wishes to cure. She keeps house for her husband and her children and she adjusts the affairs of her kingdom to meet the needs of her family, not of those who are employed to minister to it. To this rule there is one exception: the Sunday meals are adjusted to give her servants an opportunity for church, and they are encouraged to fulfill with fidelity all that their consciences, not hers, call on them to fulfill churchwise. The doors of her home are always open to the friends of her husband and of her children. She is glad to see them, and welcomes them right cordially to what she has to give. But she never tries to give them something better than she gives her own. She does not have two standards one for her family, another for the stranger. She makes no effort to conform her living to the standard of her visitors; she is glad to see them if they will adapt their life for a few days to her standard. She knows that her husband and her children are homelovers, and she is content. For love, not ambition, is the inspiration of her life and the reward of her endeavors. She builds her memorial herself; and yet she does not know that she has a monument. She lives in her monument; but she does not know that it exists. She never dreamed that she was great, or that she was specially useful, or that she had achieved anything worth living for. Sometimes, when she read the stories of historic heroines, she, too, had her "dream of fair women," and looked with a sigh upon her life made up of little deeds, so little that even she who did them was not conscious of the doing, she whose loom moved so noiselessly that she neither thought how long she was at work nor what a beautiful pattern she was weaving. Indeed, her pattern would have seemed to her, if she had ever thought about herself or her work, to weave itself. But she did not think about herself. Self-consciousness would have destroyed her monument. Her home grew up quietly, as quietly as a flower grows; and no one knew she did not know herself — how much she had done to tend and water and train it. Her husband had absolute trust in her. He earned the money; she expended it. And as she put as much thought into her expenditures as he put into his earning, each dollar was doubled in the spending. She had inherited that mysterious faculty which we call taste; and she cultivated it with fidelity. Every home she visited she studied, though always unconsciously, as if it were a museum or an art gallery, and from every visit she brought away some thought fitted to its appropriate place in her own home. She was too genuine to be an imitator; for imitation is always of kin to falsehood, and she abhorred falsehood. She was patient with everything but a lie. She never copied in her own home or on her own person what she had seen elsewhere; yet everything she saw elsewhere entered into and helped complete the perfect picture of life which she was always painting with deft fingers in everything, from the honeysuckle which she trained over the door to the bureau in the guest's room, which her designing made a new work of art for every new friend, if it were only by a new nosegay and a change of vases. Putting her own personality |