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Show ADVICE TO A YOUNG MAN. And then, remember, my son, you have to work. Whether you handle a pick or a pen, a wheelbarrow or a set of books, digging ditches or editing a paper, ringing an auction bell or writing funny things, you must work. If you will look around you, my son, you will see that the men who are most able to live the rest of their days without work are the men who work the hardest. Don't be afraid of killing yourself with overwork, son. It is beyond your power to do that. Men cannot work so hard as that on the sunny side of thirty. They die sometimes, but it's because they quit work at 6 p.m. and don't get home until 2 a.m. It's the interval that kills, my son. The work gives you an appetite for your meals, it lends solidity to your slumber, it gives you a perfect and grateful appreciation of a holiday. There are young men who do not work, my son ; young men who make a living by sucking the end of a cane; whose entire mental development is insufficient to tell them which side of a postage stamp to lick ; young men who can tie a necktie in eleven different knots and never lay a wrinkle in it, and then would get into a West Hill street car to go to Chicago ; who can spend more money in a day than you can earn in a month, son, and who will go to the sheriff's to buy a postal card, and apply at the office of the street commissioner for a marriage license. But the world is not proud of them, son. It does not know their names, even; it simply speaks of them as old So-an-so's boys. Nobody likes them, nobody hates them, the great busy world doesn't even know they are there, and at the great day of the resurrection, if they do not appear at the sound of the trumpet, and they certainly will not unless somebody tells them what it is for and what to do, I don't think Gabriel will miss them or notice their absence, and they will not be sent for, or waited for, or disturbed. Things will go on just as well without them. SO find out what you want to be and to do, son, and take off your coat and make a dust in the world. The busier you are the less deviltry you will be apt to get into, the sweeter will be your sleep, the brighter and happier your holidays, and the better satisfied will the world be with you. <br><br> Hawkeye. |