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Show HOW TO BE NOBODY. Young readers, it is very easy to be nobody, especially if you have not the resolution, nor the energy, to aspire to be somebody. The way to become a nobody, is to spend your evenings and leisure moments in drinking saloons, and in other places where loafers do congregate. If you do so, it will need no prophet, nor a son of a prophet, to foresee that you will be a nobody, if not worse, a drunkard or a professional gambler. You need not drink much, at first, only a little beer, cider, or some other light drink, idling away your time in playing dominoes, cards, checkers, and other objectionable, senseless, and time-killing games, swearing a little, now and then, to show your manliness and importance. Should you ever read any book or publication, let it be debasing crime novels or some low, sensational trash, but be sure to read nothing that will cultivate and strengthen you mind and prove your manners and prepare you for future usefulness. Never attend church; never associate with the cultured and refined, but go on keeping your stomach full and head empty, or filled only with debasing matter, and you cannot fail to be a nobody, if not worse, a disgrace to your parentage, a drone, a leech on society. "There are," says Dr. Story, "a good many boys, working in the various shops of the cities, who spend nearly all their earnings for beer, and are drunk every Saturday night; and there are many other boys and young men, who, earning no money themselves, are spending their father's money for beer and other intoxicating drinks, bringing ruin upon themselves, and disgrace upon their parents. Those who thus drink at fifteen, can hardly reach thirty, and if they smoke, too, the pernicious cigarette, they will not probably reach their twenty-fifth year. They will as a general rule, before they reach their prime, die a premature, if not a disgraceful death, and the world will be no better, if not the worse, for their existence. How many young men do we see hanging around saloons, country stores, and other places, idling away their time, just ready to graduate and become shiftless loafers, worthless nobodies, if not drunkards and professional gamblers. The young man, who thinks that he can thus foolishly, if not wickedly idle away his youthful days until he reaches middle life, and then reform and become a good, steady, and respectable citizen, is certainly deluded, if not demented, and will surely lead to his sorrow, that he has made a serious if not an irremediable mistake, and learn, from sad experience, that the downward road to ruin is easy, but to reform and regain what he has lost, is a difficult up-hill work, hard and laborious, that people are more prone to forget his good deeds, than they are to overlook his indolent habits and reprehensible doings of early life. He will feel that he is regarded with suspicion, and will then be conscious that what he sowed in his youth, has matured in his manhood, and must inevitably be reaped in his old age, and that death will find him at the best to be a nobody. Young readers are you training in the school of nobodies? Be careful, exceedingly careful; for you are forming a character every day. If you acquire habits of industry, truthfulness, temperance in all things, they will help you. If you form habits of indolence, of insolence, of carelessness and dissipation, of selfish disregard for the rights and comforts of others, you will waste part of your riper years in discovering these defects, and the balance in efforts at getting rid of them. Be careful therefore, and lay your foundation well or the whole structure of your life will be a failure and a sorrow.-Mother's Magazine |