To-morrow the truant will go to his
books; he will bend himself for that concentrated effort which alone
secures success, and his time of carelessness and sloth shall be far
left behind. But the sinister influence of to-day saps his will and
renders him infirm; each new to-day is wasted amid thoughts of visionary
to-morrows which take all the power from his soul; and, when he is
nerveless, powerless, tired, discontented with the very sight of the
sun, he finds suddenly that his feet are on the edge of the gulf, and he
knows that there will be no more to-morrows.
I am not entering a plea for hard, petrifying work. If a man is a
hand-worker or brain-worker, his fate is inevitable if he regards work
as the only end of life. The loss of which I speak is that incurred by
engaging in pursuits which do not give mental strength or resource or
bodily health. The hard-worked business-man who gallops twenty miles
after hounds before he settles to his long stretch of toil is not losing
his day; the empty young dandy whose life for five months in the year is
given up to galloping across grass country or lounging around stables is
decidedly a spendthrift so far as time is concerned.
I wish--if it be not impious so to wish--that every young man could
have one glimpse into the future.
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