'While the 'Boy' Waits'

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1873 edition. Excerpt: ...is very much like groping in the dark. Numberless ways and abundant means of success lie around us, but we stumble over some, and fail and fall. We kick good things out of the path in the excess of our cleverness. We miss golden opportunities because we are unable to see or feel the importance of the objects by which we are surrounded, and to accommodate ourselves to actual circumstances. One man, with Herculean strength, shoulders a doorpost or a paving stone, and marches forward triumphantly, perfectly certain in his own mind that it is a treasure of superlative worth with which he has burdened himself. By and by he reaches that point of the journey where a few rays of too revealing light fall across the path. Then mark his chagrin. A tithe of the force he has expended so fruitlessly, had it been properly applied, would have accomplished a rich result; it is too late now. Leave the poor fellow to totter down the hill disappointed. Next listen to that ingenious, boasting, self-sufficient man, who is rehearsing how, by dint of superior intelligence and tact, he has escaped a peril by leaping an enormous ditch into which he must infallibly have fallen had he not been considerably less blind than his neighbours. It is true he has strained himself by the leap, and will never be the same man again, but what matters that, the wound is honourable; moreover, he has performed a noble action. He has saved someone else in saving himself. Presently he turns round, still breathless with mingled excitement and thankfulness, to gaze with the light of mature age on his path. Imagine his discomfiture when it appears that, instead of jumping a ditch, he has leapt over the side of a bridge, and, besides disabling himself, missed the path which led to prosperity, ..