A nicely dressed young man, fifteen or sixteen years old, who had just
finished his course in the high school, stepped into the office of the
president of the Smutville Short Line Railroad.
“Well,” said the president, looking up from a mass of correspondence,
“what can I do for you, sir?”
“I have just finished my course in the high school,” the young man began
nervously, “and I thought that I might be able to secure a desirable
position with your company. I came in to talk with you about it.”
The president asked the young man to have a seat.
“So,” said the president, “you want a desirable place, eh?”
“I do, sir,” said the young man, his heart beating high with hope.
“A place,” continued the president, “that would pay you something like a
hundred dollars a month?”
“Something like that,” said the young man eagerly.
“I guess you would like it very well, too, if I could arrange it so that
you could report for work at nine o’clock in the mornings and get off
every afternoon at three or four o’clock. In other words, you want
something easy. I can see by looking at you that you are not accustomed
to hard work, and you could not fill a place that required you to report
at six o’clock every morning and work until six every afternoon. Do I
size you up correctly?”
“I think so, sir,” was the reply.
“In plain English then, you are looking for a soft place with the Short
Line?”
“I am, sir.”
“Well, sir,” said the president, smiling for the first time, “I regret
to inform you that there is only one such place on our railroad. I
occupy that place myself, and I am not thinking of resigning.”
The young man’s face flushed.
[Illustration: “I HAVE JUST FINISHED MY COURSE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL.”]
The president continued: “I hope you will not think that it is going
beyond what is right and proper for me to say, but I must tell you,
young man, that you have started out in life with the wrong notion. No
brave and strong young man is going about looking for an easy place. The
brave and true man asks only for work. And the men who are occupying
what you call the easy places in this life today are the men who have
climbed into them by hard work. You are very much mistaken if you think
that they have stepped into them from the high school. In fact, and
you’ll find it out soon enough for yourself, there are really no soft or
easy places in this world, and the man who goes about seeking such
places stamps himself at once as a failure. Nobody will ever employ such
a boy, and such a boy would be no good if he were employed. Let me, as a
friend, advise you, young man, that the next place you go to to apply
for a job, you ask for a chance to begin at the bottom. If it happens to
be a railroad, ask to be given a chance to do anything--firing an
engine, or cleaning cars, or laboring in the roundhouse. Be willing to
begin low down in the business, and, if you’re made out of the right
stuff, you will fight your way to the front. I started in with the Short
Line as a day laborer myself, and if I had not done so I would not be at
its head today. You advertise your own folly when you go and ask a
sensible business man to put you at the start at the head of something.
You must begin at the bottom and work up to the top. That is the rule
everywhere, and you will not, I am sure, prove an exception to it.”
Let us hope, boys and girls, that this young man left the president’s
office a wiser young man. Be sure not to follow his example. Don’t go
around hunting for easy places.