Evening Round Up | Page 5

had to do with, and about business and social problems, and with and about the things which worry and perplex the man or woman in the business as well as the home world.
I am trying to stage this book, and our relationship, upon practical things we are to talk about. I want you to know and feel I have hoped and feared even as you have.
I am in the midst of these things even now as I write this book. I am not in a reflective mood, living in the past or glorying in deeds of other days. I am writing this today and of today, even as you are reading it today.
By day I face reality and problems, and temptations and tricks and frauds and deceits, and after the day is over I write these lines and try to inoculate myself with a serum or toxin that will serve as a safeguard on the morrow to ward off the things which try to annoy and distract me from my purpose: to do, and to be, as nearly right and fair as I can, in act and thought and word.
Continuity on a singleness of purpose is a valuable thing. Fabre spent his life studying insect life. His books on the spider and others on the life of insects are the result of a whole life spent on the one hobby or study of insects.
My occupation has been full of abrupt changes. Each day is a kaleidoscope, and so, as I write between times, these chapters may be like the boy who said of the dictionary, "a mighty powerful book but the subject changes so often."
I write these chapters as the spirit moves and opportunity allows, and you may read the same way. But be sure you make opportunity happen often.

OBSERVATION
Sitting on the Side Lines, Watching the Crowd
There is fun and interest and diversion all around us. All we need is keen observation and we will see much that passes unnoticed to the preoccupied person.
What an interesting thing is the great round world we live in. The people are as interesting as fish in an aquarium.
See the rushing, surging crowd. Man, pushing along searching for necessary things to be done, he builds cities, harnesses rivers, makes ships to sail the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth. Man goes to war, he builds death-dealing devices.
Man makes the desert blossom like a rose.
Here is the scientist in his laboratory, trying to unite certain elements to produce new substance. Here is the beauty in her silken nest; here the lover; there the musician; yonder the peanut man and in the office building is the captain of industry: All busy bees deeply absorbed in their respective interests, and intoxicated in the belief that they are important and greatly necessary.
Yet in the broad measure of ages they are mere ripples on the sea of time, faint bubbles on the eternal deep, and grains of sand at the mountain foot.
Great man by his own measure, minute man by the great measure of time. Mammoths to the near-sighted, mites to the far-sighted. Hustle and bustle, crowd and push. They tramp down the weaker brothers in the mad race after the golden shekels, which are only measures of ability to buy and own material things; symbols of power to make others serve you. These golden shekels which men fret, sweat and fight for, can only buy physical and material things.
Away from the crowd is the little group who have learned a great truth, which is, happiness is not to be bought with gold. This little minority knows that mental pleasures are best, and that mental pleasures cannot be found on the great highway of material conquest.
The puffy, corn-fed millionaire pities the man who is content to live with small means and enjoys what he has to the full extent.
The wise man is he who gets the fullness out of life, happiness, respect, content, freedom from worry, who is busy doing useful things, busy helping his brother, busy training his children, busy spreading sunshine and love and the close-together feeling in his home circle.
The corn-fed, hardened, senseless, money-mad, dollar-worshipper knows not peace. Smiles seldom linger on his lips. Peace never rests in his bosom, cheer never lights his face. He is simply a fighting machine, miserable in solitude, suffering when inactive and sick when resting.
The money-chaser is up and doing, working like a Trojan, because occupation takes his mind off the painful picture of his misspent opportunity and his destroyed natural instinct. When fighting for gold he forgets his appalling poverty of the really worth-while things in the world.
Like the drunkard in his cups the intoxication makes him forget, and he is negatively happy.
Money received as reward for doing things worth while is laudable.
We cannot sit idly by