dvantage because the people do not have for you that
admiration which the doing of things compels. The fact that your
neighbors do not suspect your potentialities is really an advantage.
If you have that righteous and permissible craft which every man
should have, and if you take advantage of it, you can begin the work
which will bring you success without that envy and competition, that
friction of jealousy, which every man of acknowledged power arouses.
But if you, a man of fifty or over, go into a new environment, you
carry with you that heaviest of all burdens, the necessity of making
explanations.

"Why have you come among us at your age?" the people ask. "What is the
story of your past?" they very properly inquire. "It must be that you
are not a man of integrity which commanded the respect and support of
your old home," they will not unnaturally conclude; "either this, or
else you were a failure there."

These are the two necessary and inevitable deductions, and either horn
of that cruel dilemma of logic is enough to impale you. If you escape
them, you do it because you do not attract notice, and this, in
itself, is failure. And in any event, to gain the substantial
confidence of the people you must spend several years of right living
among them. And you have no time to waste in building up confidence at
your period of life. That is an asset which your whole career of
unsuccessful probity should have accumulated for you; and it is
dissipated if you remove from among those in whose minds that belief
in you exists.

I have seen this serious error made so many times, and nearly always
with such destroying results, that I give it more space than its
relative proportion deserves. I have in mind now two men who did
precisely this thing. Their success in the two country towns where
they had lived had been reasonable, but not considerable. It did not
appear to be success at all to them, though.

They were quite sure that they were bigger than their
opportunities--yes, that was what was the matter--they needed larger
opportunities, "larger fields," more "scope" for their powers. Each
man was about fifty years of age. Each was a man of far more than
ordinary talent. Each removed to a city. And in the city which each
chose, each miserably, utterly, hopelessly failed.

Had they remained where for years they had been planting the seeds of
confidence, respect, and achievement, and had they awaited the slow
processes of th