he-box, with springs and wheels in his head; all play and no
work makes Jack a jackass, with bosh in his skull. The right
prescription for him is play when he really needs it, and work whether
he needs it or not; for that dose makes Jack a cracker-jack.

Like most fellows who haven't any too much of it, I've a great deal of
respect for education, and that's why I'm sorry to see so many men who
deal in it selling gold-bricks to young fellows who can't afford to be
buncoed. It would be a mighty good thing if we could put a lot of the
professors at work in the offices and shops, and give these
canned-culture boys jobs in the glue and fertilizer factories until a
little of their floss and foolishness had worn off. For it looks to an
old fellow, who's taking a bird's-eye view from the top of a packing
house, as if some of the colleges were still running their plants with
machinery that would have been sent to the scrap-heap, in any other
business, a hundred years ago. They turn out a pretty fair article as
it is, but with improved machinery they could save a lot of waste and
by-products and find a quicker market for their output. But it's the
years before our kid goes to college that I'm worrying about now. For
I believe that we ought to teach a boy how to use his hands as well as
his brain; that he ought to begin his history lessons in the present
and work back to B.C. about the time he is ready to graduate; that he
ought to know a good deal about the wheat belt before he begins
loading up with the list of Patagonian products; that he ought to post
up on Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison first,
and save Rameses Second to while away the long winter evenings after
business hours, because old Rameses is embalmed and guaranteed to keep
anyway; that if he's inclined to be tonguey he ought to learn a living
language or two, which he can talk when a Dutch buyer pretends he
doesn't understand English, before he tackles a dead one which in all
probability he will only give decent interment in his memory.

Of course, it's a fine thing to know all about the past and to have
the date when the geese cackled in Rome down pat, but life is the
present and the future. The really valuable thing which we get from
the past is experience, and a fellow can pick up a pretty fair working
line of that along La Salle Street. A boy's education should begin
with to-day, deal a little with to-morrow, and then go back to day
before