the
direction towards which the inward monitor points. Let duty be the
guiding-star, and success will surely be the crown, to the full measure
of one's ability and industry.

What career? What shall my life's work be?

If instinct and heart ask for carpentry, be a carpenter; if for
medicine, be a physician. With a firm choice and earnest work, a young
man or woman cannot help but succeed. But if there be no instinct, or
if it be weak or faint, one should choose cautiously along the line of
his best adaptability and opportunity. No one need doubt that the
world has use for him. True success lies in acting well your part, and
this every one can do. Better be a first-rate hod-carrier than a
second-rate anything.

The world has been very kind to many who were once known as dunces or
blockheads, after they have become very successful; but it was very
cross to them while they were struggling through discouragement and
misinterpretation. Give every boy and girl a fair chance and
reasonable encouragement, and do not condemn them because of even a
large degree of downright stupidity; for many so-called
good-for-nothing boys, blockheads, numskulls, dullards, or dunces, were
only boys out of their places, round boys forced into square holes.

Wellington was considered a dunce by his mother. At Eton he was called
dull, idle, slow, and was about the last boy in school of whom anything
was expected. He showed no talent, and had no desire to enter the
army. His industry and perseverance were his only redeeming
characteristics in the eyes of his parents and teachers. But at
forty-six he had defeated the greatest general living, except himself.

Goldsmith was the laughing-stock of his schoolmasters. He was
graduated "Wooden Spoon," a college name for a dunce. He tried to
enter a class in surgery, but was rejected. He was driven to
literature. Goldsmith found himself totally unfit for the duties of a
physician; but who else could have written the "Vicar of Wakefield" or
the "Deserted Village"? Dr. Johnson found him very poor and about to
be arrested for debt. He made Goldsmith give him the manuscript of the
"Vicar of Wakefield," sold it to the publishers, and paid the debt.
This manuscript made its author famous.

Robert Clive bore the name of "dunce" and "reprobate" at school, but at
thirty-two, with three thousand men, he defeated fifty thousand at
Plassey and laid the foundation of the British Empire in India