ts often
discourage in their children the very talents which, if permitted to
develop, would make them successful.

Such a child has small chance in the world if it happens that his
parents are sufficiently well-to-do to hold the purse strings on his
training. Not until he has failed at the work they choose for him will
such parents desist. When they finally allow him to take to the work he
prefers they are usually surprised to see how clever he is.

But if he does not succeed at it they should bear in mind that it is
doubtless due to their having cheated him out of his priceless
youth--the years when the mind is moldable, impressionable and full of
inspiration.

Poverty's One Advantage

In this situation alone does the child of poverty-ridden parents have
greater opportunities than the child of the well-to-do. He at least
chooses his own work, and this is one more little reason why the world's
most successful men so often come from the ranks of the poor.

"Ruined by too much mothering and fathering" is a verdict we would
frequently render if we knew the facts.

Richard and Dorothy

One instance in which Fate took a hand was very interesting. A New
York widow, whose husband had left his large fortune entirely to her,
nursed definite ambitions for her son and daughter. Richard, she had
decided, should become a stock-raiser and farmer on the
several-thousand-acre ranch they owned in Texas. Dorothy should study
art in Paris.

But it so happened that Richard and Dorothy disliked the respective
vocations laid out for them, while each wanted to do the very thing the
other was being driven to do. Richard was small, dark, sensitive,
esthetic--and bent on being an artist. Dorothy, who was six feet in her
stockings, laughed at art and wanted to be a farmer.

But mother was obdurate and mother held the family purse. So, in the
spring of 1914, Dorothy was sent to Paris to study the art Richard
loved, and Richard was sent to the Texas ranch that Dorothy wanted.

Then the War broke and Dorothy hurried from Paris to avoid German
shells, while Richard enlisted to escape the Texas ranch. Dorothy, in
her element at last, took over the ranch (of which Richard had made a
failure), turned it into one vast war garden, became a farmerette and is
there now--a shining success.

Richard got to Paris during the War and when it closed refused to come
home. He wrote his mother that the war had taught him he could earn his
own liv