The Project Gutenberg eBook, The "Goldfish", by Arthur Train

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Title: The "Goldfish"

Author: Arthur Train

Release Date: July 16, 2004 [eBook #12920]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE "GOLDFISH"***

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THE "GOLDFISH"

Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

EDITED BY

ARTHUR TRAIN

1921

[Illustration: Arthur Train from the drawing by S.J. Woolf]

"They're like 'goldfish' swimming round and round in a big bowl. They
can look through, sort of dimly; but they can't get out?"--_Hastings_,
p. 315.

CONTENTS

MYSELF

MY FRIENDS

MY CHILDREN

MY MIND

MY MORALS

MY FUTURE

"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who
elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have
lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of
poverty could have meant--the liberation from material attachments; the
unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our way by what we
are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling away our life at
any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short the moral
fighting shape.... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty
among the educated class is the worst moral disease from which our
civilization suffers."

William James, p. 313.

CHAPTER I

MYSELF

"My house, my affairs, my ache and my religion--"

I was fifty years old to-day. Half a century has hurried by since I
first lay in my mother's wondering arms. To be sure, I am not old; but I
can no longer deceive myself into believing that I am still young. After
all, the illusion of youth is a mental habit consciously encouraged to
defy and face down the reality of age. If, at twenty, one feels that he
has reached man's estate he, nevertheless, tests his strength and
abilities, his early successes or failures, by the temporary and
fictitious standards of youth.

At thirty a professional man is younger than the business man of
twenty-five. Less is expected o