'How do we get them? High school and college can give much, but these
are never on their programmes. All the book processes that we go to the
schools for and commonly call our 'education' give no more than
opportunity to win the indispensables of education. We must get them
somewhat as the fields and valleys get their grace. Whence is it that
the lines of river and meadow and hill and lake and shore conspire
to-day to make the landscape beautiful? Only by long chiselings and
steady pressures. Only by ages of glacier crush and grind, by scour of
floods, by centuries of storm and sun. These rounded the hills and
scooped the valley-curves and mellowed the soil for meadow-grace. It was
'drudgery' all over the land. Mother Nature was down on her knees doing
her early scrubbing work! That was yesterday, to-day--result of
scrubbing work--we have the laughing landscape.

"'Father and mother and the ancestors before them have done much to
bequeath those mental qualities to us, but that which scrubs them into
us, the clinch which makes them actually ours and keeps them ours, and
adds to them as the years go by,--that depends on our own plod in the
rut, our drill of habit, in a word our 'drudgery.' It is because we have
to go and go morning after morning, through rain, through shine, through
toothache, headache, heartache to the appointed spot and do the
appointed work, no matter what our work may be, because of the rut,
plod, grind, humdrum in the work, that we get our foundations.

"'Drudgery is the gray angel of success, for drudgery is the doing of
one thing long after it ceases to be amusing, and it is 'this one thing
I do' that gathers me together from my chaos, that concentrates me from
possibilities to powers and turns powers into achievements. The aim in
life is what the backbone is in the body, if we have no aim we have no
meaning. Lose us and the earth has lost nothing, no niche is empty, no
force has ceased to play, for we have no aim and therefore we are
still--nobody. Our bodies are known and answer in this world to such or
such a name, but, as to our inner selves, with real and awful meaning
our walking bodies might be labelled 'An unknown man sleeps here!'

"'But we can be artists also in our daily task,--artists not artisans.
The artist is he who strives to perfect his work, the artisan strives to
get through it. If I cannot realize my ideal I can at least idealize my
real--How? By trying to be perfect in it. If