for I want you to get your share. You'll
find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this
world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
the screw-driver lost.

I didn't have your advantages when I was a boy, and you can't have mine.
Some men learn the value of money by not having any and starting out to
pry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; and
some learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and starting
out to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn the
value of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going to
Sunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having a
drunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get an
education from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and some
get it from professors and parchments--it doesn't make any special
difference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you get
it and freeze on to it. The package doesn't count after the eye's been
attracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It's
the quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into the
kitchen and up to the cook.

You can cure a ham in dry salt and you can cure it in sweet pickle, and
when you're through you've got pretty good eating either way, provided
you started in with a sound ham. If you didn't, it doesn't make any
special difference how you cured it--the ham-tryer's going to strike the
sour spot around the bone. And it doesn't make any difference how much
sugar and fancy pickle you soak into a fellow, he's no good unless he's
sound and sweet at the core.

The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and
the second thing is education. That is where I'm a little skittish about
this college business. I'm not starting in to preach to you, because I
know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to
himself harder than any one else can, and that he's mighty often
switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong
way.

I remember when I was a boy, and I wasn't a very bad boy, as boys go,
old Doc Hoover got a notion in his head that I ought to join the church,
and he scared me out of it for five years by asking me right out loud in
Sunday School if I didn't want to be saved, and then la