d the
challenge and proved themselves superior to circumstances. Thus their
lives became a challenge to the millions of their countrymen who read of
their triumph.

CHAPTER THREE

_THE COURAGE OF INDUSTRY_

ANYBODY can drift, but only the man or woman of courage can breast the
current, can fight on upstream.

It is so easy to be idle or to work listlessly. Average folks drift
heedlessly into occupations in which they have no special interest and
for which they have as little fitness. Most people waste their evenings
or use them to little profit: it never occurs to them that each day they
waste precious hours. They give more thought to schemes to do less work
than to attempts to increase output.

And so they show their weakness, their unfitness for bearing
responsibility, their cowardice when the world is calling for courage.

Worth-while work demands the finest kind of courage, and with perfect
fairness work gives back courage to those who put courage into it.

I

BEGINNING

"Yes, he's a right good worker, when you once get him started," a
country newspaper editor said to a friend who was inquiring about a boy
who had been in the office three months. "Watch him now; you'll see what
I mean."

The boy had just brought from the express office the package of "patent
insides," as the papers for the weekly edition of the newspaper, already
half printed in the nearby city, were called. With a sigh he dragged
these up the stairs and laid them on the folding table. With another
sigh he contemplated the pile and thought how much time would be
required to fold the eight hundred papers. After lengthy calculation he
stopped to read a column of jokes from the top paper in the pile. At
least five minutes passed before the first paper was folded. At the end
of ten minutes he had succeeded in folding perhaps twenty-five papers.
When the noon hour arrived not one third of the task was completed.

While he ate his lunch he was thinking of the dread ordeal of the
afternoon--six hundred more papers to be folded! Would he ever be done?
He was still pitying himself as he walked slowly back to the office.
Just before reaching the doorway into which he must turn, he spied an
acquaintance. He made his way over to the boy who had attracted him, not
because he had anything to say to him, but that he might delay a little
longer the moment of beginning work at the folding table.

"What are you going to do?" he asked idly of