ontrive every possible excuse for getting away
from your task. Now, I am going to give you one hour's work to do, every
forenoon and afternoon. I shall give you such things to do, as are
perfectly plain and easy, so that you will have no excuse for neglecting
your work or leaving it. But yet I shall choose such things as will afford
you no amusement; for I want you to learn to _work_, not play."

"But, father," said Rollo, "you told me there was pleasure in work, the
other day. But how can there be any pleasure in it, if you choose such
things as have no amusement in them, at all?"

"The pleasure of working," said his father, "is not the fun of doing
amusing things, but the satisfaction and solid happiness of being faithful
in duty, and accomplishing some useful purpose. For example, if I were to
lose my pocket-book on the road, and should tell you to walk back a mile,
and look carefully all the way until you found it, and if you did it
faithfully and carefully, you would find a kind of satisfaction in doing
it; and when you found the pocket-book, and brought it back to me, you
would enjoy a high degree of happiness. Should not you?"

"Why, yes, sir, I should," said Rollo.

"And yet there would be no _amusement_ in it. You might, perhaps, the next
day, go over the same road, catching butterflies: that would be amusement.
Now, the pleasure you would enjoy in looking for the pocket-book, would be
the solid satisfaction of useful work. The pleasure of catching
butterflies would be the amusement of play. Now, the difficulty is, with
you, that you have scarcely any idea, yet, of the first. You are all the
time looking for the other, that is, the amusement. You begin to work when
I give you any thing to do, but if you do not find _amusement_ in it, you
soon give it up. But if you would only persevere, you would find, at
length, a solid satisfaction, that would be worth a great deal more."

Rollo sat still, and listened, but his father saw, from his looks, that he
was not much interested in what he was saying; and he perceived that it
was not at all probable that so small a boy could be _reasoned_ into
liking work. In fact, it was rather hard for Rollo to understand all that
his father said,--and still harder for him to feel the force of it. He
began to grow sleepy, and so his father let him go to bed.

Rollo Learns to Work at Last.

The next day his father gave him his work. He was to begin at ten o'clock,
and w