a little more, and I should have
done so had I been able to find a job. But while I was looking for the
place, a chance came to teach school, and I took the opportunity as a
means of keeping the wolf from the door. I have been engaged in the work
of teaching ever since. When I was able to buy land, I did so, and I
have to-day a farm of which I am very proud. It does not pay large
dividends, but I keep it up for the fun I get out of it,--and I like to
think, also, that if I should lose my job as a teacher, I could go back
to the farm and show the natives how to make money. This is doubtless an
illusion, but it is a source of solid comfort just the same.

Now the point of this experience is simply this: I secured an education
that seemed to me to promise the acme of utility. In one way, it has
fulfilled that promise far beyond my wildest expectations, but that way
was very different from the one that I had anticipated. The technical
knowledge that I gained during those four strenuous years, I apply now
only as a means of recreation. So far as enabling me directly to get a
living, this technical knowledge does not pay one per cent on the
investment of time and money. And yet I count the training that I got
from its mastery as, perhaps, the most useful product of my education.

Now what was the secret of its utility? As I analyze my experience, I
find it summed up very largely in two factors. In the first place, I
studied a set of subjects for which I had at the outset very little
taste. In studying agriculture, I had to master a certain amount of
chemistry, physics, botany, and zooelogy, for each and every one of which
I felt, at the outset, a distinct aversion and dislike. A mastery of
these subjects was essential to a realization of the purpose that I had
in mind. I was sure that I should never like them, and yet, as I kept at
work, I gradually found myself losing that initial distaste. First one
and then another opened out its vista of truth and revelation before me,
and almost before I was aware of it, I was enthusiastic over science. It
was a long time before I generalized that experience and drew its
lesson, but the lesson, once learned, has helped me more even in the
specific task of getting a living than anything else that came out of my
school training. That experience taught me, not only the necessity for
doing disagreeable tasks,--for attacking them hopefully and
cheerfully,--but it also taught me that disagreea