The University of Hard Knocks

tion of a

le and t

learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I h

the fundamentals of life that un

is kn

thru his factory where he mak

a fiddle with a c

dle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That is about all there is

grades, and get the first string-the little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles thin

nd go up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to g

E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a violin? To wear stri

the strings-the tools. After that the violin must go into the great tuning school of life. Here t

you know what you have vitalized, what yo

ad it in a book." Bill

g and

and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not excited. Truth never excites-it is falsehood that excites-until we discover it in our lives. Until we see it with ou

g a thing. We could read a thousand descriptions of the sun a

and read from McGuffey's celebrated literature, "If-I-p-p-play-with-the-f-f-f

he fire I will get my fingers burned. I had to slap my hands upon hot stoves

, boring my friends and taking up a collecti

! It seems to me if you in the audience k

et Something

getting it in partial tune. It took me so long because I was naturally bright. It takes that kind longer

shed, mended and found." You see me here on this platform in my graceful and cultured manner, and you might not believe that I had ever trained an orphan calf to drink fr

ir own departments. Some people go to the canned fruit department. Some go to the fancywork department. Some go to the swine department. Ev

. I didn't need to be told. I gravitated there. The barrel always shakes all of

Whenever the climate became too sultry he would move to greener pastures. On that table were three little shells in a row, and there was a little pea under the middle shell.

his was a sure thing. (It was!) I had saved up my money for weeks to attend the fair. I bet it all on that middle shell. I felt bad. It seemed like robbing father.

ot rob father. Father cleaned me out

down. That was all I had to do now-just go, sit down. I

d the thing every fool does say when he gets bumped and fails to learn

that he is due f

ght t

eman drove into town. He stopped on the public square and stood up in his buggy.

ir to. Now just to introduce and advertise, I am putting these cakes of Wonder Soap in my hat. You see I am wrapping a ten-dollar bill around one cake and th

ove my five (two weeks' farm work) in his hands and grab that bill cake. But the bill disappeared. I n

ool D

o let me in on the ground floor. Did anybody ever let you in on the ground floor? I never could stick. Whene

the investments I did not have to lock up. You get the pathos of that-the investments nobody wanted

to double next week. But they did not double I doubled. They still exist on th

n in Central America? That was mine. I had there my oil propositions. What a difference, I ha

spend my income. I do not wonder

"Everglades"? I have an alligator ranch there. It is below the fr

ld and silver mine stock, I often noticed that it was printed in green. I used to wonder why they printed it in green-wonder if they wanted it to harmonize with me! And I would realize I had so much

g "Sel

rs would come periodically and sell me stock in some new enterprise that had millions in it-in its prospectus. I would buy because I knew the mi

onds and a dollar or two of stock. That was doubling and trebling my money over night. An old banker o

had no imagination! Nothing interested me that did not offer fi

hless paper. It would have been better for me if I had

t. His name was Thomas A. Cleage, and he was in the Rialto Building, St. Lo

from this man who said he was a friend of our family. "You have been selected because you are a prominent c

y man who did know me. So

been selected to go in with us in the inner c

if I waited till next day. I sat up all night in a day coach to save money for Tom, the friend of our family. But I see now I n

You respect not my feelings. I am not going to tell you a t

Louis to Tom Cleage's bucket-shop and pay him eleven hundred dollars to corner the wheat market of the world. That is all I paid him.

reduce. I got the thirty-third degree in finan

at time, for I got the most out of it. I do not feel hard toward goldbrick men and "blue sky" venders. I sometimes feel that we should endow them. Ho

m C

ns to get juicy when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad, "Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I

fortune right up on this platform and put it down there on t

ore than the legal rate of interest

undred per cent. I

-" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is adjourned. I selec

If you do not learn it, you will have to be "selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to

aid he. "I couldn't laugh. It was too pathetic. It was a picture of what is going on in our own little community year after year. I wish you could see what I have to see. I wish you could see the thousands of hard-earned dol

n hundred dollars to tell you this one thing, and you get it

e profits never owns it. Even the young person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We on

only own what you have earned and stored in your

four years to begin to learn one sen

eternal life-how slowly I learn, and how much

mencement

ave finished my education." Bless them all! Th

hey think. This is not to sneer, but to cheer. Isn't it glorious th

raniums along the front of the stage and a big oleander on the side. There is a long-whiskered rug in the middle. The graduate

orations I like them better, because every year I am ge

embarrassing at a commencement for the fingers not to follow the wrist! It is always a shock to the audience when the wrist sweeps downwar

pecially fro

G. No. 2 stands at the same leadpencil mark on the floor, re

s of propelling aerial boat with two fingers of each hand,

elves. We are laughing the happy laugh at how we have learned

until you have lived them. It is a grand thing to say, "Beyond the Alps lieth Italy," but you can never really say that until you know it by struggling up over Alps of diffi

ie, get

iden

ermon"? I wish you had heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought I had a call. I think now I was "short-circuite

the gospel gun and get ready for my try-

hakespeare and nailed it on page five of my sermon. "List to the poet Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. So I soldered these fragments from the books together with my own native genius. I worked that sermon up into the most beautiful splurges and spasms. I bedecked it with

t to a lady who taught expression, to get

page. You know about gestures-these things you make with yo

of fine gestures. I got an express-wagon and got no load for it. So it rattled. I got a necktie, but failed to get any man to hang it upon. I got up before a mirr

ered that maiden sermon more grandly than ever to a mirror. Every gesture went off the bat according to t

man out of the church-and I hurried. But they beat me out-all nine of them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled t

has taken some years to learn that the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No s

e lived. If you know more about peeling potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potato

they are the books that have been lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse

comes not from the books, but

e us an agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go o

t Live

never a pic

never a

l of the ar

et's heart

hey are singers. All this cultivation and irritation and irrigation and gargling of the

t it comes from the heart, chaperoned by the dia

t, "The Last Rose of Summer." She sang it with every note so well placed, with the sweetest little trills and tendrils, with the smile exactly like her teacher had taught

ver been to Berlin, but she had lived that song. She didn't dress the notes half so beautifully as Jessie did, but s

oice than that woman, but you cannot sing "The Last Rose of Summer" yet, for you do not know very much about the first rose of summer. And really, I hope you'll neve

s beyond the horizon of their live

ss of a S

riters of this land. As I had the good fortune to be sitting at table with her I wanted to ask her

day and didn't know where the next meal was coming from. I know what it is to be left alone in the world upon my own resources. I have had years of struggle. I have been sick and discouraged and down and out. It was in my little back-room, the only home I had,

for You," "His Lullaby" and many more of those simple little songs so full of th

ony and expression only teach us how to write the words and where to place the notes. These are

Hard Knocks. She here became the song philosopher she is today. Her defeats were her victories. If Carrie Jacobs-Bond had never struggled with disco

of popular songs that are trashy and voice the tawdriest human impulses, yet it is a tribute to the good elements i

and P

cks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real success in an

ealities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or trampling u

theorists have been the gre

is the matter with things to one person w

l in what book almost anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was a walking library

an could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you almost any date. He could fin

but somehow the page didn't supply the one sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoli

k of Human Experience the "sermons in stones" and the "books in running bro

positive statements

statements of the person who

ositive, wholesale statements we have not proved,

he Strin

ce, reading a different page in the Book of Human Experience. Each has a different fight t

have cried yourselves to sleep, some of you, and walked the floor when

not healed. You think it never will heal. You came here thinking that perhaps you would

er but what there are s

nd attentive because this is a polite and attentive neighborhood. But down in your hearts you are asking, "What is

you are natu

the keen sorrow of having the one you trust most betray you. Maybe, betray you with a kiss. You will go through your Gethsemane. You will see your dearest

ame elements. Your life is goi

the years, the bumps and the tears, that all these

ocks do not break the f

arer to God's great concert pitch, where the discords fade from our lives and where the music divine an

vil and unworthy go out of our lives and as peace, harmo

getting

s grow