CHAPTER I.BOYS.
If there were no boys there would be no young men and no old men. To this truism add the saying, “The boy is the father of the man,” and our subject has dignity and greatness at the outset. There may be aspects of it that provoke merriment; but there are more of a different character, and we are kept sober-minded in view of them.
The boy on shipboard is the “monkey.” The boy among types and presses is the “printer’s devil.” The boy at school is “Jack,” or “Bill,” or “Dick,” “hail-fellow well met,” and a peer among peers. The boy in college, if any boys go to college, is a “Freshman,” bound—if not happily emancipated of late—to serve the learned“Sophomore,” or take a ducking, or something worse, for his disobedience.
In business the boy is just what his character, his companions and his employers make of him. He may be a butt of ridicule, or a greenhorn to be ripened into smartness and wickedness by those who are older and wiser and worse than himself. He may be a poor drudge, to sweep and run of errands, which may be all right; or to suffer untold indignities and cruelties, with no uplifting to a better future and very little pay for very much work, which is all wrong.
Or, by way of contrast, he may be treated from the start as having in him the germ of real greatness, the undeveloped qualities of a man yet to be acknowledged as the peer of those he serves, and the possible superior of them all. No one but God knows what may be hid and struggling for opportunity and recognition and reward in the obscurest little fellow who takes the lowest place in any store or office or shop.