132 Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope 



convincingly of the fierce competition that rages 

 around all trades, all arts, all sciences. He made 

 it plain that to succeed — as he interprets success 

 — you must not only work hard, you must work 

 harder than anyone else. Whatever pace be set, 

 do you set a faster. If your competitor works ten 

 hours a day, do you work twelve. You must read 

 the books, and those alone, that have a direct bear- 

 ing on your work ; you must talk to the people, and 

 to them alone, who can push your fortunes ; you 

 must eat and drink and make merry, bearing in 

 mind the penalties that wait on excess ; you must 

 beware of the club, the theatre, the campus, because 

 these will extinguish the sacred fires of energy. I 

 am not quoting Mr. Bok verbatim, but in sum and 

 substance that is what he said. Reading the arti- 

 cle, I was sensible that nothing short of this eternal 

 manifestation of energy, this perfervidum ingenium 

 which seems to be the peculiar heritage of the 

 Scandinavian, would prevail. The mere recital of 

 what ought to be done made my bones ache. 



Since, I have never thought of Mr. Bok without 

 thinking also of the fable of the two frogs. The 

 frogs, you will remember, fell into a bucket of cream. 

 One of them, conscious of weakness, knowing that 

 night was coming on, that he could not scale the 

 slippery sides of the bucket, that it would be hope- 

 less to try to keep afloat till morning, incontinently 

 drowned. The other struggled and struggled, and 

 was found next morning by the milkmaid alive 

 and well — upon a pat of butter ! We are not told 

 any more ; but you may be sure that the hero sang 

 the song of the churning to all the frogs in Frog- 



