MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES. 
245 
self by his usual morning walk. Seeing, in his garden, at the root 
of a thrifty onion stalk, a root of a purslain, he plucks it away; 
but behind it is another, and another, at which the good man 
plucks and picks, and picks and plucks, until he discovers that 
the thread of his thought has escaped him ; and he returns to his 
study to work on, only to find in the evening that the adamantine 
purpose of the morning has been thwarted by a dandelion ! And 
yet the old maxim loses nothing; for just as great a man is'he 
u who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew be¬ 
fore.” 
It is only when things are jangled and out of time, that heart 
burning and discontent dog at the heels of human effort. It is 
too often in this country as George Francis Train says it is in 
England, under their law of primogeniture. The eldest son, of 
course, receives all the landed estate, and the others must be pro¬ 
vided for in the church, the army or the navy. 
This is productive of strange confusions in the choice of parents. 
They flip up the soldier and he comes down in the pulpit; they 
toss aloft the clergyman and he lands on the deck of the war ship. 
The natural navigator is sent into the air, and he comes down 
stranded on dry land. 
And so with us. There is too much of the feeling among some 
of the substantial farmers that their boys should be a little better 
than their fathers before them, and follow some other calling sup¬ 
posed to be a little more genteel than the bare tilling of the soil. 
And so'the flipping” process goes on all over the land. Boys 
are hoisted through college, and hoisted into professions and other 
employments, to find themselves utterly routed and confounded, 
powerless and discouraged. A kindness was intended them, but 
a positive injury has been done under the mistaken belief that 
mere academic discipline, or a college course of study, was all that 
was needed to enable them to talk law like Webster, write poetry 
like Milton, or traverse the stars with Newton. As no popular 
fallacy is more common or widespread, so none is more fatal. 
There are hundreds of young men within college walls, to-day, 
miserable and wretched in the midst of Greek roots and conic sec¬ 
tions, who would be absolutely happy in riving rails, or breaking 
the soil and adding to the wealth of the world. But there is 
