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Young Knights of the Empire

31 of 87

bank, and all the time he kept making tools for himself in his spare hours, and eventually started himself in business on his own account with his own money and his own tools, and finally invented his celebrated steam hammer. By the time he was forty-eight, he had made a big income and quite a fortune. Many men would not have been content with this, but would have gone on until they became millionaires. But Nasmyth did not, he was content to retire from hard work with sufficient money to buy a happy home, where he went in for making telescopes and studying astronomy and also in doing good turns to people not so well off as himself. And he gave some good advice to young fellows wanting to make a success of their lives in the following words: "If I were to try to compress into one sentence the whole of the experience I have had, and offer it to a young man as a certain means of bringing success in whatever position he holds, it would be this:'_Duty first, pleasure second_,'" "I am certain from what I have seen that what so many call 'bad luck' comes in nine cases out of ten from putting that maxim the other way round and satisfying your pleasure first and attending to work and duty afterwards." One poor man, a farm labourer, made himself rich by writing poetry. His name was Stephen Duck, the thresher poet. But unfortunately numbers of other working men, seeing his good fortune, also thought it would be an easier way of making money to write poetry rather than by doing hard work, and Horace Walpole, when writing of Duck, said., "that he succeeded as a poet, but he also succeeded in ruining at least twenty good workmen." There are very few young men who have not at one time or another in their lives thought themselves splendid poets. I hope this will be a warning to them, and that they will take to hard work as a means of making their way in the world. * * * * * THE man WHO "STUCK TO IT." Lord Strathcona began life as a poor boy in Scotland and he ended up by being one of the richest men in Britain, and, not only the richest in money, but in having also the admiration and affection of a vast number of his fellow-countrymen. When he was eighteen, as plain Donald Smith, he went out to Canada and joined the Hudson Bay Trading Company there. This Company used to buy fur skins from the trappers and Indians, and their trading stations were built in far-off, out-of-the-way places in order to be near to the hunting-grounds of these people. Also, as you never could trust the Red Indians, they were all fortified posts, ready for defence against attack. Young Smith was sent up to a place called Mingan, right away up in the north-east of Canada, in Labrador, a cold, bleak, dreary country. After he had been there some time, his eyes began to give him great trouble, and he feared he was going blind. There was no doctor nor anyone else to consult, so he started off to make his way down to Montreal to see a doctor. He took with him as guides two half-breed Indians. For weeks he toiled through the awful wilderness, among snow and blizzard, but at length he reached Montreal. Do you think they made a hero of him? Not a bit of it. His employers rounded on him for quitting his post without leave, and told him to go back at once. At first he felt--like many of us would have done--so angry that he was on the point of throwing up the whole thing and leaving the service of the Hudson Bay Company. But on second thoughts he felt that, after all, the managers were right. They had put him there to have charge of valuable stores and important work, and that it was his duty to stick there, and not to come in to civilised parts for his own sake. So he accepted the wigging, and started back on the long, dreary journey to his gloomy post in Labrador. He had luckily been able to see a doctor, and had got his eyes put right. It was an awful journey: so bad that the two guides gave way under their hardships and died. But again Donald Smith _stuck to it_, and struggled on, and in the end he just managed to get to his post, worn out and exhausted. But that sticking to it was exactly what was the secret of his success.

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