ADVICE TO A YOUNG MAN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), 25 March 1881, Page 3

ADVICE TO A YOUNG MAN.

My son, if you do a mean thing, if you are guilty of a small spiteful action, if you wreak some paltry, shabby vengeance on your neighbor, if you'do anything supremely little, and cowardly ani hateful, and still hold up your head and want to bo respected by the world, just lay this flattering unction to your soul—you are the only man deceived ; no one is fooled save yourself. If yon are mean everybody knows it, the rest of mankind are as well pleased as yourself. Your neighbors may not—it is more than likely they will not—tell you of it. They will not express their honest opinions on the subject to your face, but when you lie clown at night and blush over your meanness by yourself, in the dark, don't you add foolishness to your wickedness by hugging to yourself the flattering delusion that nobody knows it. They all know it, and they talk all about it. Don't you know every mean thing your neighbors do ? Don't they all tell you all the mean tilings they know about each other? And do you suppose they don't know your littleness, if you have any, just as well! My dear boy, you must 'know that this shrewd, old world is too sharp for any of us, and that you can't fool it. It will hold you at your own estimate of yourself ; not your publiclyexpressed estimate, maybe, but at your own private, honest estimate —the estimate you hold yourself at when you have turned out the light and crept into bed, and know that there is just one being in all the universe that is searching your heart as closely as, and far more honestly and purely than, you can. And so, if you want the world to think you really honest, and manly, and noble, my son, you have got to be honest, and manly, and noble ; otherwise, I don't care what it says it thinks of you. Be honest with yourself, my boy, so that when the day is done, and the blessing of night falls you, can shake yourself by the hand and say " Old boy, you have made a fearful mess of it to-day; you have stumbled and faltered ; you have bolted the record, you have just bristled with faults ; but you did it all in honesty, in human ignorance and wilfulness, and you haven't lied to anybody; and when you go 'out in the streetman'saccusingglances cannotmako your eyes drop."—'Burlington Hawkeye.' i