there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a
famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances.
What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by
deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she
has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual
acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness.
Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to
get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with
no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no
sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for
God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard
Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in
despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made
any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.

Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient
with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a
child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing
to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole
class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that
thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to
grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of
that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of
Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by
which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of
adventure.

There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while. It
would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of
roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of