The Successful Man

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 9, 1882

The Successful Man.

WHEN our successful man was a boy, and lived in a manufacturing village of New Hampshire, a widow's son, the greatest luxury he knew was to eat apples; so he told us the other day, when we fell into conversation about old times.

"Yes," said he, "when I was ten years old, I used to think that if ever I was rich enough to have as many apples as I wanted, all the year round, I should be perfectly happy. And now!"

He went on to say that he had one of the finest orchards, on a small scale, to be found anywhere in Massachusetts, which produced last year ninety-four barrels of apples of the best varieties yet produced. But he did not eat two apples per annum. He could not; for while he was making his fortune, he worked so hard, and confined himself so closely, as to contract a chronic weakness of digestion. With all the luxuries of the world at his command, he was obliged to live principally on oatmeal and milk.

Later in his youth, his ambition soared above apples. He was beginning to get a little more money than he absolutely needed, and was able occasionally to indulge in a ride. He then thought if he could own a horse fast enough to pass everything on the road, and take no man's dust, he should be the proudest and happiest of men.

"Well," he continued, "I have a horse that I think is the fastest in my county; but I never drive him. I gave him to my son last summer, and for my own use I keep an old plug that jogs along six miles an hour, without troubling myself about him."

At this point our poor successful man wearily took out his watch to see how time was getting on, and we observed that the watch was of a peculiar pattern rarely seen in this country.

"This watch," said he "is another case in point. One of my young ambitions was to possess as good a watch as mortal man could make. I have one. I gave six hundred dollars in gold for it, at a time when gold was a more expensive article than it is now. But, knocking about the world in sleeping-cars and Mediterranean steamboats, I was always a little anxious about my watch; and besides, the possession of so costly an article by a traveler, is a temptation to robbers. One day in Paris I noticed in a shop-window, this curious little watch marked twenty-five francs. A five dollar watch was a novelty, and I bought it. I deposited my six-hundred-dollar time-keeper with my banker, and it has there ever since in an iron safe. I find that this little watch keeps time as well for all the ordinary purposes of life, as the other, and I have carried it ever since."

The successful man said these things with what we may call a good-humored despair. He made no complaint; but at the age when he ought to be in the full tide of cheerful activity, he appeared to have exhausted life.—Youth's Companion.