The Beauty of Holding On
By E. L. Vincent
(E. L. Vincent in Farm and Fireside) It pays to stick as long as there is anything worth sticking to. A big storm out west pelted a man's wheat down to beat all. It did look discouraging when he went out the next morning and looked at it. It seemed to him that the Lord and everything and everybody else were against him. He had worked so hard to plow15that field, seed it, and get it in the best shape he could; and there the whole ninety acres lay flat, pounded down to the ground and ruined. As he was feeling the bluest, a man came along. “Yes; all gone to smash! The whole summer's work gone up!” It was a hard-looking piece of grain, and no mistake. “What will you take for it just as it stands?” The farmer thought about it. Nothing there. Never would be anything. It would not straighten up so that it could be cut. That man went into that field with a mower, cut the wheat, raked it up, threshed it, and got two hundred bushels of wheat, which he sold for two hundred round dollars! If that man had only — but he didn't. He got down in the mouth, and jumped at the chance to get that ten-dollar bill!!! A good many things in life turn out just about like that. We don't stick! An old fellow I know, was shingling his house one day when his feet slipped and he slid down toward the eaves. As he came nearer and nearer to the edge of things, he gritted his teeth and said, And he gripped the shingles with a grasp like death, and saved himself. There are nippers all along life's way. How do we meet them? Do we just give it up, and say, “Well, I'm a goner, anyhow,” or do we take a firmer grip on the situation, and come off all right? Everything depends on how we face a tight place.