confectioner's stock made up of coarse salt, marked "sugar," or to buy
burdock of a florist, merely because the tag attached to it was
lettered "moss rose."




LII.

THE ONLY WAY TO CONQUER A HARD DESTINY.

The only way to conquer a cast-iron destiny is to yield to it. You
will break to pieces if you are always casting yourself upon the rocks.
Sit down on the "sorrowing stone" now and then, but don't expect to
last long if you are constantly flinging yourself head first against
it. If life holds nothing nobler and sweeter than the routine of
uncongenial work, if all the pleasant anticipations and lively hopes of
youth remain but as cotton fabrics do when the colors have washed away,
if good intention and noble purpose glimmer only a little now and then
from out the murky environments of your lot, as fisher lights at sea,
accept the inevitable and make the best of it. Nothing can stop us if
we are bound to grow. We are not like trees that can be hewed down by
every chance woodman's axe; death is the only woodman abroad for us,
and he does not hew down, he simply transplants. God is our only
judge; to him alone shall we yield the record of life's troubled day,
and isn't it a great comfort to think that he so fully understands what
have been our limitations, and how we have been handicapped and baffled
and hindered? If jockeys were to enter their horses for the great
Derby with the understanding that the road was rough and the horses
blind, do you think much would be expected of the finish? And is