railroads with headquarters in New York, and now retired. He was
one of those men in whose vocabulary there is no such word as
"fail." After I had talked with him for quite a while, he looked
at me, and with his kindly, almost fatherly smile asked, "Why
don't you cure yourself?"

"Cure myself?" I queried. "How do you expect me, a young man with
no scientific training, to cure myself, when the learned doctors,
surgeons and scientists of the country hare given me up as
incurable?"

"That doesn't make any difference," he replied, "'while there is
life, there is hope' and it's a sure thing that nobody ever
accomplished anything worth while by accepting the failures of
others as proof that the thing couldn't be done. Whitney would
never have invented the cotton gin if he had accepted the failures
of others as final. Columbus picked out a road to America and
assured the skeptics that there was no danger of his sailing 'over
the edge.' Of course, it had never been done before, but then
Columbus went ahead and did it himself. He didn't take somebody
else's failure as an indication of what he could do. If he had, a
couple of hundred years later, somebody else would have discovered
it and put Columbus in the class with the rest of the weak-kneed
who said it couldn't BE done, just because IT NEVER HAD BEEN DONE.

"The progress of this country, Ben," continued my cousin, "is
founded on the determination of men who refuse to accept the
failures of others as proof that things can't be done at all. Now
you've got a mighty good start. You've found out all about these
other methods--you know that they have failed--and in a lot of