Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/563

 or three months you will be astounded at what that old mill-room will do for you. Get the owner also to take part, and he will, oftener than you imagine, for he does look to your real interests. Saturday evenings have a debate there for mill-hands only, on any timely, stirring topic. The really bright youth in that mill can want no better arena. Nothing will raise him in the estimation of all his neighbors—and especially of his fair neighbors—like good work done there.

A bobbin-boy in Massachusetts, in just such a mill, used often to walk twelve miles to Boston after supper to get a book out of a library; and to walk back home again, so eager was he to know something and to be somebody. And he became somebody, as he deserved to—the Governor of Massachusetts; a Major-General in the war; and one of the greatest Speakers the House of Representatives ever saw! There was racing stuff in that bobbin-boy; and a wonderful long-distance swimmer under water, by-the-way, was that same General Banks. No one appreciates such youth more than their employers. To the credit and lasting honor of New England it is said that she has no town of over eleven hundred inhabitants without a public library. When that can be said, not of New England only, but of the nation, good chance for an education as nearly every youth in our land has to-day, then he can have no one but himself to blame if he remains ignorant. Both here and in Scotland, Mr. Andrew Carnegie has put this and future generations deeply in his debt, in several communities, by his forethought and wise munificence, in supplying them with large working libraries—. If, in his great hall in the metropolis, he would, every fall and winter, provide the public with the best lecture-talent in the world, as the foresight, kindness,