Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/201

 and the time of final reckoning so far ahead and youth is so optimistic. I seldom call a man for procrastination and neglect of duty who does not tell me that it had been his serious intention to see me that day even if I had not called him, and I presume he is often telling the truth. I seldom talk to a loafer who has not promised himself, even before I urge him to get down to serious work, that he will stop loafing at once. The loafer has a sensitive conscience.

"I was coming in to see you today even if you had not called me," Walsh said to me this morning. "I know what you're going to say; I'm a loafer."

Loafing is a habit easily learned and hard to break, and it ruins more college careers at the very outset than does any other vice.

Then you should have a regular time for going to work each evening. You should not be turned from the habit by alluring invitations to get into card games, or to stand around the piano and develop your taste for poor music, or to waste the evening in attendance upon a low-class vaudeville show, or a racy moving picture performance, or even to sit in front of the fire and talk about politics or the girls with your room-mate. When the time comes for study, you should go to it as if you liked it, and do this six days in the week and three or four hours a day. If you do this for a month or two there will be little likelihood of your developing into a chronic loafer. I have said all of this knowing that every healthy young fellow