THE VALUE OF HARD WORK...
The following is a great poem about the value of hard work.The Mortgage and the Man
By Edgar A. Guest
This is the tale of a mortgage and a dead man and his son,
A father who left to his only child a duty that must be done.
And the neighbors said as they gathered round in the
neighbor’s curious way:
“Too bad, too bad that he left his boy so heavy a debt to pay.”
Day by day through the years that came, the mortgage held him fast-
Straight and true to his task he went, and he paid the debt at last;
And his arm grew strong, and his eye kept bright and although
he never knew,
The thing that fashioned a man of him was the task he had to do.
Honor and fortune crowned his brow till the day he came to die,
But he said: “My boy shall never work against such odds as I.
I have planned his year, I have made them safe, I have paid
his journey through.”
And the boy looked out on a world wherein there was
nothing for him to do.
His hands grew soft, and his eyes went dull, and his cheeks turned ashy pale,
For strength which isn’t employed by day, with idleness grows stale.
“He is not that man that his father was,” the neighbors often said,
“And better for him had he been left to work for his meat and bread.”
Oh, the race dies out and the clan departs, and feeble grows the son,
When they come at last to the dreadful day when all of the work is done.
For manhood dies on the roads of ease where the skies are ever blue,
And each of us needs, if we shall grow strong, some difficult thing to do.
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