Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of a talk I ought to make. They said it should be something suitable to youth—something didactic, instructive, or something in the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one's tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable.


First, then. Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than by acting on your own better judgment.


Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient.


Go to bed early, get up early—this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some others say get up with one thing, some with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work him with a convenient regularity, you can easily train him to get up at 9:30 every morning—it is no trick at all.


Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be, in the eyes of the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill-finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.


Never handle firearms carelessly. It seems so unnecessary to state that, but it is only because some people do handle them carelessly. And if a youth, there is nothing which can atone for the loss. A youth who can't fire a gun has got a defective nature.


Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a great pity to me that they should be so dull. Many a man who would have been incapable of drawing a single literary inspiration from a personal intercourse with the living world, can get seven out of ten of his ideas from books and claim them as his own. It is a most pitiful industry.


Be good and you will be lonesome. But there is a satisfaction in that, and it does not cost anything.