To the medical man, his fee serves as a medal to indicate that he was brave enough to face small pox and other infectious diseases, and his self-respect is fostered thereby.
The barrister's brief is marked with the price of his legal knowledge, of his eloquence, or of his brave endurance during a period of hope-deferred brieflessness.
A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little thing for his album.
Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs.

"But it took you only five minutes," objected the rich man.

"Yes, but it took me thirty years to learn how to do it in five minutes." "I prepared that sermon," said a young sprig of divinity, "in half an hour, and preached it at once, and thought nothing of it." "In that," said an older minister, "your hearers are at one with you, for they also thought nothing of it." Virgil seems to have accomplished about four lines a week; but then they have lasted eighteen hundred years and will last eighteen hundred more.
Seven years Virgil is said to have expended in the composition of the Georgics, and they could all be printed in about seven columns of an ordinary newspaper.

Tradition reports that he was in the habit of composing a few lines in the morning and spending the rest of the day in polishing them.

Campbell used to say that if a poet made one good line a week, he did very well indeed; but Moore thought that if a poet did his duty, he could get a line done every day.
What an army of young men enters the success-contest every year as raw recruits! Many of them are country youths flocking to the cities to buy success.