Their young ambitions have been excited by some book, or fired by the story of some signal success, and they dream of becoming Astors or Girards, Stewarts or Wanamakers, Vanderbilts or Goulds, Lincolns or Garfields, until their innate energy impels them to try their own fortune in the magic metropolis.

But what are you willing to pay for "success," as you call it, young man?
Do you realize what that word means in a great city in the nineteenth century, where men grow gray at thirty and die of old age at forty,--where the race of life has become so intense that the runners are treading on the heels of those before them; and "woe to him who stops to tie his shoestring ?" Do you know that only two or three out of every hundred will ever win permanent success, and only because they have kept everlastingly at it; and that the rest will sooner or later fail and many die in poverty because they have given up the struggle.
There are multitudes of men who never rely wholly upon themselves and achieve independence.

They are like summer vines, which never grow even ligneous, but stretch out a thousand little hands to grasp the stronger shrubs; and if they cannot reach them, they lie dishevelled in the grass, hoof-trodden, and beaten of every storm.

It will be found that the first real movement upward will not take place until, in a spirit of resolute self-denial, indolence, so natural to almost every one, is mastered.

Necessity is, usually, the spur that sets the sluggish energies in motion.