crawled through the ropes. So I figure I belonged in a hick burg like Drew City the same way a submarine belongs to a bathtub.
But, to my great surprise, Mr. Brock is against me leaving Drew City to take my chances in New York. He tells me the rumor that opportunity knocks once on every man's door is a true one and a ambitious boy don't have to rush off to the city to make his fortune. He himself got his start in a small town, Irontown, Pa., where he's then president of the big locomotive works, after he'd starved trying to knock New York for a goal.
"The fallacy that success is to be found only in the big cities has sent many a promising young man home from them to his native village, beaten and discouraged," he says, chewing on a cigar which costs some heavy money but which for some reason he never lights.
"Some of them have then gone ahead to fame and fortune, proving, of course, that success is never a matter of environment, but of the man! Knut Hamsun, who a couple of years ago won the fifty-thousand-dollar Nobel Prize in literature, could rise no higher than a street-car conductor in Chicago. Lipton drove a horse car in New Orleans, Clemenceau started as a teacher in New York, Masefield was a bartender there. Yet all those men, giving up the struggle in the big cities, returned to their home towns and made their names known to the far corners of the earth! You can do the same, Galen. Never mind New York—the cities have broken far more men than they've ever
