THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
prizes, but you have gained certain things too.
And as long as you will never have a chance to run the race over, and as. you cannot entirely make up, in this one sober year left, all that you lost in the other three rollicking ones, why, stop worrying over it and think occasionally about what you have gained instead of what you've lost. One's mistakes should not be dignified by so much attention as we are inclined to give them. You have to pay for what you get in the college world as well as in the big one. If you had got more out of your studies you might have got less out of your fellow-students. Who is it—Emerson?—says that a young man goes to teachers for instruction but it's his fellow-pupils that educate him?
Much of the time you were not poling but ought to have been was spent in running athletics, which is a good experience. If you had devoted yourself to books to the entire exclusion of beer and skittles you might have prolonged the evil day of puppishness to a more unbecoming age. If
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