printed tissue guard copy: “Patience is a thing you can’t get out of books”

Essay: Patience

“IT IS a great thing to be patient, a great thing for yourself and other folks. It doesn’t matter much what sort of a job you have in life, or what part of the world you live in, or what sort of folks you live with-the one great solvent of all earthly troubles is patience.
Have you ever watched an ant build his little house of sand? How patient he is, even when some big number nine comes along and kicks it all over. He doesn’t fret or fuss or fume. He thinks of Mrs. Ant and all the little Ants, and somewhere down in his tiny intelligence he reasons that the best thing in the world to mix with sand, to rebuild a shattered house, is patience.
Patience is a thing that you can’t get out of books, unless it be the book of nature, and what a patient soul Nature is! How she has to struggle and work to keep her family together! If Nature should lost her patience and fly off the handle, or get discouraged, what a mixup there would be amid the stars! Great Jupiter! But dear old Nature just keeps right on sawing wood, and is patient with us like an indulgent mother with her children. She knows after we have had our romp and that long, refreshing sleep, that we will wake up and see things in a different light.
Most everything in the world, from a cross wife to a balky horse, will yield to patience; and the patient man is usually a strong man, although it is a sort of reserve strength. It is the cooling, quieting, calming element in a man’s consciousness that lies in the deeper strata.
Patience is a sort of mental oil that stills the troubled waters, and the man who wants to reach port with his cargo intact needs always to have a barrel or two aboard.
The world is full of historic instances of patience, but the place that it counts most is in everyday life, because that is where we spend most of our time.”