We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
28 YOUTH
told me he had found at Bloomfield— the county seat of Greene County, where he practiced law a good deal because it was in our circuit— an Indian pony that he thought would be just right. One evening a little later, after he had been talking with Mother, he called me into their bedroom and told me Daisy was arriving the next day. That had me puzzled. But after keeping me in suspense long enough, Father told me that Daisy was the new pony. To get her over from Bloomfield, twentyfive miles away on the narrow-gauge railroad, seemed to us quite a project.
Just the year before Daisy arrived something happened— though no one could have been prophetic enough to see it— that was to play the leading role through more than a quarter century of my life. Edison took the first steps toward the motion picture. By 1887 he was working on the possibility of combining his new phonograph with small animated pictures. This dream was not fully realized until 1926, when I found myself literally the mouthpiece of an announcement that shook the cinema world with the force of a revolution: the talking motion picture had arrived!
Maxims were a real factor in the education of a nineteenth-century boy. Some were handed down orally. Many we memorized as we painstakingly wrote them over and over in our copybooks. But I was unusually fortunate. Just after my twelfth birthday Father gave me a 1 code" of rules for living which I know fixed some principles in my mind for keeps. He had clipped those rules from a magazine and had numbered them in the margin. He pasted the clipping on the flyleaf of my Bible, with a notation at the top:
A Code: Presented by his father to Master Willie Hays, Feb. 26, 1892, with a belief that it will be observed. Affectionately,
John T. Hays
That word "belief" got me: I was going to do my best to live up to Father's expectation. The two rules which he underlined in ink and which have been literally followed are these: Drink no kind of intoxicating liquors, and Never sfeak evil of anyone. Inside the Bible is another inscription:
To my dear nephew as a token of love from his Aunt Sally. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
The complete code, which I still think deserves consideration, reads as follows:
1. Keep good company or none. Never be idle. If you cannot be usefully employed, attend to the cultivation of your mind.
2. Always speak truth. Make few promises. Live up to your engagements.
3. Keep your own secrets, if you have any.