The Turning of the Tide

A distinguished professor of Mathematics in a New England college was wont to remark to the Freshman class when meeting them for the first time at recitation, "that every person is as lazy as he can be." However we may demur to this sweeping assertion, it is doubtless true that more persons fail in life through indolence and the absence of appropriate and wholesome stimulus than from lack of capacity to become useful and even distinguished.

Misfortune, undesirable as it may seem, nevertheless furnishes an effective test of character, for, while the effeminate nature of lax fibre crumbles and is disintegrated beneath the pressure, the manlier spirit, like Dannemora iron, defies the[Pg 4] fury of the furnace, and even beneath the hammer, gathers both temper and tenacity.

How great the change produced in a Scotch pebble, taken from the banks of a Highland lake, when the wheel of the lapidary has brought out the hues, and it appears what it really is, a gem; thus the thrill of sudden calamity, the sharp anguish that makes the blood spring from the lip have often supplied both object and motive to many a spirit that (capacious of better things) was fast becoming honeycombed by the rust of luxury and indolence, and has developed gifts of which even the possessor was unconscious.

The Turning of the Tide places before our readers this entire process in the person of Radcliffe Rich, from the rude awakening, the moment when the half-benumbed faculties rally for the mastery, to the stern conflict and the hard-won victory.