Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1889 — What Next? [ARTICLE]

What Next?

John Dervent and Peter Lotz were graduated at the same college on the same day with equal honors. Both men went West, and settled on ranches. After six years one of their old preceptors visited them. John was prosperous, but he knew nothing of the world outside of his own ranch. He took no interest in politics, in religion, in books, or in social questions; he hardly knew who was President; he had long ago lighted his fires with his text-books. For two days he talked to his visitor of his cows and bullocks, of the rates of cattle on the hoof in Chicago, and of beef in New York. When the professor tried to interest him in any other matter, he stared at him vacantly, or fell asleep in his chair. The. visitor went on with anxious foreboding to Lotz’s ranch. Peter, too, had been successful; he was shrewd and alert in his business, but he was a man of broad general information and sympathies. His interest was as keen in the questions of-the day as if he lived in New York or Chicago. His friend asked him presently how he had contrived to keep himself thus alive and young in thought. “My father,” said Peter, laughing, “was a fruit-grower. He had one maxim: ‘Never let your orchard run down.’ He incessantly set out new trees, that were growing and ready to bear when the old ones wore out. “When I left college, my brain was very much like an orchard with plenty of plants in it ready to bear fruit. I resolved not to ‘let it run down,’ I would not be satisfied with the knowledge I already had. I would bring in new slips and seedlings. I took the best daily newspaper, the best literary magazinq, the best religious journal in the country. I helped build a church and school-house in the neighborhood. I got up reading clubs, lectures and concerts. In short, I followed my father’s rule, and set out new plants in my brain, instead of waiting calmly until the old ones should wither and die.” It is easy to tell, when we meet mid-dle-aged or old people, whether they have, like John Dervent, left the intellectual growth of their youth to wither and die, or, like his classmate, have taken in daily new ideas and knowledge. “What next?” says the busy farmer, as he looks at the ground from which one crop has just been reaped. He makes haste to sow another. Many of the boys and girls who read these words have lately received a diploma at some college or school, and gone out into the world. What next? Ts your intellectual life to end now ? Is your brain to feed, during all these coming years, on the small portions of Greek, mathematics and history it has received ? Or will you daily plant the seed of a fact here, or set the graft of a new thought there? The man of to-day must work hard, if he means to keep himself up with the life of his time. So rapid is the march of intellectual development that the man who does not do this is soon pushed aside and forgotten.— Youth’s Companion.