# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Day's Work

"I SUPPOSE it seems pretty tough to have to get back to hard work," a freshman said to me as we were sitting together on the train that was bringing me back to the University from a summer of sight-seeing and freedom from office routine. What I said in reply is perhaps beside the mark, but the fact, and my text, remains that the day's work for each of us should have our interest and our best efforts, should bring us a measure of joy, and should not be delayed or done badly because of past pleasures or present allurements.
The boy entering college is likely to have at first a misconception as to what for him the real work of the day is. He has but recently broken away from the attachments and duties of home, and he often falls into a maelstrom of attractions at college. It is not strange, often, that he should frequently ​see things out of proportion, and that he should not at once recognize the fact that for him the real day's work is his college work—the assignments which from day to day he will jot down in a friendly note book, as they come from the lips of his various instructors. Other things may be important, but they are only incidental.
A few months ago I saw a body of Scotch Highlanders—five thousand of them—marching away to war. They were farmers, clerks, laboring men of all sorts who had left their regular work, their friends and their families to take up the business of war. Most of them have since met death upon a foreign shore. For many of them there was much joy and comfort and love left behind; for all of them there was sacrifice and privation and the danger of death ahead. But all of these hardships were for them a part of the day's work, and they were going to it with firmness and courage and with faces set. No doubt their minds were ​filled with the thoughts of the friends they were leaving behind; they would have been something less than human if they had not thought occasionally of the danger ahead; but whatever they thought or felt there was fight in their eyes, and they marched straight ahead, to the accomplishment of their tasks.
It is with that sort of spirit that the freshman should go to his work. Every day will have its special tasks; these should be done and done within the time assigned for them. He will not always find them easy or pleasant. The soldiers that I saw were carrying guns that, no doubt, galled their shoulders, and heavy knapsacks that seemed like an Old Man of the Sea about their necks; their feet were often blistered and sore, but they marched on; the day's work had to be done.
A young man said to me not long ago in explaining his failures of last year: "My work was very difficult, and I could not get interested in it, so I shirked it." Such a man would make a poor soldier, just as he ​made a poor student. Whatever your day's work is you should go to it with courage and vigor. If it is difficult you will get so much the more training out of it if you manage to do it. If it is not to your liking so much the more to your credit if you do it well. All sorts of things will call you away from it, some of them very good in themselves—physical and social pleasures, the picture shows, your new-made friends—but so far as they take your mind off the real business of the day they are bad. The day's work must be done.
And you will find as you address yourself manfully to the task of doing your college work that gradually it will grow easier, gradually your interest and your pleasure in it will increase, and finally you will come, as most men do who have chosen wisely, to look forward to it with real pleasure and to leave it with regret.
September