THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE LIFE A TALK TO BOYS ON THE POINT OF ENTERING COLLEGE IN a certain sense, college is the place for mistakes. In college a young man tests his strength, and, while testing it, is protected from the results of failure far more effectively than he will ever be protected afterward. The youth who is determined to succeed in public speaking may stand up again and again in a college debating club, may fail again and again, and through his failure may rise to success; whereas if he should put off his efforts until some political campaign had called him to the stump, no audience would listen to him, or even let him go on. "The mistakes that make us men," says Dr. Lyman Abbott, "are better than the accuracies that keep us children." Yet even in college there are mistakes. by which the career of a happy, wellmeaning youth is suddenly darkened; and though he may learn out of the very bitterness of his experience, he is never quite the same again. All boys with a fair chance in the world have at their best a common motive, to be of some use, to lead active, efficient lives, to do something worth doing, and to do it well, to become men on whom people instinctively and not in vain rely. Men and women may be divided roughly into two classes,-those who are "there," and those who are "not there." The "not there" people may be clever, may be what is called "good company," may have, even after you know them pretty well, a good deal of personal charm; but once know them through and through, and you have no use for |