his college expenses. The last thing I should advise the indigent undergraduate to do either during the college year or during the summer vacation is to take up salesmanship and especially to take up the selling of books, for unless he has peculiar talent in such work, he is likely to fail, the optimistic literature sent out by the publishers of subscription books to the contrary notwithstanding. Every spring there come to our institution, as I suppose to all other similar ones in the Middle West, representatives of the houses publishing subscription books who give their effort in securing the services of undergraduates to go out over the country during the summer to sell these wares. Some of the men who take up the work must succeed or the publishing houses would go out of business, but it is also a fact that many of those who take up the business do badly and give their time and energy very largely for experience.
The great majority of young fellows who are without money and who wish a college education are equally without talent or special skill. It is, however, very often the tales of what men with special talents have done that goad on the commonplace man and deceive him into the belief that he can do as well in earning a living as his better qualified classmate. When he finds that all that is open to him, all, indeed, that he is fitted for, is waiting table or washing dishes or taking care of furnaces at so much an hour, perhaps, the glamour of earning his way through college and graduating with money in the bank fades quickly. Money earned in this way, and this in actual fact is the common way, counts up's lowly and is a heavy drain upon the worker's time.
