Contents

SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS--The lecturer the delivery wagon--The sorghum barrel--Audience must have place to put lecture--Why so many words

The University of Hard Knocks

I. THE BOOKS ARE BUMPS--Every bump a lesson--Why the two kinds of bumps--Description of University--"Sweet are the uses of Adversity"--Why children are not interested

II. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDLESS KNOCKS, the bumps that we bump into--Getting the coffee-pot--Teaching a wilful child--Bumps make us "stop, look, listen"--Blind man learns with one bump--Going up requires effort--Prodigals must be bumped--The fly and the sticky fly-paper--"Removed" and "knocked out"

III. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDFUL KNOCKS, the bumps that bump into us--Our sorrows and disappointments--How the piano was made--How the "red mud" becomes razor-blades--The world our mirror--The cripple taught by the bumps--Every bump brings a blessing--You are never down and out

IV. "SHAKE THE BARREL"--How we decide our destinies--Why the big ones shake up and the little ones shake down--The barrel of life sorting people--How we hold our places, go down, go up--Good luck and bad luck--The girl who went up--The man who went down--The fatal rattle--We must get ready to get--Testimonials and press notices--You cannot uplift people with derrick--No laws can equalize--Help people to help themselves--We cannot get things till we get ready for them

V. GOING UP--How we become great--We must get inside greatness--There is no top--We make ourselves great by service--the first step at hand--All can be greatest--Where to find great people--A glimpse of Gunsaulus

VI. THE PROBLEM OF "PREPAREDNESS"--Preparing children for life--Most "advantages" are disadvantages--Buying education for children--The story of "Gussie" and "Bill Whackem"--Schools and books only give better tools for service--"Hard knocks" graduates--Menace of America not swollen fortunes but shrunken souls--Children must have struggle to get strength--Not packhorse work--Helping the turkeys killed them--the happiness of work we love--Amusement drunkards--Lure of the city--Strong men from the country--Must save the home towns--A school of struggle--New School experiment

VII. THE SALVATION OF A "SUCKER"--You can't get something for nothing--The fiddle and the tuning--How we know things--Trimmed at the shell game--My "fool drawer"--Getting "selected to receive 1,000 per cent"--You must earn what you own--Commencement orations--My maiden sermon--The books that live have been lived--Singer must live songs--Successful songs written from experience--Theory and practice--Tuning the strings of life

VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My first school teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll of my schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben Hur won the chariot race--Pulling on the oar

IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi keeps on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best day, tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too busy to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not praise--Doing duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of Waters"--Go on south forever!