Valedictorian, June of Ninety-Nine

In June of 1899 I was graduated as the valedictorian of my class. This valedictory was the first original address I had ever made; it was forty minutes long. And although that speech was the "apple of mine eye" then, when I think of it now it seems strange to me that I should ever have been allowed to pour forth in that park such a tropical effusion in the presence of the school board and the assembled multitude. This first graduation, where most men stop, filled me with the greatest desire I have ever experienced for further education. How that mountain of difficulty was climbed shall be related now. The summer immediately following my High School graduation wrote into the story of my life another of those delicious chapters of hard and profitable experience to which I turn and read whenever I am tempted by discouragement. This was a truly critical time in my career. I knew that I was not even half educated. I desired to go to college - but how? I thought I should have to work for several years and save the money. But I knew that it is not well to interrupt one's education; a thing that is well started goes more easily if it is not allowed to stop. But necessity is necessity, and I had become used to stooping to conquer before her iron rod. So I took the state teacher's examination and secured a "first grade" license. I could have earned forty or fifty dollars a month at teaching. I knew that most young men of my acquaintance when they could earn fifty dollars a month felt no further need of school. But I did not fear that such a feeling would ever take possession of me. I had come to have a stout faith; whatever difficulty I met, I believed that in some way I could get over it. If faith ever becomes dangerous, mine had perhaps reached that dangerous point where I felt too literally sure that "I cannot fail if I try." I had kept at school for the eight years past because I felt sure that I could do so. I had never failed to solve a problem in all of my lessons, and I had never tackled one with the feeling that I should fail. Always starting out penniless and ever with some new difficulty in my path, I had earned pennies and pushed my way through school from year to year since my mother died. I had overcome many difficulties, never doubting that I should overcome.