• Author: Unknown
• Editor:
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume V
• Page Number:
• Date: 4 17 1918
• Tags:
• advice

WHAT OF THE HOUR

An hour has been lost out of our lives, not to be regained, if ever, until next October, and just where has it gone? We have almost addled our poor brains trying to decide, and must perforce refer the question to our readers with the hope that some reasonable answer may be forthcoming.

We’ll now propound the question we’ve been saving up to spring at the psychological moment, as it were, what are you going to do with that extra hour of daylight? Are you going to move the alarm ahead a bit, and rise at the same old hour, even if you have to forego the pleasure of movning coffee thereby? Going to turn your face to the wall, when the key rattles in the lock, and murmur drowsily, “You can’t fool me, it’s really only six o’clock, and here goes for a little more sleep.’’?

Or will you seize the opportunity, and tumble out of bed at the first streak of dawn, get in an hours work, or exercise, or reading, or study, or anything that will tend to make you the man you sometimes think you’d like to be? Whether your ambition is to usurp the place of John D. Rockefeller, or Charlie Chaplin, Woodrow Wilson, or Kaiser Bill, that extra hour will help you to the realization of that ambition, if you will but grasp it, and hold it fast.

Just take thought what an extra hour a day for a period of some seven months means, more than two hundred hours in all. In that length of time you could, even if of only average intelligence, learn to run an automobile, or a lawn mower, a Trust Company, or a Quick-lunch Restaurant, learn anything from the A. B. C’s to Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, read five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica through from cover to cover, and all the Cook Books that are in print. Why, in that length of time, you could almost find out what the war’s about, and who started it.

In our humble opinion, the man who doesn’t use that extra hour to good advantage is neglecting a great opportunity, and deserves all the war-bread he is getting.