“‘Not I, but Christ,’” said Aunt Marthe with a happy smile.  She went into the house and returned with a book in her hand.  “You asked what culture really was.  This writer says ‘Drudgery.’  Listen while I give you a few snatches, then you shall have the book for your own.

“’Culture takes leisure, elegance, wide margins of time, a pocket-book; drudgery means limitations, coarseness, crowded hours, chronic worry, old clothes, black hands, headaches.  Our real and our ideal are not twins.  Never were!  I want the books, but the clothes basket wants me.  I love nature and figures are my fate.  My taste is books and I farm it.  My taste is art and I correct exercises.  My taste is science and I measure tape.  Can it be that this drudgery, not to be escaped, gives ‘culture?’ Yes, culture of the prime elements of life, of the very fundamentals of all fine manhood and fine womanhood, the fundamentals that underlie all fulness and without which no other culture worth the winning is even possible.  Power of attention, power of industry, promptitude in beginning work, method and accuracy and despatch in doing it, perseverance, courage before difficulties, cheer, self-control and self-denial, they are worth more than Latin and Greek and French and German and music and art and painting and waxflowers and travels in Europe added together.  These last are the decorations of a man’s life, those other things are the indispensables.  They make one’s sit-fast strength and one’s active momentum,—­they are the solid substance of one’s self.

“’How do we get them?  High school and college can give much, but these are never on their programmes.  All the book processes that we go to the schools for and commonly call our ‘education’ give no more than opportunity to win the indispensables of education.  We must get them somewhat as the fields and valleys get their grace.  Whence is it that the lines of river and meadow and hill and lake and shore conspire to-day to make the landscape beautiful?  Only by long chiselings and steady pressures.  Only by ages of glacier crush and grind, by scour of floods, by centuries of storm and sun.  These rounded the hills and scooped the valley-curves and mellowed the soil for meadow-grace.  It was ‘drudgery’ all over the land.  Mother Nature was down on her knees doing her early scrubbing work!  That was yesterday, to-day—­result of scrubbing work—­we have the laughing landscape.

“’Father and mother and the ancestors before them have done much to bequeath those mental qualities to us, but that which scrubs them into us, the clinch which makes them actually ours and keeps them ours, and adds to them as the years go by,—­that depends on our own plod in the rut, our drill of habit, in a word our ‘drudgery.’  It is because we have to go and go morning after morning, through rain, through shine, through toothache, headache, heartache to the appointed spot and do the appointed work, no matter what our work may be, because of the rut, plod, grind, humdrum in the work, that we get our foundations.