Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there. And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.
The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You don't get up so quick, but you don't come down so sudden. Even then, there's a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but not unless he's foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places; though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their necks. The path isn't the shortest way to the top, but it's usually the safest way.
Life isn't a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can't run far up-hill without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day's work and then spend six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and use up all their wind in that. And when they're rested and have got it back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistake intention for determination, and after they have told you what they propose to do and get right up to doing it, they simply peter out.
I've heard a good deal in my time about the foolishness of hens, but when it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, every time. He's always strutting and stretching and crowing and bragging about things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you'd think that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; when the farmer's wife throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if he was the provider for the whole farmyard and was asking a blessing on the food; when he meets another rooster, he crows; and when the other rooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it up straight through the day. He even wakes up during the night and crows a little on general principles. But when you hear from a hen, she's laid an egg, and she don't make a great deal of noise about it, either.
I speak of these things in a general way, because I want you to keep in mind all the time that steady, quiet, persistent, plain work can't be imitated or replaced by anything just as good, and because your request for a job for Courtland Warrington naturally brings them up. You write that Court says that a man who has occupied his position in the world naturally can't cheapen himself by stepping down into any little piddling job where he'd have to do undignified things.