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The Duffer
by
“What’s the use of my bothering? I’m sure to make a mess of it!”
Fancy a boy saying this to himself at cricket, while a ball is flying beautifully towards him, an easy catch, even for a duffer. Do you suppose he will catch it? Not he. He will stand where he is, and put up his hands, and look another way. In fact, he won’t do his best. And why? Because all of us never expect him to catch it; and if he did, we should probably call it a “fluke,” and laugh at him all the more. Yes, it’s our fault in a certain measure that Billy is the awful “duffer” he is.
Sometimes, as in the game of football we have referred to, he does make up his mind to do his best; but even then the idea that “destiny” is against him, and that everybody is expecting him to make a fool of himself, as usual, is enough to make any fellow nervous and a duffer.
However, whatever excuses we may make for Billy, he was undoubtedly a duffer. I have named one reason of his bad luck–want of thought–and another was hurry. In fact, the two reasons become one, for it was chiefly because Billy would never give himself time to think that he made so many mistakes. All his thinking came after the thing was done. As soon as the chemicals had blown up, for instance, it entered his head he had mixed the wrong ingredients, and as soon as the ball was flying to the wrong goal it occurred to him he had kicked it in a wrong direction.
And this really brings me to the moral of my discourse. Don’t despair, if you are a duffer, for you may cure yourself of it, if you will only think and take your time. If we are not quick-witted, it does not follow we have no wits, and if we only use them carefully, we shall be no greater duffers than some of our sharp fellows.
The great philosopher Newton once appeared in the light of a great duffer. He had a cat, and that cat had a kitten, and these two creatures were continually worrying him by scratching at his study door to be let either in or out. A brilliant idea occurred to the philosopher–he would make holes in the bottom of his door through which they might pass in or out at pleasure without troubling him to get up and open the door every time. And thereupon he made a big hole for the cat and a little hole for the kitten, as if both could not have used the big hole!
Well, you say, one could fancy Billy Bungle doing a thing like that, but what an extraordinary error for a philosopher to fall into! It was, but the reason in both cases is alike. Neither thought sufficiently about what he was doing. Newton was absorbed with other things, and Billy was thinking of nothing, and yet both he and Newton were duffers, which goes to prove that without care any one may belong to that class.
How many men who have begun life as reputed “duffers” have turned out great men! but you will find that none of them ever did themselves any good till they had cured themselves of that fault. That’s what you, and I, and Billy Bungle must all do, boys.
Just two words more about Billy. We all liked him, as I have said, for he was imperturbably good-tempered. He bore no malice for all our laughing, and now and then, when he was able to see the joke, would assist in laughing at himself.
And then he never tried to make himself out anything but what he was. Of all detestable puppies, the duffer who tries to pass himself off for a clever man is the most intolerable; for nothing will convince him of his error, and nothing will keep him in his place. He’s about the one sort of character nobody knows how to deal with, for he sets everybody else but himself down as duffers. What can anybody do to such a one?
But there is another extreme. Billy’s great fault was that he was too ready to believe others who called him a duffer. Don’t take it for granted you are a duffer because any one tells you so. Find it out for yourself, and when you’ve found it out–“don’t be a duffer!”