Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long­handled brush. He stopped by the fence in front of the house where he lived with his aunt Polly. He looked at it, and all joy left him. The fence was long and high. He put the brush into the whitewash and moved it along the top of the fence. He repeated the operation. He felt he could not continue and sat down.

    He knew that his friends would arrive soon with all kinds of interesting plans for the day.

    They would walk past him and laugh. They would make jokes about his having to work on a beautiful summer Saturday. The thought burned him like fire.

    He put his hand into his pockets and took out all that he owned. Perhaps he could find some way to pay someone to do the whitewashing for him. But there was nothing of value in his pockets—nothing that could buy even half an hour of freedom. So he put the bits of toys back into his pockets and gave up the idea.

    At this dark and hopeless moment, a wonderful idea came to him. It filled his mind with a great, bright light. Calmly he picked up the brush and started again to whitewash.

    While Tom was working, Ben Rogers appeared. Ben was eating an apple as he walked along the street. As he walked along it, he was making noises like the sound of a riverboat. First he shouted loudly, like a boat captain. Then he said “Ding－Dong－Dong”， “Ding－Dong－Dong” again and again, like the bell of a riverboat. And he made other strange noises. When he came close to Tom, he stopped.

    Tom went on whitewashing. He did not look at Ben. Ben stared a moment and then said: “Hello! I'm going swimming, but you can't go, can you？”

    No answer. Tom moved his brush carefully along the fence and looked at the result with the eye of an artist. Ben came nearer. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he kept on working.

    Ben said, “Hello, old fellow, you've got to work, hey？”

    Tom turned suddenly and said, “Why, it's you, Ben! I wasn't noticing.”

    “Say—I'm going swimming. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd rather work—wouldn't you? Of course you would.”

    Tom looked at the boy a bit, and said, “What do you call work？”

    “Why, isn't that work？”

    Tom went back to his whitewashing, and answered carelessly.

    “Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

    “Oh come, now, you don't mean to say that you like it？”

    The brush continued tomove.

    “Like it? Well, I don't see why I shouldn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day？”

    Ben stopped eating his apple. Tom moved his brush back and forth, stepped back to look at the result, added a touch here and there, and stepped back again. Ben watched every move and got more and more interested. Soonhe said，“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

    Tom thought for a moment, and was about to agree, but he changed his mind.

    “No—no—it won't do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly wants this fence to be perfect. It has got to be done very carefully. I don't think there is one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it well enough.”

    “No—is that so? Oh come, now—let me just try. Only just a little.”

    “Ben, I'd like to, but if it isn't done right, I'm afraid Aunt Polly … ”

    “Oh, I'll be careful. Now let me try. Say—I'll give you the core of my apple.”

    “Well, here—No, Ben, now don't. I'm afraid …”

    “I'll give you all of it.”

    Tom gave up the brush with unwillingness on his face, but joy in his heart. And while Ben worked at the fence in the hot sun, Tom sat under a tree, eating the apple, and planning how to get more help. There were enough boys. Each one came to laugh, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was tired, Tom sold the next chance to Billy for a kite; and when Billy was tired, Johnny bought it for a dead rat—and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, Tom had won many treasures.

    And he had not worked. He had had a nice idle time all the time, with plenty of company, and the fence had been whitewashed three times. If he hadn't run out of whitewash, Tom would have owned everything belonging to his friends.

    He had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to get.

    In my living room, there is a plaque(匾) that advises me to “Bloom(开花) where you are planted.” It reminds me of Dorothy. I got to know Dorothy in the early 1980s，when I was teaching Early Childhood Development through a program with Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky. The job responsibilities required occasional visits to the classroom of each teacher in the program. Dorothy stands out in my memory as one who “bloomed” in her remote area.

    Dorothy taught in a school in Harlan County, Kentucky, Appalachian Mountain area. To get to her school from the town of Harlan, I followed a road winding around the mountain. In the eight-mile journey, I crossed the same railroad track five times, giving the possibility of getting caught by the same train five times. Rather than feeling excited by this drive through the mountains, I found it depressing. The poverty level was shocking and the small shabby houses gave me the greatest feeling of hopelessness.

    From the moment of my arrival at the little school, all gloom(忧郁) disappeared. Upon arriving at Dorothy's classroom, I was greeted with smiling faces and treated like a queen. The children had been prepared to show me their latest projects. Dorothy told me with  a big smile that they were serving poke greens salad and cornbread for “dinner” (lunch). In case you don't know, poke greens are a weed-type plant that grows wild, especially on poor ground.

    Dorothy never ran out of reports of exciting activities of her students. Her enthusiasm never cooled down. When it came time to sit for the testing and interviewing required to receive her Child Development Associate Certification, Dorothy was ready. She came to the assessment and passed in all areas. Afterward, she invited me to the one-and-only steak house in the area to celebrate her victory, as if she had received her Ph.D. degree. After the meal, she placed a little box containing an old pen in my hand. She said it was a family heirloom (传家宝), but to me it is a treasured symbol of appreciation and pride that cannot be matched with things.

    Marjorie grew up with a sense of worthlessness. Again and again her father said she would never accomplish anything in life. He told her she was a loser and that anything she did was sure to end in failure. With these words constantly ringing in her ears she grew up looking for someone who would love her and see her as a person of worth. This led her into relationships that disappointed her, ending in pain yet, which was another proof that she was worthless and unlovable. Where does our sense of self-worth come from?

    It is true that the foundation for a person's self-worth is laid in the home. Words that we hear in our home can build or tear down our worth. Encouraging words are words of life to us while words of criticism are words of death. Other people like teachers, friends and employers add to the collection of life-giving death words in a person's heart. Over time a person begins to see themselves in the light of these words. In this situation can one develop a sense of worth?

    Feeling worthless is possibly the most obvious symptom of low self-esteem（自尊心）. But it's easy to overcome. However tough your childhood is, you can still choose to enrich the world every day simply by the way you interact with others and make caring decisions. Whether we contribute anything or not is a choice. Feeling worthless means that you're not doing as well in the areas that matter to you and therefore you need to try to increase your self-esteem. To feel worthwhile, you'll have to really work at it and never give up on yourself.

    All human beings are capable of adding value to society, including you. Thus there are no excuses for saying things like “I'm worthless, stupid, useless” because you have the choice not to be any of these things.

Londoners are great readers. They buy vast numbers of newspapers and magazines and of books — especially paperbacks, which are still comparatively cheap in spite of ever-increasing rises in the costs of printing. They still continue to buy "proper" books, too, printed on good paper and bound（装订）between hard covers.

    There are many streets in London containing shops which specialize in book-selling. Perhaps the best known of these is Charring Cross Road in the very heart of London. Here bookshops of all sorts and sizes are to be found, from the celebrated one which boasts of being "the biggest bookshop in the world" to the tiny, dusty little places which seem to have been left over from Dickens' time. Some of these shops stock, or will obtain, any kind of book, but many of them specialize in second-hand books, in art books, in foreign books, in books on philosophy, politics or any other of the countless subjects about which books may be written. One shop in this area specializes only in books about ballet!

    Although it may be the most convenient place for Londoners to buy books, Charring Cross Road is not the cheapest. For the really cheap second-hand books, the collector must venture off the beaten track, to Farringdon Road, for example, in the East Central district of London. Here there is nothing so impressive as bookshops. The booksellers come along each morning and pour out their sacks of books onto small hand carts. And the collectors, some professionals and some amateurs, have been waiting for them. In places like this they can still, occasionally, pick up for a few pence an old one that may be worth many pounds.

    In every British town, large and small, you will find shops that sell second-hand goods. Sometimes such shops deal mostly in furniture, sometimes in books, sometimes in ornaments（装饰） and household goods, sometimes even in clothes.

    The furniture may often be “antique”, and it may well have changed hands many times. It may also be very valuable, although the most valuable piece will usually go to the London salerooms, where one piece might well be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As you look around these shops and see the polished wood of chests and tables, you cannot help thinking of those long-dead hands which polished that wood, of those now-closed eyes which once looked at these pieces with love.

    The books, too, may be antique and very precious; some may be rare first printings. Often when someone dies or has to move house, his books may all be sold, so that sometimes you may find whole libraries in one shop. One the border between England and Wales, there is a town which has become a huge bookshop as well. Even the cinema and castle have been taken over, and now books have replaced sheep as the town's main trade.

    There are also much more humble shops, sometimes simply called “junk shops”, where you can buy small household pieces very cheaply. Sometimes the profits（利润）from these shops go to charity（慈善事业）. Even these pieces, though, can make you feel sad; you think of those people who once treasured them, but who have moved on to another country or to death.

    Although the British do not worship（崇拜）their ancestors, they do treasure the past and the things of the past. This is true of houses as well. These days no one knocks them down; they are rebuilt until they are often better than new. In Britain, people do not buy something just because it is new. Old things are treasured for their proven worth; new things have to prove themselves before they are accepted.

    As a senior high school student, my future is always on my mind. To be exact, thoughts of the future have kept me up countless nights and made me worry enough to do poorly on more than one test. Because of this, words of wisdom are a source of comfort. Steve Jobs gave a speech to Stanford's graduating class in 2005 and his words resound repeatedly in my mind whenever I think about my future.

    It wasn't always like that, though. It started when I became a junior, when college came into view. It's the first big step to making your life your own. So when Jobs discussed his life as a student, some fears were eased. He, too, felt the need to attend college to make something of himself. He faced what many are extremely afraid of: uncertainty. His lack of understanding caused him to stop attending college and focus on what he felt was important. His story had a happy ending, of course, since he certainly turned out well.

    This doesn't mean that students shouldn't attend college, but rather that they shouldn't worry so much. You'll get where you need to go, even if your path is a bit more winding(蜿蜒的)than you'd like.

    Jobs talked about the hardships in his work. His love of his work helped him carry on and he got where he was meant to be, which restates the point: don't panic.

    One particular part of his speech stayed with me. Steve Jobs quoted(引用)the saying "Stay hungry, stay foolish" and it has become my motto. Staying foolish is realizing that you are still a fool, no matter how much you've learned or experienced. There is always more to explore. Staying hungry is wanting to find those things about which you are still uneducated.

    Steve Jobs's level of success is attainable, and I aim to prove that. With the will power to go into the world living every day like it's my last and allowing the future to take care of itself, I will do great things. In the last moments of my life, I'll be proud of what I have done and hope to have all the wisdom a person could wish for.