It is the personal friends made in one's own good days that watch the path and clear away the ambushers.

It is not big influential friends that are so important--the little unknown man may be as useful as the big boss in the mill of life; and if one stops to measure one's friends by their position, the end is no more sure than if one makes no friends at all.
"There's nothing left for me in life--nothing at all," he said as he tossed in bed while the thunder roared and the storm beat down the shrubs.

"How futile life is--'Youth's a dream, middle age a delusion, old age a mistake!'" he kept repeating to himself in quotation.

"What does one get out of it?
Nothing--nothing--nothing! It's all a poor show at the best, and yet--is it?
Is it all so bad?
Is it all so poor and gaunt and hopeless?
Isn't there anything in it for the man who gives and does his best ?" Suddenly there came upon him the conviction that life is only futile to the futile, that it is only a failure to those who prove themselves incompetent, selfish and sordid; but to those who live life as it ought to be lived, there is no such thing as failure, or defeat, or penalty, or remorse or punishment.

Because the straight man has only good ends to serve, he has no failures; though he may have disappointments, he has no defeats; for the true secret of life is to be content with what is decreed, to earn bread and make store only as conscience directs, and not to set one's heart on material things.
He got out of bed soon after daylight, dressed, and went to the stable and hitched his horse to the buggy.