Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments tells this story about Chesterton’s friend Hillaire Belloc: “It seems that when Belloc was serving as a young man in the French army, he met an American woman with whom he fell passionately in love. Once discharged from the army, Belloc sold his beloved complete set of the works of Cardinal Newman to scramble up the money for boat fare across the Atlantic. He landed in New York, and walked across the continent to San Francisco, supporting himself by manual labor. When he arrived at the young lady’s door in California, he proposed to her on the spot. She agreed. It was a long engagement — they were married seven years later, when she was 25 and he was 26. Read those last sentences again, carefully. Unfortunately, their happy marriage was broken by the early death of Mrs. Belloc, at age 43; and Belloc had already lost a son in World War I, and would lose another in World War II. But whatever you may say about the man’s writings and his polemical opinions, Belloc lived.”

Now that’s amazing! Did you catch that Belloc was eighteen or nineteen years old when he worked his way across the continent to propose to the woman he loved. This Bellocian sort of adventure probably wasn’t exactly what twins Brett and Alex Harris intended to challenge teens to do when they wrote their book, Do Hard Things, but then again, why not?

Some guys need to bite the bullet and do something really hard to win the hand of a lady. And some young ladies need to do whatever it takes to be worthy of such an effort.

Do you know of any stories about guys doing hard things to win a fair maiden? Guys nowadays?