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[Illustration: TIME.

"The mill will never grind with the water that has past."]


THE
GOLDEN CENSER
OR
THE DUTIES OF TO-DAY
and
THE HOPES OF THE FUTURE.

BY

JOHN McGOVERN,
(OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.)

AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF COMMUNISM," "WORLDS WITHOUT END," "CROWN
JEWELS," "A PASTORAL POEM," ETC

Sold by Subscription Only.

UNION PUBLISHING HOUSE.

CHICAGO, ILL. COLUMBUS, OHIO. KANSAS CITY, MO.
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.
LEXINGTON, KY. BUFFALO, N.Y.

1884.

[Illustration]


COPYRIGHTED BY
M.B. DOWNER & F.C. SMEDLEY,
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
1881-1882.




PREFACE.


I take pleasure in laying before my readers a volume the aim of which is
to lighten the cares of to-day and heighten the hopes of to-morrow.
Every human aspiration which is not an _ignis fatuus_ or fool's beacon
is built on the realities of to-day. Every young person evincing talents
in any direction hears predictions which are alone built on what he is
doing at present. He takes this hope and redoubles his efforts. He
usually succeeds--therefore, the inherited universality of hope.

Looking thus upon hope as a beautiful edifice rising above the
foundations of our lives, I have striven to give my special attention to
the duties of to-day, those stones whereon the structure is reared, that
the first cruel tempest of adversity may not transport an unsubstantial
fabric, like the palace of Aladdin, into the deserts of despair.

I have also tried to show that the lesson, so true in a proper view of
this life, is also applicable to the far grander vista of eternity
which, in the mind of philosopher as well as divine, lies so clearly
before us.

In a Hard-Pan Series of ten chapters I have endeavored to point out, to
the young men just starting in practical life, some things less general
in their scope than the other thoughts spread forth in the book. The
necessity of arming our youth with those qualities which lead to
business success has made me confident that this attempt would be
approved by the general reader.

Wherever a writer versed in the deep mysteries of the heart has left his
thoughts on record, and they have fallen under my eye, I have eagerly
chained them to my humble chariot, always, when possible, giving the
authorship of the idea. The value of a thoroughly good admonition is
frequently enhanced by the knowledge that it comes from the mouth of a
thoroughly good man.




CONTENTS.


Preface.

The Hopes of To-Morrow Must Have a Foundation in what We Are Doing
To-Day--The same Thing True of Our Hopes of the Next Life--The Hard-Pan
Series. Page 3.


The Golden Censer.

The Golden Censer which Hangs in the Temple of Life--The Palace of the
Soul--The Alarm-Bell Called Conscience--George Washington--The Soldier
in Battle--Goldsmith's Pastor--Duty the Reason for Living--Duty the
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God--Victor Hugo's Maxim--A Celebrated
Piece of Verse. Page 21.


The Flights of Time.

We Are Old Before We Know It--We are Then Shocked and Regretful--Need of
Impressing the Young with This Truth--A Golden Thought--How We Learned
to Read--Lorena--Coal-Oil Johnny--Get Interest on Your Own Money Instead
of Paying Interest on Other People's--You Thus Save Double Interest--You
Wish to Succeed--Put out Your Ideas at Interest--"Lost!" an
Advertisement--Haste and Waste--Get to Bed Early and Cheat Rheumatism
and Neuralgia--Time the Corrector of Fools--The Mill Never Grinds with
the Water that Has Gone Past. Page 25.


Home.

Byron, Thomson, and Payne's Sweet Thoughts--A Grand Thought in a Grand
Syllable--The Murderer in His Cell--The Letter from Home--The Thatch of
Avarice--The Man Who Wrote "Home, Sweet Home," Had no Home--Dr.
Johnson--The Halo that Surrounds the Word--The Long-Ago is Hidden in
It--Rembrandt and His Sister--Dickens--The Cottage of a Godly Man--Kings
Have no Homes--Democritus--The Old Home Was Happy Because We Were
Shielded--We Must, in Our Turn, Shield the Little Ones--Suffer Little
Children--Get a Home--See that Your Children Get Settled. Page 31.


Duties of Parents.

Thoughts Intended Especially for Their Ears--Children a
Blessing--Through Our Children We Become Immortal on the
Earth--Shakspeare--How Character is Built Up--Good Example--Father and
Son--Starting the Boys and the Girls--The Daughter--Do not Blight Her
Life--Happy Wives and Mothers--"Thanking Death"--Education of the
Young--The Power and Beauty of the Bible--Bible, Shakspeare, and
Geography More Necessary than Grammar, Botany, and Latin--Worship--A
Suspicious Parent--The School-Master Experience--Try and Cut Down the
Extent of His Services in the Education of Your Child. Page 42.


Brother and Sister.

The Noble Brother Will Have a Noble Sister--The Young Man of High Tone
Will See to It that His Sister is Treated with Respect--He Sets the
Example to All Others--Utter Selfishness of a Young Man Who Drags Down
His Sister by Falling into Bad Society Himself--The Summer Vacation--Why
a "Crooked Stick" Has Been Picked up By the Sister--Your Sister Your
Other Half--Watch Her and Mend Your Weak Places--A Quick Temper--Scene
in a Field Near Stone River Battle-field--The Sister's Influence on Your
Fortunes--Brother and Sister as the Two Heads of One Home. Page 53.


Youth.

"Heaven Lies About Us in Our Infancy"--The Great History Written by
Thiers, and Its Central Thought--The Impressibility of Youth--Much Can
Be Accomplished in Youth--Alexander, Cæsar, Pompey, Hannibal, Scipio,
Napoleon, Charles XII, Alexander Hamilton, Shelley, Keats, Bryant--Youth
Our Italy and Greece, full of Gods and Temples--Edmund Burke--Rochefoucauld
--Chesterfield--Lord Lytton's Love of Youth--Shortness of Youthful Griefs
--Hannah More--Sir Walter Raleigh's Wise Remark--The Extraordinary
Expectations of Youth--Dr. Watts--Story of the Alpena--Lord Bacon's
Summing up of the Differences Between Youth and Age--Introduction to
the Hard-Pan Series. Page 62.


Prudence in Speech.

Need of Money--Difficulty of Getting It--Testimony of the Closest
Mouthed Man Who Perhaps Ever Lived--"No Man Can Be Happy or Even Honest
Without a Moderate Independence"--You Find Yourself Behind a
Counter--The Little Boy's Shoes Wear Out at the Toe--They are
Therefore Copper-plated--The Young Man's Common Sense Gives Way at the
Tip of His Tongue--Difficulties in the Way of a Boy Who "Blabs"--A Man
Who Is "Pumped" Like the Secretary of the Treasury Must Have Practiced
Silence All His Life--Story of the Barber of King Midas--Beware of the
First Error--How Things Leak out--Put a Copper-Toe on Your Tongue. Page
74.


Courtesy.

Courtesy Rests on a Deep Foundation--He Who is Naturally Polite is
Naturally Moral--You Wish to Have Your Customers Brighten up--Brighten
up Yourself--What is Good-Breeding?--Read Chesterfield--Study Your
Customer--You are Young and Positive--Be Careful on That Account--Your
Hands--Jewelry--Act Respectfully and You Will Be Full of Good
Manners--An Example--How to Treat the Busybody--Zachariah Fox--Ralph
Waldo Emerson--Milton's Allusion to the origin of the Word
"Courtesy"--The Celebrated "Beaux" of History--Momentary Views of Our
Souls--Your Clothes--They Should Occupy Little of Your Mind--Civility
Costs Nothing and Buys Everything. Page 80.


Economy.

A Small Leak Will Sink a Great Ship--The Little Cloud Arising out of the
Sea Waxes into the Storm that Lashes the Trembling Ocean--The People
with Small Wages Can Often Save the Most Money--You Cannot Spend Your
Money Without the Righteous Criticism of Others--How Young Men Spend
Much of Their Extra Cash--Rural Saloons--A Gallon of Whiskey--What It is
Actually Worth--What It is Sold For--Ordinary Profits of Legitimate
Business--Tobacco--What Three Years' Savings Will Do for a Man in
America--A Good Wagoner Can Turn in a Little Room--When You Buy a Horse
Reckon on What He Will Eat Instead of What His Price Is--Save all You
Can--Harness It up and Make It Pull in Interest. Page 88.


Courage.

Adversity's Lamp--Youth Has Great need of Courage--It should be
Long-Suffering Rather than Intrepid--You Must Gain the Battle by Taking
Sudden Advantages--You Must Hurl 10,000 Men Against 2,000 Before Your
Enemy Can Be Reinforced--Story of a Young Man Who Broke Through the
Enemy's Lines at Chicago--His Low Wages--His Bad Prospects--Reading the
Bible and Plutarch--Studying French--The Attempt to Become an
Actor--Dismal Failure--Difficulty of Conquering Wounded Pride--The
Return to "Hard Work"--Progress--Triumph--Reason of the Victory--Hope a
Quality Closely Akin to Courage--Courage, However, the Grand Motor that
Moves the World--Courage Builds the Great Bridges and Hope Rides on a
Free Pass over Them. Page 95.


Hope.

Hope is a Gold-Leaf Which Can Be Beaten with the Hammer of Adversity to
Exceeding Thinness--The Medicine of the Miserable--Hope Should Deposit
Probabilities with Experience, His Banker--Story of a Young Man Whose
Hope Carried him Across a Bad Place in Life--Making Garden--Sandpapering
Window-Frames in a Cellar--Selling "Milton Gold Jewelry"--Working in a
"gang," on a Farm, after the English Fashion--A Situation Found on the
Very Day of the Great Fire, Just Without the Bounds of the
Conflagration--Map-Making--Success--Hope Is the Cork to the Net--We Will
Part With Our Money, but we will Never Sell Our Hope at any Price--The
Celebrated Shield--Hope Unjustly Defamed. Page 107.


Be Correct.

God's Exactitude--One at a Time is the Way Rats Get into a Granary--The
First Rat Eats Out the Hole--Story of Sag Bridge--The Collision--The
Horror--The Cause--Imitate the Detectives--Story of a Cashier Who Left
Off a "Simple Cipher," which Stood for a Hundred Thousand Dollars in
Cash to His Employers--How to Mail a Letter--"We Never Make Mistakes
--The Way People Are Convinced That Care Is Necessary--How a Careless
Clerk Can Drive Away Custom--The Lightning Calculator--He Is Simply a
Hard Worker--Our Multiplication-Table Does Not Run High Enough--The
Freaks of Figures--Correct Your Spelling--Learn to Avoid Foolish
Exaggeration--Force of Habit--"A Man of Good Habits" Is a Man Who Would
Be Positively Uncomfortable and Unhappy if He Attempted to Become
Dissolute. Page 119.


Success.

Hard-Pan Reason Why Nothing Succeeds So Well as Success--Your Good
Fortune in Living on American Soil--Missing Battles and Allowing Others
to Be Promoted Instead of Yourself--No City Ever Withstood a Good
Siege--Get into the Strong Sunshine of active Life--The Safe Time to
Become Discontented--What Praise Means--What Gloomy Predictions Mean
When Your Employer Makes Them--Practice--Example in Proof-Reading--Captains
are Made out of First Lieutenants--The Retail Business--Fools Rushing in
Where Angels Fear to Tread--The Successful Grocery--No Wonder Success Sits
on That Corner--The Painter Who Mixed His Colors With Brains--Story of The
Man Who Could Imitate Birds--Do not Attempt Impossible Journeys--Stop at
Each Inn. Page 132.


Companions.

Truth of the adage that a Man Is Known by the Company He Keeps--Tam
O'Shanter's Habits--Building a House With a Party-Wall--Playing
Billiards at Noon-Time--Smelling of the Smoke of the Kitchen--Bar-Room
Manners--Judging a Man by His Clothes--A Piece of Impertinence which
Cost the Keeping of Five Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars--"The
Companion of Fools Shall Be Destroyed"--Learn to Admire Rightly--Charm
which the Look of Certain Loafers Has for Many Young Men--Getting a
Sitting in Church--Keep in Company Where You Will Be Under a Pleasant
Restraint--Either Wise Bearing or Ignorant Carriage Is Caught, as Men
Take Diseases One from Another. Page 144.


On The Road.

Natural Depression--Certainty of Its Discontinuance--The Best Salesmen
Have Been Very Soft-Hearted on Their Early Trips--Entering the
Town--Riding One Block for Half a Dollar--A Poor Meal--Getting Your
Wind--Planning the Charge--Canvassing Yourself--What Is the Almost
Limitless Power of Persuasion?--Abraham Lincoln--The Whisky Which Made
Generals Win Battles was the Kind of Whisky He Was in Search of--Your
Dress--Your Entrance at Your Customer's Place--Your Speed in Getting
Started--Your Ease after the Start Is Made--Never Stop the
Customer--Your Perfect Accuracy as to Men and Places--Story of a
Meteoric Salesman--Trouble of Putting a Stop to his Flight--Your Supper
Tastes Good--The Men of Cold Exterior--Stay Out but Do not Stay Up--How
to Get Vim and Sparkle--Extraordinary Value of a Man Who Can "Place
Goods." Page 152.


Examples.

The Tracks of Giants--Napoleonic Miracles--Webster and Astor--George
Peabody--Giving Away Eight Millions of Dollars--Stewart--Andrew
Johnson--Barnum and Stanford--Ulysses S. Grant--Commodore
Vanderbilt--Elihu Burritt--Edgar Poe--Greeley, Chase, Garfield and
William Tecumseh Sherman--Tennyson--Robert E. Lee--Pickett's Charge at
Gettysburg--James Gordon Bennett--Carlyle and Victor Hugo--Garibaldi
--Agassiz, Humboldt, Proctor, Seward, Farragut, Nelson, Abercrombie,
Joseph E. Johnston, Longstreet, and Fifty Others--The Habit of Riding Over
Obstacles--Herodotus, Seneca and Franklin on the Power of Example--Christ
Never Wrote a Tract--The System of Redoubling the Effort and Coming out,
after one Victory, Ahead after Reckoning all Losses. Page 164.


Man.

Shakspeare's Eulogy, just as He Penned It--Emerson--A Columbus of the
Skies--Carlyle's Panegyric--Whately--Man's Faults--Horace Man and
Pascal--The Poet Cowley and Boileau--Fallacy of their Scoldings as
Applied to all Humankind--What Is Man?--Plato's Answer--Addison's
Answer--Burke's Answer--Adam Smith's Answer--Buffon's Failure to Make a
Satisfactory Answer--Plutarch's Answer--"The Proper Study of Mankind is
Man"--Henry Giles and John Ruskin--The Wonderful Instrument Called the
Hand--The Violin Slave--Man's Opportunities--What God has Said of His
Children--The Beautiful Language in Which It is Written--Nobility of Our
Destiny--A Stinging Epigram. Page 175.


Woman.

The Hand That Made Woman Fair Made Her Good--Wordsworth's Beautiful
lines to His Wife--"She Was a Phantom of Delight"--Campbell's "Pleasures
of Hope"--A Pleasant Subject--The Difference Between Love in Man and
Love in Woman--Jean Paul Richter's Encomium--Schiller's
Tribute--Shelley--Shakspeare--Rousseau, Barrett and Balzac--The Duke of
Halifax--Addison--Boyle--Sex in The Soul--Woman's Love of Ornament--Her
Dress the Perfection of What Man Demands of Her--Dr. Johnson's
Explanation--Testimony of John Ledyard to the Goodness of Woman--His
History--Woman's Enormous Influence over Man--How Men Live Where There
Are No Women--The History of Human Sickness a Monument of the Goodness
of Woman. Page 187.


Father.

Overshadowing Antiquity of the Word "Papa"--The Pope Is Simply Papa, in
Italian--Duties of the Son Toward the Father--Honesty of His Love for
You--Patriarchal Government the Beginning and Still the Prop of
Society--Old Age the Childhood of Immortality--Honor Attaching to
Greatness of years in the past--Age Still a Necessity in Many of the
Learned Professions--Age Is Indulgent Because It sees no Fault it Has
not Itself Committed--Time the Harper, Laying His Hand Gently on the
Harp of Life--Love of Little Children--The Village Blacksmith, the
Mighty Man--Respect for Venerable Years a Fitting Thing in the Most
Dignified of Young Men--Two Pictures, One Dark and the Other Bright.
Page 197


Mother.

A Great Subject--Chords Struck by Coleridge and Tennyson--She Has Risked
Her Life that Her Child Might Live--She Has Grown Spectre-Like that Her
Child Might Wax Strong--She Has Forgotten the Debt Due to Her in Her
Anxiety to Obtain an Acknowledgment of the Debt Due to God--Her
Memory--Christmas--Her Sick Child--Man the Mighty at His Mother's
Knee--The Best Friend--"An Ounce of Mother Worth a Pound of Clergy"--A
Mother's Praise--The Dead--Unalterable Fidelity--Forgetting a Mother's
Claims--The Mother Still in Middle Life--The Mother of Greater
Years--The Mother of Mothers--She Gathered the Orphans Together and
Poured Out Her Tenderness Upon Them. Page 207.


Love.

A Great Passion, Therefore not one to Trifle and Be Familiar With--Its
Tyranny--Feelings and Actions of a Young Man in Love--Utter Uselessness
for Business of a Young Man During the Uncertain Period Between Desire
and Possession--Love Rules The Universe--How The Sages Look upon
Love--It Is But the Flash in the Broad Pan of True Happiness--Shakspeare,
Tennyson, Overbury, Mrs. Sigourney, South, Dryden, Plautus, Goethe, Burton,
Valerius Maximus, Rochefoucauld, Addison. Hazlitt and Emerson--"The Wooden
God's Remorse"--"Love Me Little Love Me Long"--The Poet Petrarch's Strange
Behavior--"If She Do not Care for Me, What Care I How Fair She Be!"
--LaFontaine, Lyttleton, Schiller, Ruffini, Ducoeur, DeStael, Colton,
Dudevant, Balzac, Moore, Beecher, Victor Hugo, Longfellow, Limayrac, Howe,
Deluzy and Jane Porter--"Solomon was So Seduced, and He Had a Very Good
Wit"--Alexander Smith--Great Space Given to Love in all the Books of the
World--Some Things to Remember While Viewing the Passion in Others.
Page 219.


Courtship.

The Young Man Finds Himself in Love and "Begins to Think"--He Wonders
That He Never Before Thought of Money--Difference Between a Wharf-Rat
and a Man--Difference Between a Married Man and an Old Bachelor Who Has
Always Been Afraid of the Expense--Everything Natural in Marriage--Be
"Square" with Your Sweetheart--The Circus-Poster--The Quarry of
Truth--Do not "Talk Big" and Love Little--Courtship and Marriage not a
Matter of "Want to or Don't Want to," but a Strenuous Case of "Got
to"--Marriage Like Life Insurance--Closing Hints. Page 234.


Marriage.

Sample of a "Swell Wedding"--Undignified Aspects of a Swell Wedding
Where It Takes Every Cent a Man Can Earn, Beg and Borrow--A Farce, and
an Example to Shun--Let us Have Some Manhood and Womanhood at a Critical
Point, the Start in Real Life--To Be a Man Is to Be Married--Nature's
Artful Treatment of Human Beings--Folly of Men Who Throw Away Their
Happiness--Be Inquisitive Before Marriage--Be Blind Thereafter--The Law
Approves and Encourages the Married State--The Married Man Is of the
Greater Importance in the Nation--A Thing to Be Kept in Mind--Married
Men Healthier than Bachelors--Married Women Healthier than Maids--A
Married Man Has a Greater Excess of Comforts than of Troubles as
Compared with the Comforts and Troubles of the Bachelor. Page 246.


Wedded Life.

A Practical Chapter on Life as It Is Actually Lived by a Man and Woman
Who Have a Fair Chance in the World--A Home With a Young Wife in It no
Place for Other Men, no Matter How Dear they May Be to the Husband--Give
the Wife a Chance--Kindness--Do not Be Afraid of Honoring Your Wife any
Too Much--The Wife's Proper Cares--A Reply to the Common Form of Attack
on the Principle that Marriage Is Both Natural and Expedient--McFarland--A
Man's Happy Experience as a Husband--Judgment, Vanity, Selfishness and
Trepidation--Good for Evil--Astonishing Changes in a Man's Needs--The
Fireside of a Man Who Is Trying to Do Right--His Profound Gratitude at the
Accuracy of His Taste in Earlier Years--Death, or Worse than Death--Three
Studies--Apology for a Somewhat Uncharitable Reply to a Selfish Argument.
Page 256


Bachelors.

A Chapter on Bachelors Apt to Diverge into a Dissertation on
Solitude--Arguments which the Bachelor Applies to the Question of
Marriage--Being the Soul of Selfishness He Is Unwilling to Believe
Happiness In Marriage Possible until He Shall Himself Have Embarked in
Matrimony--Manner in Which He Usually Proclaims That all Men Who Marry
Are Fools--Single Life Unavoidable with Some Men--A Mere Spectator of
Other Men's Fortunes--The One Grand Result of Single Life--Wearing Out
One Set of Faculties by Forty--Losing Control of the Other Set by
Disuse--The Way a Bachelor Judges a Young Girl--His Somewhat Sordid
Ideas--Events Have Distorted His Nature--A Bachelor's Great
opportunities for Getting Book-Knowledge--Good out of Evil--Mistaken
Ideas about Bachelors, which the Ladies are Apt to Entertain--Foolish
Diatribes against Women--The Lack of Knowledge which Those Diatribes
Betray--The Front-Porch View of Girlhood Esteemed to be the whole of
Woman's Nature! Page 270.


Sickness.

Health, Even with Memory, cannot conceive the Feelings of Disease--The
Invalid's Sad Weakness--The King cannot Hire a man to Have the Typhoid
Fever for Him--The Strong man Felled to His Couch--Chances for
Philosophy--The Chances Usually Thrown Away with the Medicine
Bottles--The Bachelor Sick--His Body now as Full of the need of Woman's
attention as It was of Brags that He would Have none of Her--Let Us do
something, by not attempting Everything in the way of Reformation. Page
281.


Sorrow.

The Tallest mountains, although They Gather the Heaviest Clouds about
Their Solemn Sides, Yet Look Through Cloudless Skies up Toward the
Sun--Effect of Deep Sorrow on the Appearance of Beauties of Nature--We
Deprecate Grief, and yet We Rail at Its Short Duration--The Stricken
Wife--The Young man who Loves and Is Rejected--His Dilemma--His
Erroneous and Immature Decision that He would Love But One, and Love
Forever--A Peak which Hardly Rises to the Bottom of the Valleys in the
Mountains Piled Down by Events in After-life--True Greatness is True
Humility--Affliction Beautifies Human Nature--Blessedness of
Employment--Efficacy of Religion--The Beautiful Poem of "The Lamb in the
Shepherd's Arms." Page 290.

Poverty.

A Topic That Hits Close to Every Man--In the Old World the Countries Are
to Blame; In the New the Individual Is Generally at Fault--Case of
Vanderbilt--Fears of Enormously Rich men that their Wealth will excite
the Irresistible Cupidity of their Governments--Burdens of Immense
Riches in an Active Land Like This--The Shocking Imbecility of False
Poverty--"Appearances"--Popular Errors as to Servants--Big Houses--Story
of the Happy Man. Page 300.


Facts About Progress.

Progress the Stride of God--The Field-Hand in 1350--One hundred and
Twelve Hours' Labor for a Bushel of Wheat--The same Laborer in 1550, in
1675, and in 1795--Seventy Hours for a Bushel of Wheat--The Same Laborer
To-day--Twenty Hours for the Bushel of Wheat--The Children of the
Laborer who Came to America--Seven or Eight Hours for a Bushel of Wheat.
Page 311.


Failure in Life.

Lightning Is More Apt To hit a Scrag than a Tree Which has Never Been
Riven--The Scrags in Society--The Loadstone of Failure at the Foot of
the Scrag--The Lesson to be Derived from Hopeless Failure in
Others--Sorrows March in Battalions, not as Single Spies. Page 321.


Gains and Brains.

The Man of Success--Eggs Trying to Dance with Stones--Trying to Draw the
Prize in a Lottery Without any Ticket--Dray Horses' Honest Belief that
the Earth Moves Backward under the Racer's Feet, He Being So Lucky--The
Heavy End of the Lifting--How Fortune Tellers Make Their Money--Great
Opportunities for All Who Were not Born Tired. Page 325.


Discipline.

One Reason of the Prosperity of the Present Era--Obey Orders--How the
Wonders have been Piled Up--Metaphor of the Organ and Its Pipes and
Reeds--Sound Your Pipe only in Your Proper Turn, and You will hear
Beautiful Music. Page 332.


Books.

We Multiply Our Sensations by Books--Everyone Can have a Library--Books
are the Best of Friends--Charm of a Well-Read Comrade--Bindings--A Book
as Great a Thing as a Battle--Importance of Some Battles--Our Eyes--How
to Judge a Book Rightly--Large Type--Need of Handy Volumes--Aid Others,
as a Duty. Page 337.


Friendship.

Reason of the Melancholy Tone which Pervades the Great Writings of the
Ages on this Subject--Man Expects to Get More than He Gives--How a man
Prepares the Nostrum called Friendship--Unsuccessful Substitution of
Selfishness for a Mother's Love--What is Possible in the way of Ordinary
Friendship--Spot Friendship--Let us not Rail against Friendship. Page
345.


Envy.

The Basest of all Traits--A Wolf's Den--The Tailless Fox--Envy is
Largely Ignorance--Greatness attained only after Arduous Labors--The
Tenor and The Stone-Front--Thiers' Long Life--A Critical View of
Gladstone's Public Sorrows--Truly Distracting Dilemmas in which
Circumstances of Empire Involve Great Men--An appeal to Envy. Page 354.


Contentment.

Mrs. Lofty--First Surprise of the Newly-Rich--The Scotch Mist--The
Angel Sent to Conduct an Empire and the One Sent to Sweep a Street--Our
Principal Causes of Happiness Free to All--How Rich Men Secure
Happiness--The Prisoner and His Three Pins--Happiness Inalienable in
Health--A Pleasant View of Egotism as a necessary Ingredient in Our
Make-up. Page 362.


Ambition.

The Need of a "Balance of Power" in the Mind--As a General Thing
Ambition a Quality to be Curbed--Assassination of Merit by Envy--The Man
Qualified to Deal with Ambition--A Picture of His Unhappy Lot, as
Illustrated in Napoleon's Life--Poem. Page 368.


The Republic's Anchor.

A Favorite Chapter--The Telegraph Outriding the Storms--The Farmers the
Grand Conservative Forces of the Republic--Difference between Business
and Farming--How the Farmers Will Settle the Communists and the
Magnates--The Farmer's Sons--A Plea for Them--A Picture of the
Opportunities which We are Daily Missing. Page 375.


Temperance.

The Drunkard's Wife--A Drama of Horror--Why Society Looks So Calmly on
Such Scenes--The Wisdom and Experience of Society--Effort of the Brother
to Improve His Sister's Condition--The Result--What Society Is
Doing--The Drift of Things--Views of the Future--A Better Time nearly at
Hand. Page 386.


A Good Name.

The Highest Type of Reputation, a Silent but Powerful Influence--Two
Instances of Good Reputation--Tall Masts Needed for Great Ships--The
Difference between Greatness on the Inside of a Man, and Great
Appearances on the Outside. Page 395


Worship.

Paramount Importance of Family Services--The Iron Duke's Remark--Sayings
of the Wisest and Best--Scenes in Burned Chicago--Newton and La
Place--Their Testimony--Victor Hugo: "I believe in the Sublimity of
Prayer"--Wordsworth's Apostrophe--Young's Prayer--A Sweet Supplication.
Page 400.


The Atheist.

The Owlet Atheism--Hammer and Tongs used to work in Fire--False Headings
on News--On The Plains of Chaldæa--The Voice of Duty ever in the way of
the Atheist--A Creator Demanded by Reason--The Atheist Like Falstaff,
Leading a very Scrubby File of Soldiers. Page 410.


The Bible.

The Bible is Authentic, Old, Beautiful--It is the Only Hope We have--It
Out-dates the Chinese Empire--Everything Good and Progressive is Founded
on It--Practical Value of Studying It--Its Eloquence--Its Triumphs in an
Infinitude of Tests. Page 421.


The Evening of Life.

Age the Outer Shore against which Dashes an Eternity--We are on a small
Planet, but We Belong to a Larger Celestial Empire--The Undevout
Astronomer Insane--Does the Beast Peer into the Stars?--Eternity is not
a conceit of Man--Apostrophe to a Patriarch. Page 433.


The Future Life.

Cato's Soliloquy--Promises of God's Word clothed in Syllables of
Unsurpassable Sweetness--He that holdeth the Pleiades in His Right
Hand--Blissful Forecasts--Shall God weigh out Arcturus to Stop the
Unreasoning Clamor of the Fool who Hath Said in His Heart there Is No
God? Conclusion. Page 441.




THE GOLDEN CENSER.

     Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer,
     Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
     --Edgar Poe.


[Illustration A] golden censer swings in the Temple of Life, making holy
its halls and grateful its corridors. This fountain of our well-being is
Duty. There is little true pleasure in the world which does not flow,
either directly or remotely, from its depths.

It shall be the object of this volume to point out and name a few of the
balms which burn in this Unseen Censer--a few of the lines of action
which render our memories sweet and forever pleasant if they be wrapt in
such perfume.


THE PALACE OF THE SOUL.

When the incense of a man's good actions spreads through the palace of
the soul, "the powers that wait on noble deeds" light up the edifice
with radiance brought from other worlds. In the eye of a good man--in
the window of the palace of his soul--we behold an occupant who fears no
duty. We are fascinated, and gather about, anxious to peer in upon the
fortunate possessor. Therein lies the happiness and the force of good
example.

But let the Censer burn low, and flicker in final sickliness; the great
bell called Conscience, hanging in the dome, strikes an alarm that rocks
the building. How oft the solemn tocsin sounds! It drives us to our
duty! Let us be thankful its clangor is so harsh!


THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY,

the man whose heart was torn each time his soldiers' feet did bleed--the
man who stood like a rock between the despot and the down-trodden--that
man, at the end of the career which glorified him, and which, with
reflected glory will light the annals of all coming centuries--that
kind, good man, George Washington, could not discern the separating line
between Duty and human happiness. "The consideration that human
happiness and moral duty," he said, "are inseparately connected, will
always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the one by
inculcating the practice of the other."


LET US KEEP THE GOLDEN CENSER BURNING

with the frankincense of our highest endeavors. "Let us," as Theodore
Parker once said, "do our duty in our shop, or our kitchen, the market,
the street, the office, the school, the home, just as faithfully as if
we stood in the front rank of some great battle, and we knew that
victory for mankind depended on our bravery, strength, and skill. When
we do that, the humblest of us will be serving in that great army which
achieves the welfare of the world."


THE SOLDIER GOES FORTH

with his loins girded, hoping to conquer in the hard battles of life.
Let the incense of Duty cling to his garments and keep him clean from
selfish contagion. How lovely the picture of that old man of Goldsmith's
time, swinging the Golden Censer before the hearts that throbbed in
unison with him:

     He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all;
     And as a bird each fond endearment tries,

     To tempt her new-fledged offspring to the skies,
     He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
     Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.

Our duty was created with us. It is a pleasure to live. What then should
be the pleasure to think there is a place for us--a duty beneficently
made that gives us rights with our fellow-creatures? What though the
duty may try your soul and stagger your capabilities? "Skillful pilots
gain their reputation from storms and tempests." Bear up with patient
courage--"the bird that flutters least is longest on the wing." "Duty is
the stern daughter of the voice of God."

Let us then, upon entering this stately Temple of Life, cast into the
Golden Censer our courage, our hope, our energy, our love, our industry,
and all those qualities which go to make the air around us redolent with
the fragrance of the achievements of life. It cannot then well be that
we shall lack in allegiance to our Maker, our country, or ourselves.
"Duties are ours; events are God's."

     "On parent knee, a naked, newborn child,
       Weeping thou satst while all around thee smiled;
     So live that, sinking in thy last long sleep,
       Calm thou mayst smile while all around thee weep."




THE FLIGHT OF TIME.

                               Age steals
     Upon us like a snowstorm in the night:
     How drear life's landscape now!--Henry Guy Carleton.

                              Whose hand,
     Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away
     Richer than all his tribe.--Shakspeare.


We are intrusted with a few short years, and yet with
more than we deserve. It is our misfortune to value those fleeting
moments only when our stock of them is in danger of utter exhaustion.
When the bright, beautiful days have vanished, and we find that, like
the base Judean's pearl, those days were richer than all our tribe--our
Vanderbilts, our Stanfords, and our Goulds--then we turn, in human
kindness, to our younger associates, and sound our warning in their
ears. According as our earnestness impresses them, they listen or they
hearken not. A golden thought which the young should learn by heart,
would run thus: _However highly I have valued this day, I have "sold it
on a rising market," and too cheaply. It would grow in value as I looked
back upon it, even if I were to live to my eightieth year_. This may not
seem true to you, who wish for Saturday night, that you may receive your
salary,--or to you, who long for Sunday, that you may gaze into a pair
of eyes that have deep beauties for you--but when your mother in your
babyhood, said a certain letter was "A,"


YOU HAD TO ACCEPT THE STATEMENT

without reservation, or you would not now be able to exercise the
grandest of human faculties--to read, to glean the thoughts of the ages,
and to receive, without toiling through the rugged regions of
experience, the impressions and the inspirations which have come to man
through all his labors and his pains. Sir William Hamilton has well said
that implicit belief is at the foundation of all human happiness--the
knowledge of the mind, as well as the certainty of the future life.

The mind is rarely broad enough in youth to survey the field of life
with an impartial view. "The years creep slowly by, Lorena," was
written in the true youthful, spendthrift spirit.


"COAL-OIL JOHNNY"

was left, as he supposed, inexhaustible riches. He threw away his money
as many of us throw away our lives, and his money lasted him two years.
Had his life been equally at his disposal, he would have been in the
hands of the pale Receiver, Death, when his oil-wells passed to other
owners. Having so precious a pearl, therefore, as this life, let us make
its setting a thing of beauty. Let us invest our moments as


THE WISE MAN,

who, instead of buying on time and paying eight per cent. interest,
saves his earnings and puts them out at eight per cent. interest, thus
reaping a difference of sixteen per cent., or nearly one-sixth of his
yearly surplus. Every idea put into your head is invested at interest.
Every expenditure of time which is a waste is a payment of interest, a
corroding, double-acting agency of evil to your welfare.


YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN THE WORLD,--

of course, you do! Look out, and do not let the thrifty men of brains
lend you their ideas at that fatal eight per cent., which, in reality,
means fully sixteen! Put into the deposit-vaults of your memory the
diligent results of your study. Those you put in earliest will pay the
most profit. When you are thirty years old there will be few with
heavier coffers. You will have little need to complain of


FAVORITISM AND DISCRIMINATION

then. On the contrary, you will, strangely enough, hear many lay that
very charge against those wise old men who have been observing you and
peeping into your treasure-chests when you were not on the watch. To the
man, fortunate in his youth in having been


ADVISED RIGHTLY,

who has not misspent a moment of his time, "the thought of the last
bitter hour" will not "come like a blight," and there will be no "sad
images of the stern agony." The wise and good man, who has the unmixed
reverence of the great and the humble, whose "hoary head is a crown of
glory," approaches his grave "like one who wraps the drapery of his
couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." "I wasted time, and
now doth time waste me!" is the cry of a misspent life. If you have
cast away a portion of your existence, I beg of you to transfix this
public notice before your companions that they may profit by your
experience:


"LOST!

"Yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each
set with sixty diamond minutes, the gift of a kind Father!"


HASTE AND WASTE.

The value of Time should never be so foolishly conceived as to urge a
man or a woman to that hurry which shows a thing to be too big for him
who undertakes it. God makes Time. Can you, then, add to it? "Stay a
while to make an end the sooner." You do not gain an hour by robbing
yourself of your sleep. You do not gain in force by enlarging the wheel
that carries your belting. If your constitution require eight hours'
sleep, then go to your bed at ten o'clock and rise like "the sun
rejoicing in the east," fresh-nerved and forceful, apt to carry all
before you. Do not encourage those tempters who come to you asking you
to break into the storehouse of your vitality and rob yourself of two,
three, and often four hours of your rest, leaving you, in the
bankruptcy of after-life a trembling alarmist, subject to the replevins
of rheumatic muscles and the reprisals of revengeful nerves. Remember
that age comes upon us like a snowstorm in the night, and that the mill
will never grind with the water that has passed. Time is the stern
corrector of fools; "Wisdom walks before it, Opportunity with it, and
Temperance behind it. He that has made it his friend will have little to
fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have
little to hope from his friends."

[Illustration]




HOME.

     'Tis sweet to hear the honest watchdog's bark
       Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home;
     'Tis sweet to know that there is an eye will mark
       Our coming, and look brighter when we come.--Byron.

     An elegant sufficiency, content,
     Retirement, rural, quiet, friendship, books,
     Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
     Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven.--Thomson.

     'Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,
     Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
      --J.H. Payne, in the Opera of "Clari."



No word in the English language approaches in sweetness
the sound of this group of letters. Out of this grand syllable rush
memories and emotions always chaste, and always noble. The murderer in
his cell, his heart black with crime, hears this word, and his crimes
have not yet been committed; his heart is yet pure and free; in his mind
he kneels at his mother's side and lisps his prayers to God that he, by
a life of dignity and honor, may gladden that mother's heart; and then
he weeps, and for a while is not a murderer. The Judge upon his bench
deals out the dreaded justice to the scourged, and has no look of
gentleness. But breathe this word into his ear, his thoughts fly to his
fireside; his heart relents; he is no longer Justice, but weak and
tender Mercy.

What makes that small, unopened missive so precious to that great rough
man? Why, 'tis from Home--from Home, that spot to which his heart is
tied with unseen cords and tendrils tighter than the muscles which hold
it in his swelling chest. Perhaps he left his Home caring little for it
at the time. Perhaps harsh necessity drove him from its tender roof to
lie beneath


THE THATCH OF AVARICE.

It does not matter. As the great river broadens in the Spring, so do his
feelings swell and overflow his nature now. Why does he tremble,--that
rough, weather-beaten man? Because there is but one place on the great
earth where "an eye will mark his coming and grow brighter." If that
beacon still burns for him, he can continue his voyage. If it has
gone out, if anything has happened to it, his way is dark; nothing
but the abiding hand of the Great Father can steady his helm and hold
him to his desolate course.

[Illustration: CHILDHOOD.

     "Childhood is the bough where slumbered
       Birds and blossoms many-numbered;
     Age, that bough with snows encumbered."]

The man who wandered "mid pleasures and palaces," had no Home, and when
he died he died on the bleak shores of Northern Africa, and was buried
where he died, at the city of Tunis, where he held the office of United
States Consul. "To Adam," says Bishop Hare, "Paradise was Home. To the
good among his descendants,


HOME IS PARADISE."

"Are you not surprised," writes Dr. James Hamilton, "to find how
independent of money peace of conscience is, and how much happiness can
be condensed in the humblest home? A cottage will not hold the bulky
furniture and sumptuous accommodations of a mansion; but if love be
there, a cottage will hold as much happiness as might stock a palace."
"To be happy at home," writes Dr. Johnson in the _Rambler_, "is the
ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and
labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution." In the
mind of the good there gather about the old Home


HALO UPON HALO OF FOND THOUGHT,

of nearly idolatrous memory. Upon this very green, the joyous march of
youth went on. Here the glad days whirled round like wheels. At morn the
laugh was loud; at eve the laughter rang. To-day, perhaps the most
joyous of the flock lies in the earth. Perhaps the chief spirit of the
wildest gambols is bent with sharp affliction; the one that loved his
mother best is in a foreign land; the one that doubled her small cares
with dolls goes every week to gaze at little gravestones, and the one
that would not stay in bed upon the sun's bright rise now sits in awful
blindness. You cannot rob these hearts of their sweet memories. The
mystic keyword unlocks the gates. The peaceful waters flow; the thirsty
soul is satisfied.


THE LONG AGO.

A lady opens a short epistle from her brother. He is rich, successful,
busy, in short driven, cannot visit her at a certain date, regrets, with
love, etc., all in ten short lines. What does this dry notice tell? It
tells of a buffalo-robe which, by much strategy, can be secured from
father's study; it tells of a daring, rollicking boy who has got the
strategy and will soon get the buffalo-robe. It tells of two boys and
three girls, all gathered in the robe, with the rollicking one as
fireman and engineer, making the famous trip down the stairs which shall
tumble them all into the presence of a parent who will make a weak
demonstration of severity, clearly official, and merely masking a very
evident inclination to try a trip on the same train.


WHERE WAS THIS?

Why at the dear old Home, in the Long Ago. Who was the fireman and
engineer? Why, this great, pompous man of business, whose short note his
sister has just laid down--of course, he was the fireman and the
engineer!

We see the sister of Rembrandt, the painter, traveling weary miles to
the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of a
drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that would
have looked upon them in anger. Now he is the most celebrated painter of
his time. He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble
contemporaries. He never receives people into his stronghold.


TWO GREAT DOGS GUARD THE ENTRANCE.

Into a gloomy portal the aged sister enters, and soon the miser and the
good angel of his past are together. There they sit in the dusk, and
recall, after sixty years of separation, the scenes of the Home which
existed eighty years before! We marvel at a word that comes along a
cable under the ocean. Why should we not also wonder at a little word
that can sound across the awful stretch of eighty years, through


AN OCEAN OF LIFE,

stormy with fearful disappointments, boisterous with seasons of success,
and desolate with the drift, the slime, and the fungus of miserly greed!

Says Dickens: "If ever household affections and loves are graceful
things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy
and proud to Home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor
man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of
heaven."

"If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man," writes
Jeremy Taylor, "how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed
his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his
mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the
diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural
appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the
ambitious."

It has happened within a hundred years that men of private station have
become Kings. One of the severest trials of their exalted lot has been
the disaster which came upon their homes.


KINGS HAVE NO HOMES.

I am told that the Presidents of the United States have complained very
naturally that they are denied that privacy which is accorded to the
lowliest citizen in the land. It should content the possessor of a Home
that he has that which Kings cannot have, and which if it be bright and
free from wrong, is more valuable than palaces and marble halls. Of this
golden right of asylum in the Home, Abraham Cowley has written:
"Democritus relates, as if he gloried in the good fortune of it, that
when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him;
and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his
gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus; after
whose death, making, in one of his letters, a kind commemoration of the
happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last that he
thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life,
that, in the midst of that most talked of and talking country in the
world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without
being heard of; and yet, within a very few years afterward, there were


NO TWO NAMES OF MEN MORE KNOWN

or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and
various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of
our time; we expose our life to an ague of frigid impertinences which
would make a wise man tremble to think of."

What makes the remembrance of the old Home so happy? Was it not because
there the storms of life were turned away from us by those who bore the
blasts to keep us in our innocence? And now that future which then was
on our horizon has neared us and is our zenith, the centre of our
heavens. About us are


PRATTLING LITTLE ONES

who in the far-off years will clothe this house about with that holy
mantle which will give it the right to that same grand title, Home. Can
we not, in thinking of the good old Home, stand a little nearer to the
blast and warm some tiny heart a little more? Does the merry laugh sing
out as it did in our own youth? Then this is indeed a Home, growing each
day more sacred in the mind of those fledglings who will so soon fly
from the nest to beat a fluttering and a weary way through the tempests
that will encompass them. A Christmas-tree, a picnic, a May-day
festival, make trouble for limbs already weary with labor, but


IT IS THE WEARINESS AND THE SELF-SACRIFICE

as well as the mirth and the innocence which have girt this great word
round about with its bright girdle of true glory. "Suffer little
children to come unto me," says the Lord Jesus, "and forbid them not,
for of such is the kingdom of heaven." We may say likewise, following
the beauteous expression of our Savior, "Suffer little children to come
into our homes, and forbid them not their mirth and their joy, for
their contentment is now the one lesson that will take deep hold on
their lives, and their souls will grow rapidly in such surroundings."
Says the poet Southey: "A house is never perfectly furnished for
enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a
kitten rising six weeks."

"He is the happiest," says Goethe, "be he King or peasant, who finds
peace in his Home." Especially should


THE YOUNG MAN

be taught the value of a Home. If his advisers lay before him the lesson
of life in all its aspects, he will indeed be a prodigal if he have not
a Home of his own almost immediately upon leaving the fatherly roof.
There are no reasons, no exceptions, which relieve the healthy,
able-bodied young man from an early advance on the enemies who threaten
the welfare of the citizen. The strongest fortification which the human
heart can throw up against temptation is the Home. Certain men are
almost invincible against the onslaughts of the many base allurements
which wreak such misery on all sides of us. Why are they so firm? It is
because a glorious example has stood before their minds, a liberal and
older knowledge of the world has aided their early endeavors, and a
plentiful advice has fastened in their understandings the wisdom of
virtue and industry. If your sons have Homes of their own, you can leave
them, as a great General leaves his lieutenants to occupy a country,
here a fortress held in safety, there a cantonment with natural
defenses, and there a "city on a hill," while you advance into those
other regions which are written on the map of your destiny, "sustained
by the unfaltering trust" that you have kept the great obligation
imposed on you, and handled your forces for the best advantage of the
cause you served.

[Illustration]




DUTIES OF PARENTS.

     Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
     To teach the young idea how to shoot.--Thomson.


By the general voice of mankind, children are held to be
a blessing to the good. Where the bonds of love do not tighten as the
children grow, it is like those cases where the chords and muscles do
not fasten together after a hurt--there has been malpractice. Let us not
live like quacks. There are some general rules in life which will lead
us toward a greater enjoyment of our children's lives. Through them and
their issue we become immortal on this earth. Death cannot sweep us down
entirely. We leave our lives set in a younger cast of flesh, to hold the
fight against the enemy. While they thus serve us, to guard us from
extinction, we also stand as their ambassadors in heaven, presently to
go on our mission,--first to finish our own preparations, and then to
begin those of our offspring, who will follow in our footsteps. Says
Shakspeare: "The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their
children they are heaven's lieutenants." Our experience teaches us that
virtue and honesty are in themselves great rewards. Whether we be
virtuous and honest matters little in our estimation of the value of
those qualities. The thief, quaking before the Judge, cannot but compare
his own lot with that of the good man who sits above him. The one has
followed every bent of his inclination, which gradually became more and
more capricious, more difficult to satisfy. The other put on a steadying
curb in early life, denied himself nine times where he humored himself
once, and


FINALLY HAD A CHARACTER

which made few demands upon him, and whose demands were decent and in
order. Thus "some as corrupt in their morals as vice could make them,
have yet been solicitous to have their children soberly, virtuously, and
piously brought up." We therefore, on every ground, must teach our
children religion, dignity, and probity. "Parents," says Jeremy Taylor,
"must give good example and reverent deportment in the presence of
their children. And all those instances of charity which usually endear
each other--sweetness of conversation, affability, frequent
admonition--all significations of love and tenderness, care and
watchfulness, must be expressed toward children; that they may look upon
their parents as their friends and patrons, their defence and sanctuary,
their treasure and their guide."


FATHER AND SON.

Says Sir R. Steele: "It is the most beautiful object the eyes of man can
behold to see a man of worth and his son live in an entire, unreserved
correspondence. The mutual kindness and affection between them give an
inexpressible satisfaction to all who know them. It is a sublime
pleasure which increases by the participation. It is as sacred as
friendship, as pleasurable as love, and as joyful as religion. This
state of mind does not only dissipate sorrow which would be extreme
without it, but enlarges pleasures which would otherwise be
contemptible. The most indifferent thing has its force and beauty when
it is spoken by a kind father, and an insignificant trifle has its
weight when offered by a dutiful child. I know not how to express it,
but I think I may call it a transplanted self-love."


THE OCCUPATION.

"The time will be coming--is come, perhaps--when your young people must
decide on the course and main occupation of their future lives. You will
expect to have a voice in the matter. Quite right, if a voice of
counsel, of remonstrance, of suggestion, of pointing out unsuspected
difficulties, of encouragement by developing the means of success. Such
a voice as that from an elder will always be listened to. But perhaps
your have already settled in your own mind the calling to be followed,
and you mean simply to call on the youngster to accept and register your
decree on the opening pages of his autobiography. This is, indeed a
questionable proceeding, unless you are perfectly assured of what the
young man's unbiased choice will be."


THE DAUGHTER.

"Certain it is," said Addison, "that there is no kind of affection so
purely angelic as that of a father to a daughter. He beholds her both
with and without regard to her sex. In love to our sons there is
ambition, but in that to our daughters there is something which there
are no words to express." "There is, however, an unkind measure by which
a few persons strive to avoid living by themselves in their old age.
They selfishly prevent their children (principally their daughters) from
marrying, in order to retain them around them at home. Certainly matches
are now and then projected which it is the duty of a parent to oppose;
but there are two kinds of opposition, a conscientious and sorrowful
opposition, and an egotistical and captious opposition, and men and
women, in their self-deception, may sometimes mistake the one for the
other. 'Marry your daughters lest they marry themselves, and run off
with the ploughman or the groom' is an axiom of worldly wisdom. Marry
your daughters, if you can do so satisfactorily, that they may become


HAPPY WIVES AND MOTHERS,

fulfilling the destiny allotted to them by their Great Creator. Marry
them, if worthy suitors offer, lest they remain single and unprotected
after your departure. Marry them, lest they say, in their bitter
disappointment and loneliness, 'Our parents thought only of their own
comfort and convenience. We now find that our welfare and settlement in
life was disregarded!' But I am sure my hard-hearted comrade in years,"
continues this aged writer, "that you are more generous to your own dear
girls than to dream of preventing the completion of their own little
romance in order to keep them at home, pining as your waiting minds."


THANKING DEATH.

One of the most learned observations to parents has been made by Lord
Burleigh. "Bring thy children up," said he, in "learning and obedience,
yet without outward austerity. Give them good countenance and convenient
maintenance, according to thy ability; otherwise thy life will seem
their bondage, and what portion thou shalt leave them at thy death, they
will thank death for it, and not thee!"


EDUCATION.

"I suppose it never occurs to parents," says John Foster, in his
Journal, "that to throw vilely-educated young people on the world is,
independently of the injury to the young people themselves, a positive
_crime_, and of very great magnitude; as great, for instance, as
burning their neighbor's house, or poisoning the water in his well. In
pointing out to them what is wrong, even if they acknowledge the
justness of the statement, one cannot make them feel a sense of guilt,
as in other proved charges. That they love their children extenuates to
their consciences every parental folly that may at last produce in the
children every desperate vice." As to this matter of education,


OUR GREAT SCHOOLS

have taken it largely out of the parents' hands to guide the course of
instruction, and where this would be done logically, I cannot but feel
it is to the disadvantage of the child; but the system is built for
public, not for individual benefit, and will probably do the greatest
good to the greatest number. If we could have a little less Latin and a
little better spelling, a little less long Latin and a little more good
short Saxon I believe our youth would make their mark easier. Our young
people dislike interest tables and are delighted with long words. Under
the present system and popular taste, our children despise


THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE

until they are thirty years old, whereafter they gradually learn that
the very essence of artful language is contained in its pages. There is
not much need of a long word when a short one sounds better. "The Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters." How like the ripple of
a brook the syllables drop from the tongue! The fall of the voice, and
_the fall of the idea_, make the passage a lovely instance of the
highest art in poetical expression. If our youth could be taught
respect, attention, multiplication and division, spelling, short words,
short sentences, Bible, Shakspeare, and geography, and could spend less
time conjugating foreign verbs, there would be a really higher grade of
intelligence in the end, perhaps, and there would, above all, be more of
that glorious independence of mind which makes a thing worthy of
commendation because it is appreciated, not because somebody else has
said it is good.


WORSHIP.

The Catholics say that if they may have the spiritual culture of the
child till he is ten years of age, they will willingly surrender him
into the hands of the teachers of any other faith, resting secure in
the permanency of early teachings. The great value of early religious
instruction has always been conceded by the most learned. "The first
thing, therefore," says Dr. Priestly, "that a Christian will naturally
inculcate upon his child, as soon as he is capable of receiving such
impressions, is the knowledge of his Maker, and a steady principle of
obedience to Him; the idea of his living under a constant inspection and
government of an invisible being, who will raise him from the dead to an
immortal life, and who will reward and punish him hereafter according to
his character and actions here.


ON THESE PLAIN PRINCIPLES

I hesitate not to assert as a Christian, that religion is the first
rational object of education. Whatever be the fate of my children in
this transitory world, about which I hope I am as solicitous as I ought
to be, I would, if possible, secure a happy meeting with them in a
future and everlasting life."

"A suspicious parent makes an artful child," says Haliburton. A tender
parent makes a wayward son. A cruel parent makes a timid son. Be harsh
when harshness is necessary, but be kind when kindness is needful, for
as the grass of the fields needs the light of the sun, so does the human
heart yearn for sympathy and kindness, in all the years of its wonderful
growth. Parents may in a great measure do much of the teaching which
that


NOTORIOUSLY HARSH SCHOOLMASTER, EXPERIENCE,

deals out, who beats our boys and girls so brutally. I cannot, in
closing this chapter, do better than to quote the words of wise old
Roger Ascham: "He hazardeth sore that maketh wise by experience. An
unhappy sailor he is that is made wise by many shipwrecks, a miserable
merchant that is neither rich nor wise but after some bankrouts. It is a
marvelous pain to find a short way by long wandering. He needs must be a
swift runner that runneth fast out of his way. And look well upon the
former life of those few who have gathered, by long experience, a little
wisdom and some happiness; and when you do consider what mischief they
have committed, what dangers they have escaped (and yet twenty for one
do perish in the adventure) then think well with yourself whether you
would that your own son should come to wisdom and happiness by such
experience or no."

[Illustration]




BROTHER AND SISTER

     The noble sister of Publicola,
     The moon of Rome; chaste as the icicle,
     That's curdled by the frost from purest snow,
     And hangs on Dian's temple.

               But good my brother,
     Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
     Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
     Whilst like a puffed and reckless libertine,
     Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
     And recks not his own rede.--Shakspeare.


There has always been a charm for me in the speech of the
haughty _Coriolanus_ concerning _Valeria_, the sister of _Publicola_.
There is such a noble alliance of the brother and the sister. The one is
a man in high regard; therefore his sister likewise takes on those
correlative qualities which make her the moon of Rome, the Goddess
Diana, as it were. The young man of good quality will begin his life
with an exalted appreciation of his sister. He will give her that
tender regard and assistance which is her gentle due, and she, in turn,
will form her ideas of young men by the character of her brother, and,
in choosing a man upon whom to settle her womanly affections, will be
largely guided by her estimate of her brother's manhood. The young man
can not over-estimate the importance of his influence in this
connection. Depend upon it, if he be high-minded, courteous, attentive,
self-sacrificing at the proper times,


HIS SISTER WILL DEMAND,

in the man who aspires to be her companion in life, the qualities of a
high mind, a courteous demeanor, an attentive inclination, and a
willingness to put aside self at the time that duty and manhood demand.
The brother's acquaintances and associates are often the first young men
introduced to the sister on terms of intimacy. If the brother lower the
standard of his life, the colors of his house are also trailed. His
family pride should be, and usually is, one of the strongest supports in
holding him to a course of action that will retain the entire respect of
his community. When a son with a sister grown plunges into ways of
disrepute, there is no more sorrowful example of the utter selfishness
of a depraved human heart.


HOW MUCH LESS GRASPING IS THE BURGLAR

who is not willing to let the hard-working citizen keep his earnings,
but steals upon him in the night and robs him into poverty--how much
less selfish, I say, is he than the brother who steals upon the fair
young life of a pure, good maiden, brands her as the sister of a
disreputable loafer, and leaves her to choose loafers for a husband, or
marry a stranger who may afterward taunt her with her low connection! I
can conceive of no keener spur to the young man of pride and purpose
than to keep this view of things before him, that he may be worthy of
the company of young men who, in turn, will be worthy of the company of
his sister.


MANY OF THE NOBLEST YOUNG MEN

of the present day, when they go for a summer vacation, take their
sisters with them. The act gives them their first true knowledge of the
responsibilities attaching to the care of a woman--to the gravity of
married life. It being cheaper, as a rule, for man and wife to travel
together than for brother and sister, the brother has an idea of future
expense awaiting him (after he shall have married) which is on the right
side of an estimate--that is, the surplus side. The sister's mind is
broadened by this kindness and self-sacrifice of the brother. She has a
higher opinion of manhood, and her choice will fall all the higher up.
What makes our finest girls often go through the forest of maidenhood
rejecting the most promising staffs of support, and, finally, nearing
the plains of spinsterhood, pick up in a panic


THE CROOKEDEST STICK OF THE LOT?

It is mainly the brother's fault. He has not shown her how much of a man
he himself can be, and she has not noticed the manly qualities of many
of the admirers whom she has passed by in disdain. A wise young woman
should be on the lookout for gentleness and courage in man. If she finds
those qualities--if she can only become aware they are there, her heart
will relent in spite of her, and there will be no hesitancy in her final
choice, nor regret in her final retrospect.


IN YOUR SISTER

you behold the exact complement of yourself. Yourself and herself,
brother and sister, are the links which your parents have left to hold
their minds, their qualities, their aggregated development and
progression, to the earth. All that your parents were, yourself and your
sister will perpetuate, adding the acquirements of your own lives. You
have in your sister an opportunity for self-study without its like or
equal. Where your sister is weak, there are you weak (naturally) also.
Your vanity may conceal the fact in your own nature, but her character
will express it to you.


STRENGTHEN UP THESE POINTS.

As the calker goes through the hold of the ship, peering intently for
light, or listening for the trickling of water, so should you, in
observing your sister's character and family peculiarities, find and
calk up all the treacherous leaks in your own nature. Her carelessness
is your forgetfulness. Mend it. Her heedlessness is undoubtedly your
recklessness. Send out scouts. Her impatience is possibly your high
temper. Hit yourself when you are in rage, and thus learn its folly. I
know of a man who once came within an inch of braining his
fellow-soldier. They were lying on the grass, when the fellow struck my
friend a smart blow with the iron ramrod of a Springfield musket, all in
fun, you know. My friend was like Cowper, who wrote:

     The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
     And proves, by thumping on your back
           His sense of your great merit,
     Is such a friend as one had need
     Be very much his friend, indeed,
           To pardon or to bear it.

Well, he felt the smart of the iron ramrod, and his fury rose in a
whirlwind; and he got up, took the musket by the barrel, raised it back
for an awful blow, and was just about to crush the head of the joker
when a white face and the simple word "Jim!" brought him to his senses.
He dropped the musket and sank upon the grass in a paroxysm of
excitement, but was saved from murder just by a hair's breadth. He had
never curbed his temper before. Here he had been forced to overcome the
fury of a building all in flames. The lesson sank deep into his heart.
To-day nobody knows he has any temper at all.


THE SISTER'S INFLUENCE.

Again, as you are influential in the matter of the future prospects of
your sister, and can probably elevate her lot by your aid in forming
her character, so, too is she often, though to a smaller degree, potent
in turning the tides of your life. She has dear friends of her own sex.
They are at your house. They may come to see you by coming to see her.
You meet these girls at your home, and, perhaps, some day you wake up in
love. Now, if your sister, who admits these maidens into your home, has
that true womanhood which is so admirable, you are certain to have
fallen in love with one of the finest young women in town, and it is


A LUCKY DAY FOR YOU,

for young women usually keep away from young men for whose character
they have no regard. Do not, however, get into the opinion that you are
irresistible, or anywise attractive. It will give you many wounds. Young
women detect masculine vanity of this order with a quickness that is
appalling to the young man. They may have had no thought of you at all!
They will then, all the readier, become influenced by your good points,
and, above all, by your habitual good treatment of your sister. Be,
therefore, on your guard, even in self-interest, which is a low guide
of action, nevertheless--but


EVEN FOR THIS IGNOBLE REASON.

Watch over your sister, to protect her from any association whatever
with bad young men, to minister to her wants, to help your parents
minister to her health, and to love her with a sincere affection, for as
long as you live, you will find her devotion unchangeable, through good
and evil report. This same sister may be your companion all through your
life. Where single life becomes the destiny of both brother and sister
this often happens. In almost every neighborhood there are two persons
thus domiciled, honorably fullfilling their duties to society, and often
doing greater public service than any other two people of the community.
Look therefore upon your sister as perhaps the best friend you will have


AFTER THE DEATH OF YOUR MOTHER.

Consider her as the person whose interests may be more closely allied
with your own than those of any other soul on earth. It certainly cannot
lessen your respect for the high relation she sustains toward your life
and your happiness. Counsel her in exceeding kindness, for you will
find her inclined to retort, as did _Ophelia_ to her brother _Laertes_,
at the head of this chapter, bidding you be sure you "reck your own
rede" which was an ancient form of admonishing one to heed his own
advice.

[Illustration]




YOUTH

     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
     The soul that riseth with us, our life's Star,
       Hath elsewhere had its setting,
              And cometh from afar:
       Not in entire forgetfulness,
       And not in utter darkness,
     But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
       From God who is our home:
     Heaven lies about us in our infancy.--Wordsworth.


"Like virgin parchment," says Montaigne, "youth is
capable of any inscription." Let us have only those inscriptions which
will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before
us. "Unless a tree has borne its blossoms in the spring," writes Bishop
Hare, "you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn." All through the
great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French
revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there
runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous.
The thousands of characters who "strut their brief hour" upon the stage
in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and
generous, lofty and incorruptible. Then they ripen into manhood, glory
waits upon their comings and their goings, and they are soon between two
masters, their interests and their consciences. A circumstance threatens
their early resolutions, an event overturns their consciences, and a
selfish, jealous, ambitious mind thenceforth guides the fortunes of a
life.


HOW FORTUNATE FOR THE RACE OF MAN

that when the mind is least prejudiced with set beliefs and when the
heart is kindliest, it lies in the power of those who have the young
near them to bear them frequent counsel, and to strengthen the natural
nobility of their natures!

A great deal can be accomplished in the early years of life. Many men
have made all their fame in the morning, and enjoyed it through the rest
of their lives. Alexander, Pompey, Hannibal, Scipio, Napoleon, Charles
XII., Alexander Hamilton, Shelley, Keats, Bryant--hundreds of examples
readily come to the recollection, showing how thoroughly the mind can
be trusted even in its immaturity. Youth is beautiful. It is "the gay
and pleasant spring of life, when joy is stirring in the dancing blood,
and nature calls us with a thousand songs to share her general feast."
"Keep true to the dreams of thy youth," sings Schiller. We love the
young. "The girls we love for what they are," says Goethe, "young men,
for what they promise to be." "The lovely time of youth," says Jean Paul
Richter, "is


OUR ITALY AND GREECE,

full of gods and temples." Let not the Vandals and Goths of after-life
swoop down upon this sunny region in our lives; yet if they do, may we
not look upon our noble ruins, our Coliseum and our Parthenon, in a kind
of classic love that shall endear and sanctify the rights of the young
about us and lengthen out their "golden age." Youth should be young.
Says Shakspeare: "Youth no less becomes


THE LIGHT AND CARELESS LIVERY THAT IT WEARS,

than settled age its sables and its weeds, importing health and
graveness." Youth is like Adam's early walk in the Garden of Paradise.
"The senses," says Edmund Burke, "are unworn and tender, and the
whole frame is awake in every part." The dew lies upon the grass. No
smoke of busy life has darkened or stained the morning of our day. The
pure light shines about us. "If any little mist happen to rise," says
Willmott, "the sunbeam of hope catches and glorifies it."

[Illustration: "Youth is our Italy and Greece, full of Gods and
Temples." Page 64.]

Youth is rash. It "skips like the hare over the meshes of good counsel,"
says Shakspeare. "Then let our nets and snares of benevolence be laid
with the more cunning. Youth is a continual intoxication," says
Rochefoucauld; "it is the fever of reason." We must cool this fever,
spread around it cheering flowers of truth, bathe it in the water-brooks
of gentleness and self-sacrifice. "Young men," according to
Chesterfield, "are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men
are to think themselves sober enough," yet joined with this self-esteem,
we find that "youth is ever confiding; and we can almost forgive its
disinclination to follow the counsels of age, for the sake of the
generous disdain with which it rejects suspicion." "How charming the
young would be," writes Arthur Helps, "with their freshness,
fearlessness, and truthfulness, if only--to take a metaphor from
painting--they would make more use of grays and other neutral tints,
instead of dabbing on so recklessly the strongest positives in color."
Why should their colors not be rich? Are not the hues upon their cheeks
as rich as the sunset?


DOES NOT THE CHERRY

"dab on" the scarlet and the carmine direct from the gorgeous sun
himself? Age marvels at the happiness of youth. The sombre lessons of
the world have left their marks on the mind of the one; the other has
everything to learn. It would seem as though its residence had been (as
the poet has written so beautifully at the head of the chapter) in some
Paradise, whence, it issued to this earth, "trailing clouds of glory" as
it came. Age has suffered from the heats and dust of the previous day,
and sees in the blood-red "copper sun," only the indication of another
march of weariness and thirst.


YOUTH BREATHES THE DEWY AIR,

and beholds only the roseate tints of the sunrise. Why should not its
heart rejoice? Says Lord Lytton: "Let youth cherish the happiest of
earthly boons while yet it is at its command; for there cometh a day to
all 'when neither the voice of the lute nor the birds' shall bring back
the sweet slumbers that fall on their young eyes as unbidden as the
dews." "Youth holds no society with grief," says old Euripides. Perhaps,
rather, it makes those "formal calls" which have no feeling in them.


THE LITTLE GIRL'S KITTEN DIES,

and the little human heart is inconsolable for half an hour. In half a
day, when asked to tell her greatest grief, she will relate an accident
to her doll, forgetting the poor kitten yet waiting for burial! How
could those lips and cheeks retain their delicate tints if the wet
seasons of grief set in with tropical intensity? Lord Lytton, often, in
his highly colored writings, cries out "O youth! O youth!" and there is
a world of regret in the exclamation. "O the joy of young ideas," sighs
Hannah Moore, "painted on the mind, in the warm, glowing colors which
fancy spreads on objects not yet known, when all is new and all is
lovely!"


SIR WALTER RALEIGH

has justly claimed the respect and admiration of the world for many
high qualities of mind. One of the most admirable of his remarks is an
admonition to youth, which runs as follows: "Use thy youth so that thou
mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not
sigh and grieve at the account thereof. Use it as the spring-time which
soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all
provisions for a long and happy life." But this is difficult to do. The
march of youth is through a mountainous country. The scenery is
changing, but the progress is not encouraging. "Self-flattered,
unexperienced, high in hope when young," says the poet Young, "with
sanguine cheer and streamers gay, we cut our cable, launch into the
world, and fondly dream each wind and star our friend." How many youths
have believed they would, by merit alone, rise to the Presidency of the
United States--


THE FIRST MAN IN FIFTY MILLIONS!

Youth keeps a diary, into which it pours a volume of "thought" that
seems a very mine of gems. Take up that chronicle at middle age and see
its weak and driveling character. Observe the almost total lack of one
idea that will aid you to some honorable end! And yet there is
something touching even in the great trust and confidence of childhood.
How sweet and true are the beautiful lines of Thomas Hood called "I
remember, I remember:

     I remember, I remember,
       The fir trees dark and high;
     I used to think their slender tops
       Were close against the sky;
     It was a childish ignorance,
       But now 'tis little joy
     To know I'm further off from heaven
       Than when I was a boy.

Dr. Watts lays down to youth that it should have a decent and agreeable
behavior among men, "a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant
manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity
and good humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling
accidents of life." This programme of action is far beyond the reach of
a well-balanced adult, much further the inexperienced and untried mind
of younger life. But the character which should attain to such angelic
proportions would truly have a reverent place among men's memories.


THE ALPENA.

Youth has no knowledge of God's power. The confidence that early years
implant in the mind supplies an unsubstantial substitute. I have
pictured to myself an illustration: A bright young man is present at a
grand concert. It is between the parts. He bends suavely over the back
of a lady's chair and talks sweet music to her ear. He says: "Could you
not follow every thought of the composer in that symphony?" (which they
have just heard). "And was not the effect sublime when the storm reached
the heights of the mountains, and all the elements of Nature struggled
so stubbornly?" And the young woman demurely gives him an assuring look
which conserves all her interests; whereupon he backs off in triumph,
and feels that the concert _is_ worth his week's wages after all!


AGAIN,

this young man at Grand Haven, on the western border of Lake Michigan,
boards the structure of pine wood and ten-penny nails called the Alpena.
The Alpena floats out into her last night--into the valley of the shadow
of death. Presently the young man feels his vessel and his life
trembling like a captive wild bird in a remorseless grasp. Anon this
trembling grows into the awful, final, fatal paroxysms. Then suddenly
the mind of the young man breaks from the shackles of vanity and
self-sufficiency, and he views, for the first time, the visible forms of
angered Nature. He recalls his white gloves, his former complete idea of
a storm, his triumphant, _au revoir_ retreat from the opera-box, and, as
the discords of the Everlasting gradually resolve toward the diapason,
the full chant, of His solemn eternity, the young man cries out, in a
spirit of revelation, "What a worm am I!" and adds his own piteous
tragedy to the unheard murmurs of bubbling death and muddy burial!


"REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR,

in the days of thy youth," says Solomon. "Train up a child in the way he
should go," says the proverb, "and when he is old he will not depart
from it." Be not afraid of the sneers of the ungodly. "As the cracking
of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool." "The fairest
flower in the garden of creation," says Sir James E. Smith, "is a young
mind, offering and unfolding itself to the influence of Divine Wisdom,
as the heliotrope turns its sweet blossoms to the sun."

Lord Bacon, in his forty-third essay, thus sums up the qualities of
youth: "Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for
execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled
business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the
compass of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them. The
errors of young men are the ruin of business;


BUT THE ERRORS OF AGED MEN

amount to but this, that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men
in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold;
stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of
the means and degrees, pursue some few principles which they have
chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown
inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth
all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them--like an unready horse,
they will neither stop nor turn."


THE HARD-PAN SERIES.

Now with this wise parallel of youth and age before me, with the
importance which I attach to this period of life as the precise moment
at which the final cast of the clay of life is set, and with the belief
in Goethe's statement that the destiny of any nation, at any given time,
depends on the opinions of its young men under twenty-five years of age,
I beg to call the especial attention of the young to a Hard-Pan Series
of ten chapters which follow, devoted largely to just this
forming-period of life, when the mould is ready and the governing
characteristics are fast pouring in. I beg parents and preceptors, if
they approve my efforts, to lend their aid in attracting toward these
admonitions such consideration as their merit shall warrant, and I have
so endeavored to dispose the bitterness of practical advice as to both
somewhat cover its presence and gratify a youthful and adventurous
literary taste.




PRUDENCE IN SPEECH.

               Give thy thoughts no tongue,
     Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
     Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar;

     Do not dull thy palm with entertainment
     Of each new hatched unfledged comrade

     Give every man thine ear but few thy voice;
     Take each man's counsel but reserve thy judgment.
     --Shakspeare.


You live. To live is costly. Who will pay for it? Your
soul cries out "I." But how will you get the money? "Oh! I'll get
it!"--that is the confident cry of youth. The confidence oozes out as
life lengthens--and yet there are certain lines of action which, if
followed, in this bright land of liberty, are sure to result in the
accumulation of something for our old age.


THE MYSTERIOUS JUNIUS

one of the great exemplars in the matter of keeping a secret wrote to
his publisher: "Let all your views in life, therefore, be directed to a
solid, however moderate independence. Without it no man can be happy,
nor even honest." This celebrated sentence was written by a man who was
refusing a proffer of money for his writings (then in print) and it
should not be read as inspiring one to avarice. The vice of avarice is
more honest than envy, but is not the less unpleasant and reprehensible.
Let us suppose you are fortunate enough to have some grit and spunk
about you. At the earliest point practicable you get something to do.
Perhaps at a Fourth of July celebration your Sunday school teacher
trusts you in a booth to deal out lemonade and handle money. It is a
good beginning. Perhaps you are


ESTABLISHED BEHIND A COUNTER

in a general store and intrusted with the great secret of a cost-mark,
fully as important a secret, let me assure you, as you can buy in the
most secret of places! What spot in your character will "wear down" the
quickest? When you were little it was your toes. They were
copper-plated. Now the wear falls where copper will not protect you.
Nothing but experience will now serve as the copper did then. The first
place that "rubs" will be


YOUR TONGUE.

When you have conquered the natural inclination to be what is familiarly
known as a "smarty," there is still a greater wisdom to acquire. Avoid
hearing, where it is not absolutely necessary, anything that you will
have to keep secret. The less secrets you have the less discretion will
be necessary to protect them. After you have heard a thing from your
employer, keep it to yourself. The youth who talks about his employer's
business must have other marvelous faculties to succeed in life. He is a
Blind Tom. He plays the piano, but the wonder is how he does it. It must
be that it would hurt your feelings if you heard another merchant say of
your employer that he keeps a pretty good boy, except that


HE "BLABS A GOOD DEAL."

If you can shut up your mouth now, you can keep it shut when you get to
be Secretary of the Treasury and a whole syndicate of bankers are trying
to pump out of you whether you mean to pay off $100,000,000 of 5 per
cent bonds the next week, or merely reduce the interest 1-1/2 per cent.
If they could tell, they could make a million dollars, and unless you
have been all your life a discreet man, be assured they _will_ tell. If
your employer's rivals in business find out through you where your
people get a certain line of goods, how much is paid for it, or


THE TIME ON WHICH IT IS BOUGHT,

be assured you will never succeed either as a man in business for
yourself, or as a worker under the direction of others. Your employer
may be embarrassed and the fatal knowledge may have come into your
unlucky ears. You will hear it whispered all around you. Why? Because no
one knows "for sure." Everybody wants to see if you know anything about
it. Can you not see how much luckier you would have been had you really
known nothing of the state of things? A word, a look, from you, may turn
from your employer just the helping hand that would have carried him
across a tight place. How many battles have been won by the arrival,
just in time, of a reinforcement! Make it a point that, if you are
inclined


TO "BLOW YOUR AFFAIRS,"

you were not cut out for "business." You had better become a lecturer,
a farmer, or something else, and occupy a field where industry alone
will save all your interests. Remember the miserable barber of King
Midas in mythology. The King had been cursed by the offended god Apollo
with asses' ears. To hide his deformity he had his barber dress the hair
over the ears, and the barber was then sworn with an awful oath of
secrecy. But the "tonsorial artist" (as they call him in the city!) was
one of those people who could not stand the pressure. He went out in the
field and dug a little hole, and


INTO THIS HOLE HE BREATHED THE SECRET

that His Majesty had been smitten by Apollo. What was the astonishment
of the world at hearing the reeds that grew hard by whispering among
themselves, whenever the wind blew them confidentially together, "King
Midas hath asses' ears!"

Be in mortal fear of the first error in this regard. When a boy has made
a record for bad, it seems to hang to him. The fact that he has told
something which he ought to have kept to himself is quoted against him
until it becomes a positive habit to speak about it every time his name
is mentioned.

"Jimmie, where's your outside man? I heard he was in town. His cousin
asked me to inquire."

"Oh! no! he's not in town. He went out on the road last night. He will
be in Eagertown to-morrow, Brightside Wednesday, and Upearly Saturday."

That is exactly what was wanted out of you, and you must excuse your
questioner if he hurries on, so as not to be seen pumping you any longer
than is necessary.

Now this style of gaining information is low and contemptible, but of
two boys who talked, one of whom said a good deal that did not amount to
much, learning a good deal that did, and the other letting out a great
deal and learning nothing, there can be little doubt of the business
success of the first as compared to that of the second.

Put a copper-toe on your tongue. Remember that Gen. Grant made a great
part of his fame by letting other folks do his talking.




COURTESY.

     When my friends are blind of one eye, I look at them in profile.
     --Joubert.


There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest
on a deep moral foundation. If you are always courteous without
difficulty, you are endowed with a nature naturally moral. You are
naturally a gentleman. Anyhow, you are behind the counter, and you
desire to sell goods. You wish to have customers brighten up when they
see you. Very well, brighten up yourself. You ought to be glad to see
them. If they are not glad, they, perhaps, have less reason for joy.
They are about to part with their money in order to get something they
cannot part with so easily. You went to work in the morning hoping a
good many people would come in. Now here they are. You can smile on the
young lady, but can you smile on the old woman? You can if you are a
man. It is nothing but good-breeding to do it. What is this boasted word
"good-breeding?" It is "the result of much good sense, some good nature,
and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to
obtain the same indulgence from them." Chesterfield, a man who was as
prominent in England as Daniel Webster in America, expressed his
astonishment that anybody who had good sense and good nature could
essentially fail in good-breeding.


STUDY YOUR CUSTOMER.

If he or she be brusque, be yourself pliable, respectful, and by all
means quick. Do not stand in front of him or her with your head down
ready to hook or to butt. You are glad the customer has come in. That
should solve the whole problem. In the city you are required to "put up
with" the bad mannered fashion that people have of treating a clerk as
if he were a piece of furniture, but in the town this is all changed. A
majority of the citizens know you, and all regard you with better
breeding than would the city customer. You are young and positive,
because you know very little about life. Curb yourself. Let the customer
make all the statements he has to make. He will run out of them
presently. In case he want any of yours, he will then ask for them, and
literally be at your mercy. As to


YOUR HANDS,

have them very clean. It will be a positive advantage to you to wear no
rings. In case the people like jewelry, it distracts their attention
from the great idea (a sale); in case they do not like gew-gaws, it will
put you in opposition. Make your great effort in the direction you think
the customer's mind is taking. Sell him what he thinks he wants first.
So much, sure. Then, if he changes his mind, it will be to your profit,
generally. When the customer speaks to you, it gives you your programme.
If he be cheery, imitate him. He is your friend and is giving you an
example. If he look hard at you,


LOOK RESPECTFULLY

at him. Serve him with alacrity, say nothing not necessary, and the joy
in your heart will thaw him out before long. Express to your customers
your desire that they should come again,--never by words, because that
is too difficult, except in a barber-shop, where it is a custom--but by
opening the door for them at their departure, even if you have to keep
another customer waiting, and by thanking them on receipt of the money,
or upon delivery of the goods if it be on account. There are very few
people who will remain cold toward you after they find out you are
really glad to see them. The general store of the rural town makes


THE FINEST-MANNERED MEN IN THE COUNTRY,

respectful, dignified, alert, and unruffled. I saw a clerk at the postal
money-order office in St Paul. The Swedes and Poles go there often to
send away money. That young man had such a charming way of showing an
old Swedish woman just how to make out an order before she had learned
to write, and he had such an awe-stricken way of receiving the
instructions of other money-senders who knew all about it, that I felt
he was a credit to America, and I mention the reminiscence only with
diminished pleasure from the fact that I have forgotten the young man's
name. Courteous treatment of a customer is necessary under every
conceivable circumstance. It may be a busybody has come in to worry you,
who never bought a cent's worth of you or anybody else whom you know;
nevertheless her tongue is an advertisement. If you can gain her good
will, even comparatively, as weighed by her estimate of other clerks, it
is better than a column advertisement in the local papers. When
Zachariah Fox, a great merchant of Liverpool, was asked by what means he
contrived to amass so large a fortune as he possessed, his reply was:
"Friend, by one article alone, and in which thou mayest deal too, if
thou pleasest,--it is civility." "Hail! ye small sweet courtesies of
life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which
beget inclinations to love at first sight; it is ye who open the door
and let the stranger in."

"We must be as courteous," says


RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

"to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the
advantage of a good light." There is more natural courtesy in the
country than in the city, just as there are more privileges where three
clerks are at work than where there are a hundred. And then, again,
civility seems to be lacking in the city as well naturally as out of
necessity. Milton has put this forcibly by saying "courtesy oft is
sooner found in lowly sheds, with smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls
and courts of princes, where it first was named." The small courtesies
sweeten life. The great ones ennoble it. The extent to which a man can
make himself agreeable, as seen in the lives of Swift, Thomas Moore,
Chesterfield, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Aaron Burr, Edgar Poe, and those
odd creatures called


"BEAUX," SUCH AS BRUMMEL, NASH, ETC.,

goes to show the immense importance of the art, and its influence in
determining the success of any man in business. Good-breeding shows
itself the most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least. Says
Chesterfield: "How often have I seen the most solid merit and knowledge
neglected, unwelcome, and even rejected; while flimsy parts, little
knowledge, and less merit, introduced by the Graces, have been received,
cherished, and admired." You have seen beautiful swords of auroral flame
dart into the zenith; you have seen marvelous flights of meteors, which
were gone ere your admiration had given rise to a cry of pleasure. So it
is with manners. They irradiate our presence, giving to our associates


MOMENTARY VIEWS

of those qualities which are universally loved and
respected--gentleness, unselfishness, gladness and peace. Your clothes,
while under twenty-five years of age, should be very neat. Your shirt
should be clean. This does not imply that you are to break extra backs
to keep fresh shirts ready for you, but that you are to make extra
efforts to keep the one you have on unsoiled for a decent length of
time. If your clothes are dark, get in the habit of wearing a black silk
or satin neck-tie and wear it some one way all your life. It helps
people to "place" you. Generally a sack coat makes a very tall man look
shorter, and a frock-coat looks all the better for a change. The clothes
should be loose, so that they will


OCCUPY AS LITTLE OF THE MIND AS POSSIBLE.

The young man who purposely keeps his mind on his fine clothes is lost.
He is a coxcomb. He has no greater influence with the young ladies for
all his fine feathers. Let me leave you selling a large bill,
remembering that civility costs nothing and buys everything, and
feeling that the very perfection of good manners is not to think of
yourself.

[Illustration]




ECONOMY.

    Behold there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.
    --I Kings, XVIII, 44.


Franklin says that, if you know how to spend less than
you get, you have the philosopher's stone. Cicero, many hundreds of
years before Ben Franklin said: "Economy is of itself a great revenue,"
and another Roman writer put it still better when he said: "There is no
gain so certain as that which arises from sparing what you have."
"Beware of small expenses," again writes Franklin; "a small leak will
sink a great ship." In our large cities there are thousands of servant
girls earning from two and a half to three dollars a week. The men who
employ them often get from twenty-five to one hundred dollars per week,
yet it is a notorious fact that the prudent servant girl usually has
more money at her command, clear of all debts, than her employer, whose
expenses scrape very closely against his income. Now you are on a salary
in a store. Perhaps that salary is yours, to spend as you see fit. If
so, remember that, like the highest officer in the land, you have
certain duties. If you were President you could not appoint your old
schoolmate Secretary of State unless he had made as much progress in
politics as yourself. So, too,


IN YOUR MONEY MATTERS,

you cannot make yourself so valuable to your employer that he will not,
before he advances you, inquire into your personal expenses, and find
out what you do with your money. If you have spent it, year after year,
as fast as you could get it, he will have great misgivings about letting
you into a position where your desire to distribute currency can
possibly lead you to practice on his funds. Among the easy ways to spend
money in a small town is the habit of hiring livery-rigs. The business
is just as useful as a drug-store, but no poor boy should hire equipages
for mere pleasure. To attend a funeral, or to take a sick mother or
sister out in the sunshine, is commendable. The youth who does that
rarely needs the other suggestion, however, for those who spend the
most money at a livery stable are usually seen with their mothers and
sisters the least. No young man who thinks well of himself will enter a
saloon at all. Often the worst classes in the whole country frequent


RURAL SALOONS,

men who dare not walk through the streets of any of the large cities.
Perhaps at the card-table in the groggery across the street is a man who
has come to your town to break into your employer's store! Anyway, there
is no "business" in the world which returns so little for the money
accepted as the saloon. Take


A GALLON OF WHISKY,

for instance. It is worth a dollar to a dollar and a half. It has been
taxed ninety cents by the Government, leaving it worth that much less.
Well, now, a man is expected to go into a saloon, and, for about three
tablespoonsful of this stuff, he pays ten cents in the town and fifteen
cents in the city. Your news dealer pays eight cents for an illustrated
paper, and twenty-eight cents for a popular magazine. He sells the one
for ten cents and the other for thirty-five cents, taking all the risk
of not getting a sale. If you could afford to travel with such people as
are found in saloons, in the first place, and to put such truly
abominable stuff in your mouth in the second place, you could not, even
then, in the third place, afford to give fifteen cents for what is in
fact worth less than a mill. You are in reality giving away your money
to the Government and the saloon keeper.


LET VANDERBILT SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT,

and those who have made their fortunes and their bad habits the
saloon-keeper. I have dwelt on this, because these are few young men who
are not tempted. All the above applies to tobacco. It is an utterly
obnoxious habit to use tobacco. It is the cause, together with the dough
falsely called pastry, of all the dyspepsia in our climate. It ruins the
eyes, it costs money in vast quantities, returning almost nothing in
goods, and has but one redeeming feature that I know of--it is


JUST AS BAD ON MOTHS AS IT IS ON MEN,

and it makes a musty room smell a little better. If you can keep out of
saloons and shooting galleries, you will not play billiards or
cards--both very expensive--you will not use tobacco, and you will be
less apt to go to dances and hire livery teams. Should you preserve
yourself against these vices of our young men, you will have money
without denying yourself clothes as handsome as a poor young man looks
well in. Three short years' savings will put you in possession of a sum
of money sufficient to set you to thinking about business for yourself,
either with your employer or alone, for


LIFE IN AMERICA IS SHORT.

A man is a failure almost before he thinks he ought to have been
considered as started. If you have been receiving small remuneration, be
assured that a capital all the smaller is needed in your town. The
market value of labor is the largest element in the problem of business.
If you worked cheap, then others will, and if they will, it is because
living is cheap. The high-priced man in the city has to be paid highly
because of his expenses, not because he has taken a vow to save a large
amount of money. "He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his
father's wisdom than he that has a great deal left to him does to his
father's care," says William Penn. "He is a good wagoner who can turn in
a little room," says Bishop Hall. How many a man, in getting a costly
home, has found that old Franklin was right when he said it was easier
to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. Therefore, when you get
anything,


BEWARE IT ENTAILS LITTLE EXPENSE OF KEEPING.

A horse will eat you poor; a gun will cost you a hundred guns. Think of
it when you buy them, and you will thereafter have no regrets, besides
being less apt to make such purchases. "Gain may be temporary and
uncertain," says Franklin, "but expense is constant and certain." "Not
to be covetous is money; not to be a purchaser is income," says Cicero.
"A fool and his money are soon parted," says the adage. "Live by hope,
and you will die by despair," says the Italian proverb. Save all you can
honorably. Harness it up and make it pull also by bringing in to you a
little interest. Here will be your first real business move--one of
grave importance. The little cloud that ariseth out of the sea, like a
man's hand, will soon cover your financial sky, and bring an abundant
shower of the good things of this life.

[Illustration]




COURAGE.

     I dare do all that may become a man;
     Who dares do more is none.--Shakspeare.


Courage is adversity's lamp. Perhaps the young man's
courage is more sorely tried than that of the man of middle age, for age
dreads the whip of events, while youth champs their bit. Youth cannot
endure the thought of a long siege. The ladders must be put against the
walls, the breach must be clambered through, and if the citadel be
strong, the rash onset will be repulsed with heavy loss. But Hope dotes
on youth. The young are her flock, her fold, her children. Into the
hands of her children she puts the scimitar of courage, and bids them go
forth again. Let us suppose you have been cast down your ladder, and
have little but your courage. It may be necessary to leave your pleasant
little town and seek employment where men are used as machines--in the
great cities. Such a fate is, indeed, a sad reverse. The safety of
home, the magazines of moral ammunition stored all about you, the
bomb-proofs against the shells of soul-destruction aimed at every
soldier in life, will all be torn from you, and you will be as a Knight
of the Cross, alone on the desert. Perhaps


YOU HAVE REACHED THE GREAT CITY.

Now buckle on your armor. You do not need an intrepid courage, now;
intrepid courage may have brought you here; intrepid courage is but a
holiday kind of a virtue, to be seldom exercised, as experience will
teach you. You need firmness to resist all kinds of attacks. You need
good-nature, and yet you must repel temptation with a look as black as
Erebus. You need affability, yet you must speak almost by rote, and the
opportunities to keep from speaking outnumber the exigencies in which
you must speak by ten to one. You must be tender, and yet you must be
cruel as a surgeon. Without these opposites well balanced in your
character, you will not fight the battle successfully.


NAPOLEON

won his battles by hurling ten thousand men upon two thousand. Simple,
was it not? Now you are one young soldier. You will have to find a place
in the enemy's lines which is even weaker than you before you can throw
yourself against it with success. You, therefore, cannot be too
circumspect. If the General pushes two thousand men against one
thousand, on ground that is otherwise even, he is a wise leader, but if
he finds four thousand enemies there, and if his principal attack is
hazarded in the action, he is always accounted a daring fool. Let me
recall


THE ATTACK OF A YOUNG MAN

who broke through the enemy's lines, in the City of Chicago. He got
eight dollars a week in a city on the Mississippi River, and was led to
believe that, if he went to Chicago, he could get ten dollars. He was
employed as a clerk in a Commercial Agency, a business which aims to
ascertain the standing and degree of success or lack of fortune of the
retail dealers of the region it covers. He felt that eight dollars a
week were all that he could ever get where he was. Upon his arrival in
the City of Chicago he was put at work for seven dollars, the
representations made to him having proven unreliable. There were about
fifty young men and women in the same room. Seated at his desk when
eight o'clock came, he found that his chances to rise were seemingly
restricted to the hours of noon and six o'clock. In this way he worked
for six months. He was fortunate enough to obtain board at five dollars
a week, leaving him, after his washing, perhaps a dollar and a quarter
clear. To a man of twenty-five years who could see the real difficulties
of his future, the need of a high quality of moral courage was urgent.
And he had it. He got acquainted with a humble friend, considerably
better off, who therefore, could talk to him very bravely of the dignity
of labor, and the honor of paying one's way, even if it took only five
dollars and seventy-five cents to do it. This young friend did thus
encourage and inspire the young clerk, and he was able to set about
improving his mind.


HE READ THE BIBLE THROUGH

during this six months, and thus acquired a style of simple expression
which would be of value to him in his reports when he should travel. He
read Plutarch's Lives. He studied French, and read "The Man Who Laughs"
and "Paul and Virginia," two remarkably different works. You see he was
a man of persistence. But such a mind finds the humiliation of a dollar
and a quarter a week all the more bitter. A man conversing with Plutarch
about the relative merits of Pompey and Lucullus, or of Marius and
Sylla, dislikes to be


DOCKED THREE HOURS

for being ten minutes late, and dislikes to return to his landlady at
the end of the week and give her five-sevenths of the whole spoil of
Bythnia and the Propontis! One day the second assistant manager spoke to
him, and this ray of hope lit his way to a seat on a high stool to write
out "tickets" for merchants who send in to see about Blow & Co., of
Bugleville. This gave him eight dollars a week, and enabled him to go to
a theatre once in a while and hear


SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS.

One night he approached his friend and announced that the die was cast,
and that he should become an actor. Nothing could be worse than he was
doing. Absolutely no business paid less than eight dollars per week,
unless it were his own itself which had paid him seven dollars. It was a
summer month. A theatre was empty. A dramatic agent had agreed to get up
a company and run the place a week. It would require only twenty-five
dollars from the young man. He would then be a sharer in the profits,
would be given a minor part in the cast of characters, and would
thereafter be secured


AN ENGAGEMENT WITH JOHN M'CULLOUGH

or John Raymond at about fifteen dollars a week. The dramatic agent was
to have ten dollars from the first week's salary of the regular
engagement. As he was working at absolutely bottom figures (board
usually costing at least six dollars a week) and as he was skillful at
his business, and could command work at all times if he were willing to
work for his board, the young man thought he was not very rash in making
an attempt, and yet it seemed to the friend of the young man like the
memorable jump of the fish out of the frying-pan. The difficulty of
going back to work after a failure was entirely overlooked. The young
man paid his twenty-five dollars, absolutely the frugal hoard of six
months of toil, got a leave of absence for three weeks, and studied all
one week, meanwhile eating five dollars' worth of very poor board.


HE "ACTED" THROUGH THE WEEK

up to Thursday, when the company failed to pay in advance for the gas,
and it was shut off. He spent the next two or three days preparing
himself for a part in "The Gilded Age." On the second night the "heavy
man," Raymond, became enraged at the manner in which this part was
borne, and demanded that the character be given into the hands of
another person. This was the finishing stroke. The young man stayed at
"home" for three days, and on Friday night went to see his more
fortunate associate. To his friend, who perhaps saw things in a
prejudiced light, it seemed like a conspiracy to make good the dramatic
agent's word of promise--to keep it to the ear and break it to the hope.


THE YOUNG MAN'S MONEY WAS GONE,

he was in debt for three weeks' board, and he had been ruthlessly and
ignominiously branded with failure. He reverted to Brutus at Philippi,
to Cato, and he was nearly on the verge of suicide. It may be that the
cheering words of his friend brought out his true but latent courage.
What were a troop of vulgar and ill-mannered players to him? What was a
dramatic agent but a harpy? He was worth a whole theatre full of actors
such as had worked almost his ruin. Go back and put his nose down to the
grindstone, his desk, where, at least they paid men enough to live on,
and did not make it necessary to cheat a poor landlady!


JEREMY COLLIER

has said that "true courage is the result of reasoning. Resolution lies
more in the head than in the veins, and a just sense of honor and of
infamy, of duty and religion, will carry us farther than all the force
of mechanism." The young man had the courage to go back. His friend was
gratified. As the months passed the bitterness departed. Christmas Day
the young man was sent to the Stock Yards to do a week's-reporting. That
Christmas-week was one of the coldest ever seen in this climate. The
young man's unweathered ears and nose were badly frost-bitten. But
notwithstanding this great obstacle of a cold snap he made a success of
his expedition. His reports demonstrated that the Bible and Plutarch
had not been sown on stony places, and that good English could be used
in reporting the standing and prospects of a retail firm as well as in a
memorial to Congress. When he got back


THE MANAGER OF THE HOUSE HIMSELF

spoke to him, and the second assistant assured him that one of the
"outside men" would soon be put aside to give him a chance on the road.
When a young man goes on the road his board is paid, so that it is that
much of an advance of salary. Six long months, however, ran along at
eight dollars a week, and the unsatisfactory man on the road proved more
influential than the second assistant. When our young man saw this, he
went to the manager, demanded nine dollars a week, and got it after a
loud protest from that broad-hearted functionary. The next week--this
was in the summer--he went on the road in place of a sick man, traveled
through nearly all the towns in Illinois and Iowa, and made a fine
record, both as to the character of his work, his speed, and his
expenses. Upon his return a rival firm, hearing of his work, made him a
proposition at a thousand dollars a year and expenses, with two months'
holiday each year, and he signed a contract. His first year's tramp took
him through nearly all the towns of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas,
Nebraska, and Colorado. He returned in August, with nine hundred dollars
in cash credited to his account in the bank and demanded and received
fifteen hundred dollars and expenses for going over the same route the
next year, and to-day he stands with his head as high among his fellows
as any young man in America. Now a retrospect of the young man's short
career shows that


HE HAD GENUINE COURAGE.

He never failed when he had any chance to succeed. He never will. For
such a man the world is not a world of chance. It is almost a certainty.
The opportunities are more frequent than the men with courage.


DURING THE HARDEST WINTER

since 1842 the young man passed through experiences on the road, brought
about by deep snows and blundering Postmasters that would sicken
anybody's heart, experiences that without excellent brain-work would
simply have stalled anybody, but his coolness, his use of the telegraph
with unerring judgment in following the movements of his superior (who
was traveling in like difficulties--it was like Kepler making a path for
Mars while himself riding on the earth),--extricated him, and made his
journeys little more costly, all told, than those of the preceding year.
In the city all depends on courage. This young man espied a few weak
places in the enemy's lines. He attacked with vigor. In the charge on
the theatre he met the enemy in force and was thrown back with heavy
loss, but in all the other onsets the enemy had no force to withstand
him. One quality which the young man had in a large measure was the fear
of failure. "The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that were
stupid and irrational; but he whose noble soul its fear subdues, and
bravely dares the danger Nature shrinks from." There is a quality much
akin to moral courage, which, however, is not present very noticeably in
the strongest natures, but which is


THE ANCHOR TO MANY LIVES.

I will present it in the following pages. But let me assure you that if
you have the truest courage--the kind that this young man had--you will
not need the quality which I will next take up. Hope rides in a
palace-car, along the railroad, and over the tremendous bridges which
Courage has constructed.

[Illustration]




HOPE.

     Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
       Adorns and cheers the way:
     And still, as darker grows the night,
       Emits a brighter ray.--Goldsmith.


Hope is the best part of our riches. For it alone
reaches further than any other--off into the world which is to come. But
I am speaking to you of the practical advantages of hope. Bacon says:
"Hope is leaf-joy, which may be beaten out to a great extension, like
gold." It has been most beautifully said by Hillard that the shadow of
human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope. Shakspeare
says the miserable have no other medicine. "Hope is a prodigal young
heir, and Experience is his banker, but his drafts are seldom honored,
since there is often a heavy balance against him." Now to make his
account good in the First National Bank of Experience, what should Hope
do? He plainly should begin the deposit of probabilities to draw
against. Walter Scott says: "Hope is brightest when it dawns from
fears," and I should think his drafts would be honored just so far as
they were drawn with circumspection. "Folly ends" writes Cowper "where
genuine hope begins." But where there is no hope there can be no
endeavor, so whether it exist in superabundance or not let us cultivate
it as one of the loveliest of the flowers of life, as absolutely the
sweetest perfume that ever burns in the Golden Censer. Let me tell you
how


HOPE ALONE SAVED THE LIFE

of one of the finest young men in the land. He was the son of a wealthy
wine merchant who had failed in business near Bath-Easton, England. Like
many other lads, he felt the sting of circumstances which promised to
alter, and without good advice got ready to come to America. He was well
trained in the wine trade, and supposed that employment would at once
open to him. He brought over two guns, two revolvers, a field glass, a
sword, much valuable jewelry, about twelve suits of clothes and not a
very large amount of money--possibly three hundred dollars. After
seeing Boston and New York, he "left for the plains," and


ARRIVED IN CHICAGO ON CHRISTMAS,

the year before the great conflagration. Here he was met by other
English friends, and the New Year's calls customary in the city were
made "in fine style," for he was an engaging young man. In just a casual
way he inquired for work, but found his trade did not exist in the New
World. He was thus in the worst business position conceivable. He had
had no drill in anything that would do him any good. Upon spending the
last of his money one night--I think it was for a game of billiards--he
made up his mind that he would go out after work the next day. This he
did. He tramped the snowy streets early in the morning. He waded in the
slush at noon. He clambered over the frozen mud at night. But everywhere
it was dull. The employers were keeping their men simply to have them
when the busy season began. All would say:


"CALL IN NEXT MAY!"

His campaign in Chicago was methodic. He took a certain street each
day. He canvassed one side in the forenoon. He returned in the
afternoon, often carrying his lunch. He never lost hope. But oh! it was
discouraging to those who saw it. Another young man came from St. Louis
to the boarding-house and got a situation in a great dry-goods house, as
entry clerk, for he was a skilled man. This was unfortunate for our
friend, for the companionship of the St. Louis accession was a positive
injury. He resembled the pictures of Byron and was of a viciously
despondent turn of mind. He hated life and life's duties. Our friend
fell into the toils. Together they bemoaned the hardness of the world,
and presently,


LIKE THE COMMUNISTS IN AMERICA,

they overturned kingdoms and systems of society as they blew the foam
from their beer. This folly led to a fight at the boarding-house which
lowered our friend from an English gentleman to a fellow who was
destitute and drunken, but it opened his eyes. St. Louis left for warmer
climes, but our friend redoubled his energy, and finished the actual
canvass of every decent-looking place of business and factory in
Chicago! This is, as I believe, from actual evidences I had at the
time, an actual fact.


A FINE-LOOKING HEALTHY YOUNG MAN

asked every probable employer in Chicago whose attention he could secure
if there were any work, and the answer was "No, sir!" This took him till
about the first of May. He had no influence. He had no friend who had
influence, nor any chance to get one. His watch, rings, and scarf-pin
gradually went to the landlady. His shot-gun, field-glass and clothes
were carried to the pawnbrokers. For his musket he got a dollar, and


FOR HIS SWORD

half as much--upon a solemn promise to redeem it, as even the pawnbroker
doubted the wisdom of such an investment at his own figures. That week
the young man encountered a gentleman who, in England, had known him
well. The disparity in their positions was great, as the gentleman was
now able to give and recently had given his church ten thousand dollars,
but that disparity had been greater in England, where it had been in
favor of the young man. However, this did not prevent the gentleman
offering the young man a job of gardening at a dollar a day, as that
was a good bargain, and that did not prevent the young man eagerly
accepting the offer. That week he earned his board. The next week he was
adrift again, quite well used up from heavy work, but very active. His
hope was the one striking point in his character.


HIS CHEERY VOICE

could always be heard. People liked to have him around, but they never
seemed to pay him anything in return. Early in June he got a job
sandpapering window-frames in a city cellar. This tried his mettle for
it broke his hands to pieces, but he worked through the job at eight
dollars a week. It ruined about twenty-five dollars' worth of clothes
unavoidably. Coming out of the cellar the last day of the job, he looked
into a store which was just opening. Did they want clerks? Oh, yes.
"Lots" of them. How much did they pay? Five per cent. What were they to
sell? "Milton gold jewelry." All right.


"MILTON GOLD JEWELRY"

was made a sensation. It was all in the name. Had they called it brass
the people would have stood off. Make a chain that looks like gold,
call it Milton or Shakspeare or Byron gold, and the people want it--or,
at least they did, the year of the fire. The sales of our friend footed
up more than those of any of thirty clerks, and netted him about a
dollar and a quarter a day. But this charming industry could not last.
The people had bought a chain which they supposed to be worth sixty
dollars for a dollar and a half. In two weeks the chain would fade. It
was a necessity of the business to keep moving. Our friend could have
gone to some other city with the lover of Milton, if he had paid his own
fare, but he was heartily disgusted with the business, the scheme being
essentially American. He next was taken to Morris, Ill., by some kind of
a gang-worker. The English system of working from farm to farm with a
large force was to be tried. There he was treated a good deal worse than
hogs should be used. Finding his way back to Chicago, he again began


HIS TRAMP FOR WORK.

He called on an advertiser who wanted him to travel at a figure so low
that the question arose as to how he would pay his board, when the
advertiser told him he supposed his applicant understood that he "would
have to beat the hotels!" In September came the news of the death of his
sister and mother. And still he tramped. He was now in what his casual
acquaintances considered "a hard hole." His landlady was "carrying"
him--that is, she was wanting his room worse than his company, but,
being a kind-hearted Irish woman, she could not believe another week
would pass without better success. No one with a trade--no one with the
slightest influence--knows what difficulties are before a stranger in a
strange land.


AS GOD WOULD HAVE IT,

on Saturday the seventh of October, 1871, he started out, again full of
hope. About a mile and a half to the west of the city he entered a hotel
at which he had often applied before. The proprietor had broken his leg
the day before. He wanted "a likely young man," Here was one. The
proprietor was himself an Englishman. Here was a youth whose rosy cheeks
proclaimed the shores of Albion. On Sunday he made ready. That night and
the following two days there came a calamity that horrified the
civilized world--perhaps the barbarians as well. The employers who had
refused him shelter and food ran like droves of wolves before a
prairie-fire, and filled their famished bodies off a charity that has
been likened to that of the Savior of the world, so freely was it given.
His hotel was not burned. In the arduous labors of housing three where
one had before been quartered he showed an ability which attracted the
attention of a dealer in real estate who soon took him into his office.
Here he learned a trade. His employer soon found that he had a man who
could make a map worth fifty dollars as well as the map-makers, and this
gave the young man practice. Hope, kindled into such a flame, led the
young man in a march of improvement that even continued in his dreams,
for he often dreamed out some combination of colors, some freak of
lettering, that elicited everybody's admiration. All this improvement


DID NOT COME IN A WEEK OR A YEAR,

but it led to his permanent engagement in a substantial enterprise of
the kind, where work, elegant and original, will always await him, and
where his usefulness is ever apparent to the most unwilling
investigator. From being the victim of the most cruel circumstances
which a man in health ever encountered under my observation, he has
become the valued companion of the leaders of thought, of art, and of
music, and I feel confident that the whole of his ultimate success at
one time in his career depended on the fact that he had more hope than
any other man I ever saw.


HOPE IS LIKE THE CORK TO THE NET,

which keeps the soul from sinking in despair. Hope is the sun, which as
we journey towards it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us. Dr.
Johnson has well and truly said that the flights of the human mind are
not from enjoyment to enjoyment, but from hope to hope. It is a strange
frailty of human nature that we part more willingly with what we really
possess than with our expectations of what we wish for. The man who
curbs this tendency is known as a man of wisdom. What a beautiful poem
is


CAMPBELL'S "PLEASURES OF HOPE!"

How the changes ring upon the beauties of "Hope, the charmer," until, at
last, we see her smiling at the general conflagration, we see her
lighting her torch at nature's funeral pile! And yet what an ingenious
device was that of the ancient, who, knowing the powerful allurements of
Hope, put on the front of the magic shield "Be bold! Be bold!" and on
the other side "Be not too bold!" There is a development of hope known
as audacity. A touch of audacity is generally considered necessary to
get along in the world. Be careful that your audacity is never called
"cheek." When you have rights to retrieve, you cannot be too audacious;
when you expect something for nothing, and demand instead of appealing,
you are "cheeky." It does not pay in the long run. It is the sign and
seal of a greedy nature.


WHEN POOR FRANCE

trembled in the nightmare of the Revolution, and the Kings of Europe had
agreed to conquer and dismember her, there arose a dark-faced man in the
tribune of the French Congress. He was a man of terrible personal power
and magnetism. Hope must have cradled him in his babyhood. He hurled a
defiance at Europe that fairly shook France to a delirium of patriotism,
and as he was drawing to a close he thundered; "What needs France to
vanquish her enemies, to terrify them? Naught but audacity!--still more
audacity!--always! audacity!" Fourteen republican armies sprang forth
full armed, as though Danton's words had been the fabulous dragon's
teeth sown ages before in the bright fields of mythology.


FRANCE WAS RIGHT,

therefore God inspired her. Be sure, when your flights are bold, that
you have the right. "Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just." Hope
has been defamed more than any other of the joys of life, just as the
most charitable become the target of the greater portion of the
malignity of fault-finding fellow-creatures. Treat Hope fairly, my young
friend, and she will never desert you, neither will she poison your
expectations, as did the hags who prophesied to Macbeth.




BE CORRECT.

     Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
     A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
     Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
     And now a bubble burst, and now a world.--Pope.


I have here quoted one of the grandest flights of the
human fancy, and with a purpose. If God, who is perfection, and in whose
image we are faintly formed, watches the weakliest of his lambs,
supports the weariest of his poor sparrows, should not we, in trying to
be true men, endeavor to pay equal care to all things intrusted to our
attention, be they great or be they small! And more than that. The
little errors beget myriads of their kind. "Many mickles make a muckle."
The habit sooner or later, leads some of us into an awful abyss, where
it had been better we had not lived. Errors creep into character just as
ideas get into our brain. Says Moore:

     And how like forts, to which beleaguers win
     Unhoped-for entrance through some friend within,
     One clear idea, wakened in the breast
     By memory's magic, lets in all the rest.

Says Franklin: "A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a
nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want
of a horse the driver was lost; being overtaken and slain by an enemy,
all for the want of care about a horse-shoe nail." "In persons grafted
with a serious trust," says Shakspeare "negligence is a serious crime."
And so it is.


STORY OF SAG BRIDGE.

In September, 1873, a conductor on the Chicago and Alton Railroad
started south with a freight train. He was to stop at a station a few
miles from Joliet and wait for the incoming passenger train from St.
Louis. He consulted his watch. That unhappy piece of mechanism told him
that he had time to reach the next station. He spoke to the operator of
the telegraph. That person could give him no information as to where the
passenger train was, and he, determining not to wait, pulled out. As his
train was still within hearing, the operator rushed to the platform
with the news that the passenger train had left the nearest station! The
operator knew that


TWO TRAINS WERE ABOUT TO COME IN COLLISION,

a knowledge that has sometimes deprived railroad men of their minds
forever. Soon the awful shock reverberated afar, and from nine to
fifteen persons were killed in a horrible manner. One of the most
prominent men of Chicago was scalded so that the flesh left his
skeleton. An unkind fate preserved the conductor to confront his
ignominy. It was found that


HE HAD FORGOTTEN TO WIND UP HIS WATCH!

How could such a butchery have been brought about, save by a course of
small errors which had eaten into his moral nature, leaving him a great
ghoulish fiend of Carelessness, running his pitiless Juggernaut up and
down the highway between two great cities! The hideous errors made by
men are always indicative of those particular men. Some people never
make errors at all! Why? Because they are careful. Simple, is it
not--like Napoleon's tactics? Yet that constant care is so wonderful in
its effects that human science cannot peer into the mystery of its
action. Men laboring under total aberration of the mind have been known
to carefully wind a clock at a given hour, and evince no other power to
do a reasonable thing. Begin early in life to do all these little things
with the greatest care.


IMITATE THE CELEBRATED DETECTIVES,

who actually pay little attention to things gross and palpable, but
follow the more closely those minute clews which, interlacing and
concentering, often as a whole, lead them, with the greatest certainty,
to the dark hand that did the foul deed. Here is


A RIDICULOUS ERROR:

On Tuesday, the third of May, 1881, Scranton, Willard & Co., brokers, of
New York City, sold to Decker & Co. stocks to the enormous sum of
$127,000. For this property Decker & Co. wrote a check on a bank for
$127,000, and a messenger was sent by the cashier of Scranton, Willard &
Co., to have the check certified--that is, to have the bank officials
write across the face of the check in red ink "Certified," meaning that
the money was there and would thenceforth be dedicated to the redemption
of that particular piece of paper. The boy returned with the check, the
cashier put upon his own file a "tag" representing the amount of money,
along with many other similar records, and the boy was sent with the
check to the Bank of North America. The boy handed to the banker, with
the check, a similar "tag" from the cashier, which was also filed. When
you deposit money, at many banks, you fill out a "tag" or deposit-check,
and offer it with the money, which "tag" is used by the banker as a
safeguard against errors and lapses of all kinds. When Scranton, Willard
& Co.'s cashier reckoned up his "tags" he found no record of a check for
$127,000. He immediately accused the boy of purloining the check, and
inquiry at the bank (met by the reply that no such check had been
deposited, as shown by the depositor's own "tags") strengthened his
suspicions.


ALL THE BANKS OF NEW YORK

were at once notified of the loss of the great check, and costly
engagements were made to advertise the matter all over the country. The
boy was not arrested, but his case was not neglected, you may be
assured. Repeated cross-questioning failed to shake his simple
statement, that he had done as he had been told to do.


THE ACCOUNTS OF THE BANK OF NORTH AMERICA

were behind that afternoon, and the cashier stayed until late in the day
to get them balanced. After he had finally secured the totals of the
day's transactions, he found that he had received, according to the
depositors' "tags," $114,300 less than he had paid out. In some
perturbation he recalled the notice of Scranton, Willard & Co., and at
once sent to them, to see if that affair had anything to do with his
immense discrepancy. Following this line of inquiry, Scranton, Willard &
Co.'s cashier found that, in attempting to put the figures "127,000" on
the "tag" of deposit he had neglected to write the last cipher, and the
"tag" for $12,700 which had been made in its place, added to $114,300
which the banker lacked in "tags," exactly made up the $127,000 which
the bank had in reality credited to Scranton, Willard & Co.'s account.
How could a man leave off


A CIPHER WHICH MEANT $114,300?

Simply by a course of instruction and development in error, until,
probably nothing save the most colossal sums would command his
unqualified attention. Let us suppose your mother or sister gives you a
letter to mail. Do not put that letter in your pocket. Carry it in your
hand until you reach the place to post it. Do this for years. After that
drill, when you get a letter to mail, you will not need to keep it in
your hand, for you will feel it in your hand just as long as it is in
your pocket, as the one-armed man has sensations in both hands!


"WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES!"

I spoke in the preceding chapter of the ancient shield with its "Be
Bold! Be Bold!" Now, on our modern shield we would put "Be Correct! Be
Correct!" and it would not be necessary to put on the reverse side "Be
not too Correct!" You cannot afford to make errors! Last year a
gentleman drew a sum of money from the First National Bank of New York
City. As he was about to leave the building, he discovered an error. He
returned to the paying teller. He said: "I think you have made a mistake
in paying me." The cashier stood there, by chance. "No, sir," said he,
"we never make mistakes!" "But," said the gentleman, "you gave me
twenty dollars too much money!" "_No, sir!_" thundered the cashier, "we
_never_ make mistakes!" Not for twenty dollars in cash would that banker
admit that the establishment with which he was connected ever made a
mistake. And you can be assured that


SUCH A SPARTAN SPIRIT WEEDS OUT

most of the ordinary blunders of business. Now if this great rich banker
could not afford to indulge in mistakes, how much less can you, who have
your whole fortune to make, be anything less than strictly accurate in
all your operations? Study the spirit of that banker's answer. Imitate
his horror of an error. He must have had good reasons for that feeling.


A HOMELY EXAMPLE.

A customer comes in from the country. He says: "I have brought a load of
wheat to town to-day--about fifty bushel I should guess. I'll be in
after noon and settle my account with you." Very good; you, the clerk,
hurry to your books, to make out his account. When he comes in, he
glances over it, and says: "Good gracious! you haven't given me credit
for four dollars and seventy-five cents I paid you last May. I
recollect it because I was in town to get a corn-planter when I paid it.
And I've got your receipt, too." Sure enough, there is the receipt,
which you have filled out yourself. And yet you failed to make an entry
of the fact in his account. Shame covers you.


THE FARMER BEGINS TO HAVE SUSPICIONS.

Your employer begins to talk of the fall plowing as soon as he can, but
the farmer goes over to your unscrupulous competitors in business,
relates to them the fact that his scrupulous attention to details has
saved him four dollars and seventy-five cents, and asks their opinion as
to whether or not an attempt were not made to cheat him. His listeners
talk about you in a mild-mannered way--

     Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
     And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.

Off goes your customer in his lumber-wagon, carrying that gross libel
upon your place of business, to fill the prairies and the openings with
its brood of gossiped offspring, until, some day, it comes back that
your employer is a horsethief and has served a term in the penitentiary!

The errors which are often made in handling figures are just as
annoying. It is a trifling error to call eight and four thirteen, but it
often may disconcert an immense calculation. Like the pebble in the
shoe, small in itself, it may do great injury. Some years ago there
traveled through the country a genuine "lightning calculator." You could
put down any number, big or little, while his back was turned, and he
would turn again and mark the total with far greater rapidity than he
could speak, and he thought out the total far quicker than he could mark
it. Of course, he had a magic book to sell, but when you came to read
his magic book and see how he did it, you found it was the same old way,
only he was more expert than you. He could add four thousand two hundred
and twenty eight and three thousand six hundred and fifty four as easily
as you could forty two and thirty six, or perhaps four and three, so you
see that the scheme of running up a single column of figures is at best
a clumsy one.


YOU EXPOSE YOURSELF

to additional errors by enlarging the possible additions in a body of
numbers. We are taught the multiplication table up to twelve times
twelve. We never stumble up to that point. But it ought to continue up
to one hundred times one hundred. We could then always add two figures
to two figures easier then to parcel the operation out into two jobs.
The "lightning calculator" had probably carried it up to five thousand
times five thousand. Take an interest in "sums." Learn


THE FREAKS OF FIGURES.

For instance, to multiply any set of figures by 11--say 54--add the 5
and 4 together and put the 9 between the 5 and the 4. To multiply 1, 2,
3, 4, 5 and 6 by 11, do the same way, only carry your 10's. Thus 6 and 5
are 11, put down 1 before the 6; 5 and 4 are 9 and 1 to carry is 10; put
down the before the 16, etc. Again to multiply, say 18 9's by 9, bring
down a 1, then make 170's and a 9 out to the left. Again to square
numbers, call even 10's the body; call the rest the surplus,--104--add
surplus to body making it 108; now square the surplus (4) making 16 and
put it after the 108, or 10,816. This is simply taking advantage of the
10s. Take 33 and you will see. Here 3 is the surplus; add the surplus,
making 36; multiply 36 by 30, making 1,080; square the surplus, 3 times
3--9; add to 1,080--making 1,089. You see you get an even thirty to
multiply by and load up the sum to be multiplied sufficiently to
balance. Above 5 call it a deficit and go to your next 10 for your body.


I MENTION THESE TRICKS

not because they are good for anything practical, but to get you to take
up figures and be quick with them. Get yourself up a multiplication
table running to 50 times 50--there's something practical. The man quick
and accurate at figures is always esteemed.


OUR LANGUAGE

is a vast record of the changes in pronunciation which have been brought
about by affected people as well as careless and ignorant people. "'Tis
true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." But you cannot change it by
spelling "balance" with two _ls_, or "sure" with an _h_. Be accurate in
your spelling. Restrict yourself to such words as you can spell, and you
will soon improve if you are guilty of such errors. In conclusion, if
you go fishing and catch three perch and one black bass, say that you
caught those fish, and not that you caught three black bass and one
perch. Right there is where you can form habits that will shine out in
your face as you grow to the full dignity of manhood. You see I lay
special stress on habit. The Duke of Wellington said that habit was ten
times nature. Horace Mann said


"HABIT IS A CABLE.

We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it." Dr.
Locke said with a wonderful knowledge of life: "Habit works more
constantly and with greater facility than reason; which, when we have
most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed."
Thus, you see, when a man is spoken of as a person "of good habits," it
means something more than is usually conceived. It means he is under
chains which he cannot break--and, in reality, that he could not be a
bad man without suffering and discomfort.




SUCCESS.

     Nothing succeeds so well as success.--Talleyrand.


[Illustration T] The man Talleyrand, who made the above mocking
assertion, was one of the closest observers of human nature who have
ever lived. And yet what he said in a spirit of uncommon hatred of his
fellow-beings is really another way of saying the exact truth--that
success comes only after so many trials and disappointments that the
world, considering it a safe rule, admires the result, and feels that
the reflected credit for a great result belongs to him upon whom it
falls. Beside you toils a young man of your own age. He does not seem to
care to rise. He dislikes the few duties of the present, and would be
inclined to shrink from further responsibilities. It may be that he is
the happier as compared with you, but men must not consult simply their
own individual happiness. Sooner or later all men take on a broader
burden than merely their own support. Try early in life to get the start
which the experience of others furnishes you. You are lucky that you
were born in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Men before you
have, by ambition and energy, made the affair of living easier for you.
Right here in youth is the time to begin the battle. You are now a
private.


OFFICERS ARE VERY SCARCE.

Make up your mind to have shoulder-straps early in the campaign. You
cannot afford to miss a single battle. Every opportunity which opens to
you is a city to be taken, and you are to be put in command. See that it
surrenders. No city ever properly besieged evaded final capitulation.
The chances are all in your favor. Remember, when you contemplate your
unambitious comrade, that he is likely to change his tastes as he grows
older. If he cannot give a reasonable degree of encouragement to those
tastes he will then become crabbed and sour. Wherever you see men crusty
and difficult to please, be sure they have had cities to take and
failed to capture them.


ALEXANDER SMITH,

a Scotch poet who died at a very early age, said very appropriately: "To
bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them
with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all
events, a moderate amount of it, is required--just as sunshine is needed
for the ripening of peaches and strawberries." Now how are you to catch
this marvelous sunshine of prosperity? Simply, do not shut it out. Your
comrade has had the moral ague. He fears that, if the sun shine on him,
it will bring a return of his fever. When the sun shines on you, do not
miss a ray. It makes you grow.


YOUR PARTICULAR DUTIES

are soon learned. Why is it that the affairs of walking behind a counter
and actually knowing what your employer pays for his goods so soon lose
the magic there once was in them? It is because the human brain is
supple, and comprehends quickly. By the time certain problems are solved
others spring up. See that you solve them. The mind should be pacified
in its desire for new conquests.


THE SAFE RULE

as to whether or not you are fitted for new endeavors is to find to your
own true satisfaction that you can do your duties better than anyone not
in daily practice of the same kind of work. If your employer can take
hold and do a thing once a week better than you who do it a hundred
times a day, then it should still have considerable charm for you, for
your mind is strangely unfamiliar with the procedure. When a clerk stays
in one position all his life, it is certain to be from


LACK OF BOTH AMBITION AND ABILITY,

and he lacks a good deal of each. Every little while, through the
sickness, advancement, or bad judgment of others, a place just a little
more responsible than your own is left vacant. Somebody is wanted badly.
You are the man, and are put there for the interval. There is the
pivotal point. By unusual endeavor you can probably fill the place
better than it was filled by the regular occupant. Your employer,
expecting less of you, gets more, and praises you. Now, by praising
you, he is, somehow or other,


"TAKING STOCK IN YOU."

If he "keeps you down," he shows his poor judgment, and he is not going
to do that if he can help it. On the other hand, your comrade is put in
the vacant place. The duties are hard and perplexing. He is compelled to
go and ask a man for some money. The man is mean. He not only refuses
the money, but addresses some personal considerations to your comrade
which sicken him to the heart. He returns to your employer with a tale
of failure well tinged with his own morbid feelings and wounded vanity.
Your employer is irritated, and attributes the fiasco to the ambassador.
To satisfy his own views of things, he prophesies that your comrade
never will amount to anything, anyhow. Now, to see this prediction
verified is, unfortunately for your comrade, just as necessary to your
employer's self-love as to see you succeed. The point of the first
opportunity, the first impression on your employer, is really central,
pivotal. If you get a big iron safe on such a spot, you can turn it with
extraordinary ease.

There is no road to practical business so good as practice. You read of
clerks being educated by sham forms of business. You might as well read
of men gambling with counterfeit money. Business men want clerks who
have been private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain. When a man
starts in as captain he is likely to get discharged as private. In the
great printing houses


PROOF READERS

are required, to see that the types are spelled out, one by one, into
the right words, and that the right words are rightly spelled. Now let a
college graduate apply for such a position. He knows Greek and Latin. He
can spell--or thinks he can. He can turn you out a sentence, which,
after going about so far, refers to what it is talking about, cuts a
pigeon-wing like the boys on the ice, tells a little tale between two
dashes, and one inside of that between two parentheses ("finger-nails,"
the printers call them), again refers to what it is talking about, and
closes up with three unaccented syllables following a heavy sound.
Sometimes folks hire this gentleman. The proof-slip is thrown in wet,
greatly to his horror, and after drying it he finds they are waiting for
it outside, and some other proof-reader is compelled to take it. Then
he learns he must read it wet, as it is. Pretty soon the foreman of the
printers brings in a proof-slip which is set in three sizes of type
where the gentleman discovered but one size. Then the foreman of the
proof-room has a discouraging way of taking the gentleman's proof and
marking from eight to ten glaring typographical errors which the
gentleman has overlooked, and eight or ten typographical absurdities,
which he has approved, and, horrors upon horrors! eight or ten errors of
"style." Now, for the first time, the gentleman has learned that every
time the word "President" appears in the newspaper it is either
capitalized or uncapitalized, while he had naturally supposed that it
took its chances, the way a picnic does!


THUS THE GENTLEMAN GETS AN IDEA

of his utter incompetency to fill the place of a trained man. And he
never gets half so complete a view of his uselessness as do those around
him. Such proof-readers rarely work two nights. They are corporals in
captains' places. Or, perhaps, they are captains of artillery in the
infantry service. What do folks do when the best proof-reader is
missing? They go out into the type-setting room and take the brightest
printer they can find. He cannot tell French from Latin, but he can see
a fair share of the errors in a proof-slip, and will not let the
telegraphic abbreviation for government go into the paper as "goat," nor
that for Republican as "roofer," as I have seen collegiates do.


HE IS ALREADY A LIEUTENANT.

Give him a little practice and he is a captain. With energy and ambition
failure never comes if you only know the difficulties. "Fools rush in
where angels fear to tread" is as good in business as in poetry. In the
great cities there are long streets lined with retail store-rooms of
every quality of location. They rent at from twenty-five to a hundred
dollars a month. Many a store-room has not had an occupant in it for ten
years who did not grow poorer. No good business man could be induced to
enter into a business at such a point. But


THE FOOLS HAVE RUSHED IN,

like the collegiate into the proof-room, convinced that they could do
what good business men know to be impossible,--that is take in eight
dollars a day and pay fifty dollars rent, on forty per cent profit.
Here and there is a grocer who gets up at half past five in the morning,
opens up, puts out his eggs, oranges, berries, lemons, potatoes, beans,
and bananas, sweeps out, gets out his horse, goes to the market-street,
does a day's buying there and elsewhere, and by eight o'clock is ready
for business, just about as the man who expects to share in trade with
him is unlocking his doors. Speak to the eight o'clock man and he will
tell you that he has to stay up till ten at night, and that he cannot
burn the candle of life at both ends. But, for all that, he is
grievously disappointed when the final collapse comes. Nothing succeeds
like success because very few things are like success. Nothing on the
street succeeds like this grocery, because nowhere else on the street is
so much work done by so few men. Nowhere else does the proprietor put
all of his time and his money into his business, and, in strawberry
time, for instance, retail thirty-five dollars' worth of strawberries in
one day with only one clerk, one delivery-boy and a cashier! At the same
time, this successful grocer would not invest one cent in the store-room
opposite, where, with so much confidence, the eight-o'clock man has put
all his money.


THE MAN OF SUCCESS KNOWS THE DIFFICULTIES.

"Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that
putteth it off," says the Bible, yet that is precisely what we are doing
when we smile at the sally of some envious dealer about the "luck" of
our grocer--that "nothing succeeds as well as success." But the landlord
goes on renting his store-room, and thanking his stars that the fools
are not all dead yet. Do not desire a position two grades ahead of you.
The one that is next to you is your proper goal. Over the shoulder of
the companion who holds it you can get many a glance long before your
chance comes to do the work, and, even then, what looked so very easy to
you before it came your turn to do it, will now "shoot light horrors
through you." In a large measure people are bought at their own prices.
If they are worth those figures, their fortune is made. A celebrated
painter was once asked how he mixed his colors. He replied that


HE "MIXED THEM WITH BRAINS."

Mix brains with your business. Like the opium or chloral slave you will
be able to endure a larger quantity each day, and the effect will not
be darkness and death, but light and life. Simply because you think you
can do a thing is no great sign you can do it. You must have brains and
probabilities in your favor. You must absolutely have done something
very nearly like it. I never saw a more signal instance of the general
self-conceit of the race than in the experience of a young man who once
sold a little rubber reed which he laid on his tongue, and with which


HE MOCKED ALL KINDS OF BIRDS.

After seeing him do it, the crowd would gather about in great herds,
with their "quarters" high in the air, anxious to purchase, and just as
sure they could do the same thing as the eight o'clock man that he can
get a crowd into his store. I do not remember a solitary instance where
a purchaser ever acquired the least facility in imitating the sounds of
birds, and I have been tempted to believe the "machine" was a "dummy" by
which the salesman conveyed to the gaping crowd the hope of acquiring
his wonderful art. Do not, in the journey of life, attempt impossible
stages of travel because they look easy at the start. Stop at each inn
which the experience of years has shown to be necessary for your
continued comfort. But never, on any account, lie down between the inns,
for the outlaws called Failure and Discredit will fall upon you and work
your destruction. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge nor wisdom in the
grave." "In the morning sow thy seed." "Let us crown our selves with
rosebuds before they be withered."

[Illustration]




COMPANIONS.

     But to our tale.--Ae market night
     Tam had got planted unco right
     Fast by an ingle bleezing finely
     Wi reaming swats that drank divinely;
     And at his elbow Souter Johnny,
     His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony;
     Tam lo'ed him like a very brither--
     They had been fou for weeks thegither!--Burns.


I cannot but feel much apprehension in approaching a
subject so nearly allied to the actual inner character of a man. "A man
is known by the company he keeps." I cannot admonish the blind that they
should see. I cannot suggest to Tam O'Shanter that he should not
associate with Cobbler Johnny. Why, he loves him like a very brother!
Indeed, as the last sublime token of friendship, have they not been
drunk for weeks together? Besides, are they not such worthless wights
that they will do less harm in associating with each other than in
enlarging their power of evil by operating on new material? If you are
Tam O'Shanter, I cannot very well advise you to seek out some worthy
young man for an associate and attaint his character and his reputation
by clinging to him. Now the only thing I can consistently do is to hope
you are a young man


FAR REMOVED FROM TAM O'SHANTER IN HABITS

and selfishness. I can hope that you are a young man who, in going on a
fishing excursion with some reputable person of your age, will not cast
a cloud on the mind of that person's employer, and cause him to fear
that his clerk is falling instead of rising in self-esteem. Let my hope
be taken as an enduring fact. Now I feel I am on safe ground. You are
building a structure. On your west party-wall your neighbor is also
erecting one. He is building it so that it will fall down--that is
plain. When it falls it will involve you in its ruins because the middle
wall supports both edifices. What do you do? You go to the authorities,
and they make him take down his house brick by brick. In this way the
law surrounds you with its beneficent protection, and you need not
suffer from the faults of others. But alas!

[Illustration: "Adieu, valor! rust, rapier! be still, drum: For your
manager is in love; yea, he loveth."]


MORALLY,

when you put up a party-wall you must abide by the conclusion. If your
companion reflect credit on you, then you are doubly strong, but if he
pull you down, then there is no relief and little sympathy. Let us
suppose that, in an absolutely evil hour, you have learned to play
billiards. A brother-clerk says: "Let us play a string at dinner-time!"
Across your mind flits the bright green table, the beautiful ivory
balls, the wonderful angle which you discovered the last time you
played, and, compared with the dull routine of the store, you
momentarily feel that


A GAME OF BILLIARDS

would be truly beneficial. So, at noon you go. There never was a game of
billiards that would end precisely at the moment you should leave for
duty. There never were two employes who played billiards who did not
cheat their employers out of considerable time. There never was an
employer who would not resent this injustice. The comrade who does not
play billiards will, sooner or later, get an absolute advantage over
you. You will come in, complaining of your luck only to find that your
slow-going comrade has "got something" which you have missed. Employers
do not want head-clerks or partners who hang around billiard saloons or
livery stables. "He who comes from the kitchen smells of its smoke."
What can you get at a billiard saloon? You can get the good opinion of
some person who is never civil to anybody. His incivility has a charm
for your young mind. You naturally imitate him.


YOU TRY IT ON A CUSTOMER.

He says: "Have you any buttons like this?" showing one about fourteen
years old. You look at him insolently and say "Nah!" (meaning "No,
sir"). This makes the other clerk (who plays billiards with you) laugh
very heartily, but it makes your employer laugh out of the other corner
of his mouth, for he has no business to keep such a clerk, and the
customer knows it. The customer may avenge himself by refusing an
extension on a note which he holds, and that note, possibly, may have
your employer's name on it! The mistake you make in this particular case
is in applying the manners of a billiard-saloon to the uses of a place
of business. A very ordinary-looking old man was one day standing in a
great bank in New York City. He was talking with a friend, and the
friend spoke of desiring to have a draft cashed which had been drawn in
his favor. Knowing that the old man banked at that place, he asked him
to step up to the paying teller and identify the drawer of the money.
This the old man, naturally, attempted to do. He said: "I know this
gentleman to be Alvin H. Hamilton." The paying teller looked at the old
man and judged him by his clothes. He said: "I don't know you at all,
sir! Pass along." This did not please the old man. He expostulated.
"Pass along!" yelled the teller, looking ominously toward the policeman,
who edged toward the group.


"I'LL PASS ALONG!"

said the old man, hotly. And he drew a blank check, engraved in a costly
manner, from his pocket, and wrote on the "please-pay" line "Five
hundred and fifty thousand dollars." Then he signed his name to it,
turned it over, put his name on the back of it, and got in line again.
By the time he was at the window the word had gone along the line. The
receiving teller, the collecting clerk, the certifying clerk and the
examiners, had passed the news to


THE CASHIER AND THE PRESIDENT

that something unusual was about to happen, and those magnates had
rushed to the paying teller's side. "Do you know that signature?" said
the old man with a gleam in his eye. Now it was the teller's turn to
feel wretched. "Pay five hundred and fifty thousand--Babbit, soap man!
oh! what an idiot I am!" All this went through his head. The president,
the cashier, abased themselves before the irate old man. It was all a
mistake! They assured him! They assured him! Beg pardon! Impertinence of
new teller. And a' that, and a' that. But it would not do! The money
went to another bank, and a business worth thousands of dollars annually
was lost, together with the natural prestige of such patronage. There
was what I should call


A CASE OF BILLIARD-ROOM MANNERS,

and a costly one. Drop that style. Says Bishop Horne: "It is expedient
to have an acquaintance with those who have looked into the world; who
know men, understand business, and can give you good intelligence and
good advice when they are wanted." "He that walketh with wise men" says
the Bible, "shall be wise; but a companion of fools shall be destroyed."
Try to frequent the company of your betters. Good books are safe
companions. Good men, a little older than yourself, are still better.
Perhaps good women, who take an interest in young men, are better than
all others, for they are more unselfish, and often have a spare thought
for the young man that makes his life happier.


LEARN TO ADMIRE RIGHTLY.

The leer of the man who has sold lemonade in a circus has a strange
charm for a young man. It has a strange repulsiveness for the "solid
man" of business. The look of a man with a cigar put in his mouth at a
sharp upward angle and with a hat lurched like the cargo of a bad
sailer, has a strong fascination for a young man. It is a strong
irritant to the man whose companionship is an honor. You cannot do
better than to frequent some church, rent a sitting, and have a
positive engagement two or three times a week. You are a great gainer by
this. It may cost you a little; but you will get all that back in moral
capital--just as valuable in business as money. Says George Washington:
"The company in which you will improve most will be least expensive to
you." In your church you will meet men who do not live all for
themselves, as does the dominant mind in the bar-room. Their drill and
discipline have made them more unselfish. They will help you in many
ways. They will throw a rope to you and pull you aboard. Sooner or later
your association with them will get you position, respect, family,
happiness, success, and above all, that peace which passeth all
understanding. Do not take this as preaching. It is as practical as
anything in this book. Chesterfield says: "No man can possibly improve
in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some
degree of restraint." What makes mankind revere Shakspeare Because he
said fine things? No. But because he said true things. Listen to him:
"It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught,
as men take diseases of one another."




ON THE ROAD.

     Conference maketh a ready man.--Lord Bacon.

     Now stirs the lated traveler apace
     To gain the timely inn.--Macbeth, Act III., Sc. 3.


What is there about going to a strange town on business
which should make a man's heart feel like a cold biscuit inside of him?
A young man may have been to a certain village on endless excursions of
pleasure, when his pulse beat as gloriously as the bass drum on a grand
circus-entry into town, yet when he has to go to the depot to take the
cars for that same town to sell goods there for the first time in his
life, it is harder to carry his heart to the train than it is to lug his
grip-sacks. When you feel that way, do not feel ashamed. All the "old
heads" on the road have been in that predicament. Talk to your heart the
way you think about a mother when she mourns for her child. You say "Let
her feel bad. It's natural. It'll do her good." Now when your home
begins to drop out of sight behind, and the conductor comes along to
punch your ticket rather than to comfort you, say to your heart "Go it,
you you old ninnyhammer! It's natural for you to thump, but you can't
interfere with business, you know!" Your mind is all right. It's your
body. Now, while


YOU ARE NEARING THAT FATAL TOWN,

you look back over the goods in the store. Of course, you are positively
familiar with everything in stock. You came out on the road either
because you asked to go, or because other folks had espied a faculty of
persuasion in you which they thought would sell goods. Sometimes a man
looks persuasively, sometimes he talks persuasively; sometimes he both
looks and talks it. This is after he has had practice. "Iron sharpeneth
iron. So a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." Now this town
you are going to is a band of enemies. How can you make a conquest? By
doing as Napoleon did. Set your own time for the fight, pitch upon one
man at a time, always pick out one not used to your mode of warfare,
and then clean him out before he thinks the action has begun.
"Formerly," says Bovee, naively, "when great fortunes were only made in
war, war was business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by
business, business is war."


HERE IS THE TOWN NOW.

How dirty those houses look! O, yes, they are the habitations of the
poor. You know the hotel you are going to, of course. You know where it
is. Now you grab your valises, your overcoat is on, and you climb down.
Want a 'bus? It's only fifty cents for a ride of a block and a half!
Well, you will get along without it. The labor will get your blood
going. You have thus made a sale already, equal to two dollars. Put that
down to your credit. By this time, although you are among the
Philistines, you are yourself again. You go into the wash-room of the
hotel, enter the dining-room, eat a very poor meal, and get up to begin
the fight. Now sit down a half-hour and let your food get started in
your stomach.


GETTING YOUR MIND.

Does not the General spread his maps before him? You probably have a
certain firm in your mind, either by chance or direction from your
employer. This, of course, is the weak point in the enemy's lines. Here
he has trusted to the ground as it looked from his side of the field,
when, in reality, it presented few difficulties from yours. Some
experience in the world has led me to believe that if a salesman has
come to the opinion, even in the most absurd manner, that he can sell a
certain man goods, he can do it, almost beyond the chance of a doubt. I
once knew a successful solicitor who seemed to do all his work at his
desk. He would sit in the greatest gloom


CANVASSING HIMSELF!

That was a fact. He was really revolving the weak places of the enemy in
his mind. Suddenly he would start up, seize his paraphernalia, make his
expedition, and return rich-laden. This taught me the wonderful power of
persuasion when directed in exactly the right way. One of the first
things to forget is yourself. I think possibly the finding in your mind
of a man to whom you can sell goods depends principally upon your belief
that when you make your dash on him you forget what he will think of
_you_. You have the willingness to sacrifice all that to the one object
before you. In the possible places of attack which you reject, you are
not yet willing to make that sacrifice. You know


ABRAHAM LINCOLN

was a great man. Why? Well, here is one reason. The little men came to
him one day with horror spread upon their narrow features. Said they:
"O, Mr. Lincoln, we have just discovered that Grant drinks whisky. We
have come to ask you to put a Temperance General in control of the more
important of his actions. He has the lives of our children and our
friends in his hands. Save us from his liability to plunge us all in
general blood!" Now this was after Vicksburg. Mr. Lincoln took an
interest in this revelation that elated the petitioners. "You are quite
sure he drinks whisky, are you?" "O, yes.


HE WAS DRUNK AT SHILOH."

"Well, will you not try hard to find out where he gets his whisky?" said
Old Abe; "I want some of it for my other generals!"

This man Abraham Lincoln wanted to put down the Rebellion for the sake
of both the North and the South. Anything that would contribute to that
end was what he wanted in large quantities.


YOU ARE DRESSED

as you have always dressed--with easy-fitting business garments.
Absolutely nothing on your person gives offense, either in newness or
oldness. You enter the store to whose proprietor you intend to sell
goods. If you know him and he is busy, you nod and avoid a talk. This is
both difficult and unlucky. If he is at your service, you state that you
have come to show him your samples. You do not hope he needs anything at
the start. Of course, he needs nothing. That does not enter into the
question. He will buy at the end. You now, if your samples are with you,
pick out some medium bargains. Reserve your powerful arguments. Try to
make him understand the true value of these goods. Nothing under the sun
is so powerful as example. Now, to furnish examples, you must state who
sells this particular line of goods. Mention the names with all the
precision, volubility and confidence in the world. He may evince no
interest, but it has moved him greatly to hear all those names! Now he
begins to talk prices to you. The chances are that he is "drawing the
long bow"--that is, that he is putting the prices at which he buys full
low enough! Do not dispute him. Never argue with him. Accept all he says
as gospel. Very soon he will be on the other tack. You will be talking,
and you can judge whether he has told the truth or not. Now you are both
on excellent terms. He thinks you are a very decent young fellow.


BRING ON YOUR "LEADERS."

You ought to have some little line that you are selling for less than it
is worth. Give him the solemn privilege of getting some of it. He
wavers, he is lost. This is the entering wedge. If he is sharp enough to
buy only "leaders," he is too sharp for you, and for your house. Ten
chances to one he would never pay anyway. You must have picked out a
poor man to start on. But if you have an ordinary gentlemanly man of
business, he will take some goods of you. Canvass him for everything. Do
not neglect your work now it has come. He is wavering everywhere. He is
contradicting by his acts nearly every assertion he made behind his
entrenchments. Never mind that. Do not leave him until there is "no
more buy in him." Now, after you have all the items--and


NEVER STOP HIM

when he is giving them--sum them up, read them over, take his name (firm
name), his post-office (not his railroad station), his railroad station,
his express company, his railroad, absolutely everything. Make his name
"Owens," not "Owen," "Ransom's Sons" not Ransom & Sons, "Smythe" not
"Smith," if that be the way he puts it. A man is very tender about his
name. Never forget that. Impress those things on your shipping-clerk at
home. Tell him you have sold Edwards Pierrepont a bill of goods, and
that this particular buyer has


A PRIVATE GRAVEYARD

for shipping-clerks who mark it "Edward." You have already consulted
your commercial "testament" to see if the firm will pay. If the bill be
too large for the credit allowed in the "testament," telegraph to your
firm about it and get instructions. Of course, you cannot have mistaken
prices or sold below the necessary profit. A firm in Boston started out
a confident young man, and he sold tremendous bills of goods. He took
no account of the value of the goods, freight, or time of payment. All
those merchants who had friends on his "beat" telegraphed to them to be
sure and give him an order. He was the rage. There was also some rage at
Boston when the orders began coming in. They telegraphed to Madison


TO HEAD HIM OFF,

but he had "taken a shoot" to Rockford. They telegraphed to Dubuque, but
he had doubled down toward Galesburg. They telegraphed to Galesburg but
he had escaped into Iowa. Finally they sent, to every town on three
parallel lines of railroad in Iowa, a postal card with "Come Home!"
covering one side of it, and captured him somewhere about the middle of
the State, also in the middle of the greatest of all his campaigns. The
firm settled his expenses, but refused to deliver the goods, and hired
an extra lawyer or two to contest


THE LARGE CROP OF LEGAL SUITS

which brought up the rear of his triumph, like the tail of a gorgeous
comet. This young man was peculiar. I only mention his flight through
the western commercial sky to make you smile when you think of it and
lighten your heart, when this remembrance comes in a lonesome hour. If
you are unacquainted with the gentleman to whom you are to sell, use
your habitual salutation. A majority of successful men say "How are you,
sir?" You have your card right side up, close to his hand. You say: "My
name is Bennington--I am from Chicago--Remington & Company--let me talk
to you a little about some of our goods." You have accompanied some such
speech as this by an expeditious display of your samples. If your choice
of attack was sound, he is already looking at your goods.


THE BOARD AT THE HOTEL

has greatly improved this evening, so you will find. Make up your mind
that when a man does not accord you a fair hearing you have erred in
your approach. There are some men who have to be approached through a
personal introduction. If you take advantage of the chances that come in
your way, you can afford to accept the misfortunes which befall you, for
it is a real misfortune to attack a cold, hard-surfaced man in his
moment of strength and get a full broadside from his guns. Go in force
against such men. Two men would have him at a disadvantage.


IN CONCLUSION,

do not be in a hurry to get back home. Have books with you. Shun
traveling men, as they cannot benefit you. The desire to have company
often makes a man "lose a town." It often keeps him up nights. What is
the reason you dread the attack? Because you have no electricity in you.
You have not slept enough. Have you not often felt you could walk ten
miles as easily as one? That was just the moment to "fall up against"
the hard-surfaced man. Have you not often felt you would like to be in
the little white cottage, reading what a wonderful place New York is?
Just then you ought to be in bed,


MANUFACTURING SNAP AND SPARKLE.

In all your expedition, judgment has been at work. Judgment sent you
out, and judgment pointed out your attack. You therefore have sold goods
to responsible people, and your firm are delighted. You now have the
most powerful lines of money-making in the world right in your hands.
You are the man who can "place the goods." You are practically a
partner. If you have perfected yourself in your art, and if you are not
in business for yourself, it is because you do not want it so to be.




EXAMPLES.

     Lives of great men all remind us
       We may make our lives sublime,
     And, departing, leave behind us,
       Footprints on the sands of time.--Longfellow.


It is hard to follow in the tracks of giants, but
nevertheless the sands of our time are filled with that kind of
footprints. The present century has beholden some of the most
astonishing elevations of all history. Slaves have become Roman
Emperors, but we hardly know what "slave" meant in those days. Within
the last hundred years we see a poor old dame with three sons called
Joseph, Napoleon and Jerome. We see a cooper's son called Michel Ney, an
inn-keeper's son called Joaquin Murat, a lawyer's son named Jean
Bernadotte, a military cadet named Louis Davout, and a lame boy called
Charles Talleyrand. Behold them mounting the ladder until, at the end of
thirty years, the roster stands thus. Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain;
Napoleon Bonaparte, greatest warrior of modern times and Emperor of
France, which meant dictator of Europe; Jerome Bonaparte, King of
Westphalia; Michel Ney, Prince of the Moskwa and Bravest of the Brave;
Joaquin Murat, King of Naples; Jean Bernadotte, King of Sweden, and
founder of the present dynasty; Louis Davout, Prince of Eckmuhl, and, in
1811,


COMMANDER OF NEARLY 600,000 MEN;

Charles Talleyrand, Prince of Benevento, and perhaps the greatest
diplomat in history. We have Ben Franklin learning to ink type in his
youth and in his maturity teaching the world how to subdue our favorite
slave, the lightning. We have Daniel Webster ploughing on a farm and
afterward delighting two worlds with the magic of his voice. We see John
Jacob Astor arrive in America scarcely able to speak English, and die in
1848 worth more than any other man in America at that time. We see
George Peabody at work in a grocery at Danvers. Years afterward, as a
London banker, we chronicle his charities, almost fabulous in their
extent: To Danvers, Mass., two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; to
the Baltimore Institute, one million four hundred thousand dollars; to
the poor of London, two million five hundred thousand dollars; to the
southern negroes, three million five hundred thousand dollars; to eight
institutions, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars; to his
relatives, five million dollars; We see A.T. Stewart hard pressed for a
dollar, and we find him worth thirty millions when he dies. We watch


THE WIFE OF ANDREW JOHNSON

teaching him the alphabet, and we listen to his proclamations as
President of the United States. We tell Abraham Lincoln where he can
borrow a book that will benefit him, and we pass by his great dust in
numbers almost like the stars in heaven. We see Phineas T. Barnum first
humbugging the people with a lemonade-stand worth all told two dollars,
and we next see him humbugging the people with the greatest show on
earth, worth a million. We lend Leland Stanford a quarter and he next
buys up three or four high-priced legislatures and defies the
Constitution of the United States to prevent him levying a tax on "his
people" of a million dollars with a stroke of his pen. We see


ULYSSES S. GRANT

working by the day in a tanyard, and then receiving the sword of a
warrior whose name will also echo far out into the "corridors of time,"
and then again accepting as the representative of America, the pent-up
admiration of the Old World for the New. We see Jay Gould investing a
thousand dollars in a country store and then in turn dictating to all
the railroads and controlling all the telegraphs in the greatest empire
that has ever existed. We watch Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sr., begin as a
poor lad, save, build, command, and die, leaving to his favorite son


EIGHTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!

We see that son, beginning on that paltry patrimony, already the
possessor, in a few short years, of seventy millions in addition. We
help Elihu Burritt to say his letters at noon-time in a blacksmith shop,
and afterward, lo! he converses in thirty languages. We see Edgar Poe,
dying as poor as man ever died, yet leaving to the world a name as a
writer that Europeans persist is as yet the brightest in American
literature. See Horace Greeley, trudging across a State, anxious to get
a job for his board and clothes; then listen to his voice in the
councils of the President and in the hearts of the people. Remember
Salmon P. Chase, a poor Ohio boy, Governor, Secretary of the Treasury,
author of the best currency system so far conceived, and Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court.


JAMES A. GARFIELD

is now at work driving a canal-boat, now Republican leader of the House,
now Senator, now President, and now the object of a weeping world's
affection. See the poor boy Sherman, born in Lancaster, O. A short space
flies past us, and he has cut his own communications and marched with
his army into the enemy's country. The London _Times_ says if he emerges
from the unknown country with his army, he will be "the greatest captain
of modern times." Soon his banners float on the coast, soon the cities
are blazing behind his fearful stride, and soon the cruel war is over.
We behold the third son of a very large family of


TENNYSONS

begin writing verses. He writes trash at first, but by and by he is
proclaimed the greatest living poet, and his art of writing (all that
part of his work which was difficult) is pronounced the greatest the
world has ever seen. We see the boy Lee, studying hard to sustain the
illustrious name he bore, advancing in science to the great study of
astronomy, becoming the intellectual credit of his surroundings, the
tutor of the scholarly. We behold him clasping the sword put in his
hands by the greatest unsuccessful insurrection of all past time, and,
seated on his horse, smiling at the awful repulse of


PICKETT'S IMMORTAL CHARGE AT GETTYSBURG,

saying, simply: "We cannot always expect to have our own way in an
attack," when down in his great heart he knows that the proudest people
ever defeated have cast the final die, and lost. We stand over his ashes
and feel that they are the ashes of a truly great man whom "unmerciful
disaster followed fast and followed faster." We see James Gordon
Bennett, the jibe of all the printers because of his crooked eyes. Yet
he dies the owner of the greatest money-making newspaper of all
newspaper history, a journal which sends expeditions to Africa and
squadrons to the north pole. We see a "canny" Scotch boy at study. He
"takes wonderfully to German," and soon the English world is hailing him
as the "literary Columbus." He has shown them the greatness of
Frederick, of Schiller, and Goethe. He writes a history of the French
Revolution, and calls it the "truth clad in hell-fire." He reads a
library in a few hours, or, rather, he reads what he has not read--and
finally he lies down, hating the world, hating freedom, but full of
genius, and men say "Carlyle is dead."


A BOY CALLED VICTOR HUGO

is born in France. At thirty he is famous. Then for fifty years he
wields an influence through the literatures of all nations second only
to Shakspeare's. We see the sailor-boy Garibaldi, the commander-in-chief
and savior of Uruguay in South America, the idol and king-maker of
Italy, and the stern patriot without rank or gew-gaw on


THE ROCK OF CAPRI,

a joining of the characters of such men as Socrates and Washington. We
see Disraeli, a poor boy and we see Disraeli more powerful than any
other man on earth. We look at Gladstone as a boy starting in life,
determined to be a scholar. We hear his glorious voice, we read his
books, we study the laws he has framed, we watch the empire he governs,
and we feel he succeeded in his boyish ambition. Everywhere--in the
lives of Agassiz, Humboldt, Proctor, Seward, Farragut, Nelson,
Abercrombie, Joseph E. Johnston, Longstreet, Stanton, Aspinwall,
Lorillard, Ayer, Helmbold, Scott, Garrett, Ralston, Garner, Watson,
Howe, Singer, Steinway, McCormick, Morse, Edison, Bell, Gray,
Applegarth, Hoe, Thomas, Wagner, Verdi, Jurgensen, Picard, Stephenson,
Fulton, Rumsey, Fitch, Lamb, Fairbanks, Corliss, Dahlgren, Parrot,
Armstrong, Gatling, Pullman, Alden, Crompton, Faber, Remington, Sharp,
Colt, Daguerre, Bessemer, Goodyear, Yale, Keene, Gould, Villard,--and


IN THE LIVES OF THE THOUSANDS

which my limits exclude me from mentioning, there is the example of the
hard worker, the promise of results that will follow a well-directed
effort. "In order to do great things, it is necessary to live as if one
was never to die"--that is, pay attention only to the object aimed at. I
remember a man of success who meant to break up housekeeping and go to
Europe on a matter of business. This was the first of January. The fact
that the weather suddenly turned cold to the extent of thirty degrees
below zero did not seem to attract his attention. He was absent-minded
on that question! When it came to going out to hire an expressman to
haul his effects to a storehouse he found no one would venture out with
his horse until the thermometer should rise, and his astonishment knew
no bounds! He had been


SO IN THE HABIT OF RIDING OVER OBSTACLES

that his distress was very noticeable when he was compelled to wait in
idleness for three days. Never allow obstacles to stop you. When the
waters meet an obstacle they run around it. So do the ants. Read the
lives of successful men. Watch successful men. "We are less convinced by
what we hear than what we see," said Herodotus thousands of years ago.
Said Seneca, nineteen hundred years ago: "Men trust rather to their eyes
than to their ears; the effect of precepts, is, therefore, slow and
tedious, while that of example is summary and effectual." Says Franklin:
"None teaches better than the ant, and she says nothing." "Not the cry"
say the Chinese, "but the flight of the wild duck, leads the flock to
fly and follow."


"CHRIST NEVER WROTE A TRACT,"

says Horace Mann. "The people look at their pastor six days in the
week," says Cecil, "to see what he means on the seventh." Says Dr.
Johnson: "Those who attain any excellence commonly spend life in one
common pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier grounds,"
and the examples of a majority of the successful men will show this to
be true. It seems to me, in conclusion, that


LIFE IS LIKE THE SYSTEM

upon which gamblers often stake their money. If they lose one, they
stake two; if they lose, they stake four; if they lose, they stake
eight; if they still lose, they stake sixteen; now if they win, they
have, of course, won one more than they have lost altogether. The banker
guards against this system by limiting their progression to a certain
figure and thus breaking it down. But in the game of life we have no
limit put upon our enterprises. We may redouble our efforts after every
failure, and we find, upon the first success, that we have, in one
stroke of prosperity, more than made ourselves whole for failures which
may have extended behind us indefinitely. You cannot fail in life if you
will stake an effort on each succeeding attempt twice as great as the
effort which lost you your last desire.




MAN

     A combination and a form, indeed,
     Where every god did seem to set his seal
     To give the world assurance of a man.

     His life was gentle, and the elements
     So mixed in him, that nature might stand up
     And say to all the world "This was a man!"--Shakspeare.


"What a piece of worke is a man? How Noble in Reason? how
infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in
Action how like an Angel? in apprehension how like a God? the beauty of
the world, the Paragon of Animals?" This is the exalted panegyric of the
greatest mind so far vouchsafed to our race--this, then, was
Shakspeare's ideal of a true man. Says Emerson: "O rich and various man!
thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and
the night, and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the
city of God; in thy heart the power of love and the realms of right and
wrong." "Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless
force," says Chapin; "the world was spread out around him to be seized
and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting
him to to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his
plummet, and Herschel sailed,


A COLUMBUS OF THE SKIES."

"Man," says Carlyle, "has reflected his two-fold nature in history. 'He
is of earth,' but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his
wants and his desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand,
glorious aims, with immortal longings, with thoughts which sweep the
heavens and 'wander through eternity.' A pigmy standing on the outward
crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to
the infinite, and there finds rest." Then turning to the combined
effects of individual lives, the same great writer says: "History is a
reflex of this double life. Every epoch has two aspects--one calm, broad
and solemn--looking towards eternity; the other agitated, petty,
vehement, and confused looking towards time." "Man," says Sir William
Hamilton, one of the greatest of true philosophers, "is not an organism:
he is an intelligence, served by organs." Says Whately: "The heavens do
indeed 'declare the glory of God,' and the human body is 'fearfully and
wonderfully made;' but man, considered, not merely as an organized
being, but as a rational agent, and as a member of society, is perhaps
the most wonderfully contrived, and to us the most interesting, specimen
of divine wisdom that we have any knowledge of."


MAN'S FAULTS.

So much in compliment of mankind. Now this same marvelous creature, man,
has a critical spirit. He is endued with a quality of progression. The
motive power in this progression is dissatisfaction. Let us listen to
the sages when they drop eulogy and become out of conceit with
themselves.


"MAN IS IMPROVABLE,"

says Horace Mann. "Some think he is only a machine, and that the only
difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and
the other by water." Says Pascal: "What a chimera is man! what a
singular phenomenon! what a chaos! what a scene of contrariety! A judge
of all things yet a feeble worm; the shrine of truth, yet a mass of
doubt and uncertainty; at once the glory and the scorn of the universe.
If he boasts, I lower him; if he lowers himself I raise him; either way
I contradict him, till he learns he is a monstrous, incomprehensible
mystery." "Make yourself an honest man," says Carlyle sarcastically,
"and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world." This
remark sprang, probably, from a reading of


WHATELEY'S COMPARISON

of a rogue with a man of honor: "Other things being equal, an honest man
has this advantage over a knave, that he understands more of human
nature: for he knows that _one_ honest man exists, and concludes that
there must be more; and he also knows, if he is not a mere simpleton,
that there are some who are knavish. But the knave can seldom be brought
to believe in the existence of an honest man. The honest man _may_ be
deceived in particular persons, but the knave is _sure_ to be deceived
whenever he comes across an honest man who is not a mere fool." "Man is


TOO NEAR ALL KINDS OF BEASTS--

a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a
dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture."
This was the poet Cowley's opinion. "Of all the animals" scolds Boileau,
"which fly in the air, walk on the ground, or swim in the sea, from
Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal, in my
opinion, is man." People must be very bad, indeed, who get opinions as
low as the two last quoted. That rapacious vulture George Peabody! that
dissembling crocodile William Cowper! that robbing wolf Girard! that
thieving fox Charles Sumner! that fawning dog Napoleon Bonaparte! and
those most foolish animals Louis Agassiz and Isaac Newton! It does not
well become the weakest links in a chain to boast that they gauge that
chain's strength, for the chain can be greatly strengthened, upon this
easy discovery of those weak links, by simply dropping them out of
connection.

And now comes the query: "What is man?" He has always been more or less
at a loss for some striking and succinct statement of his peculiar
characteristics--of the mark that separates him from other animals.
Diogenes Laertius says that Plato having defined man to be a two-legged
animal without feathers, he (Diogenes) plucked a cock, and, bringing him
into the school, said "Here is Plato's man." From this joke there was
added to the definition "With broad flat nails." Even this definition is
just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey. Again
it was thought that man was the only being who laughs. Says Addison,
poetically: "Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and
below him are serious." But scientists refuse to accept this distinction
as accurate. "Man is an animal


THAT COOKS HIS VICTUALS,"

says Burke. "So does the buzzard" (in the sun) say the learned men. "Man
uses tools," says another. "So does the beaver--the ourang-outang hurls
stones, and fights with clubs," say the scientists. Finally, says Adam
Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations:" "Man is an animal that makes
bargains; no other animal does this--one dog does not change a bone with
another." We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very
faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another,
in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the
little dog with the desirability, under the circumstances, of the
smaller of two bones! And I am not sure but that


ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,

are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters
acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at
the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line
of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes
the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak
spot in each. "For man is a plant,"


SAYS PLUTARCH,

"not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising,
as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven." "A man ought
to carry himself in the world," says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and
building on Plutarch's thought, "as an orange-tree would, if it could
walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little
censer it holds up to the air."

     Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
     The proper study of mankind is man.

This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the
world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages
before the birth of the celebrated "wasp of Twickenham," mankind had
been at study on the subject. "The burden of history" says George
Finlayson, "is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology,
what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall
be." "Man is the product of his own history," says Theodore Parker. "The
discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so
valuable to him. The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope--


THE STAR THAT IS LOOKING, NOT LOOKED AFTER,

nor looked at." "Man is greater than a world, than systems of worlds;
there is more mystery in the union of soul with the physical than in the
creation of the universe." This sentence is by Henry Giles. To the
first portion of it I give unqualified belief. I believe, too, with John
Ruskin, that "the basest thought possible concerning man is that he has
no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible
is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is
nobly animal, nobly spiritual--coherently and irrevocably so; neither
part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other."
"Man is the metre of all things," says Aristotle,


"THE HAND

is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms."
The remark of the great Athenian regarding the hand, while no truer than
that one touching the mind, is yet easier of demonstration to the
unphilosophical reader. For instance, the printers of the finest
engravings to this day use the palm of the hand to apply the ink; the
type-setting machine is so far a failure for the want of the human
fingers; the most perfect performance of music on a machine yet lacks
that _sympathy_ and exception to mathematical rule which the human
fingers, highly trained, impart to the keyboard, and the violin, that
thing most nearly in communication with the soul of man,--pays no
allegiance whatever save to the human hand well practiced in its
mastery; the hand skilled in love soothes the aching brow; the whole
framework of this instrument, the hand, filled with gold coins, almost
without volition spurns the spurious piece; the false bank-note is
lifted with suspicion; across the signature the deft fingers run to aid
the eye; over the letters the mind of the sightless pushes its loyal
touch, and the signal comes faithfully back to the dungeoned
intelligence!


OUR OPPORTUNITIES

are the greatest of those of any living beings. It follows, it seems to
me, that our responsibilities should be greater, both in justice and in
reason. Every opportunity is equivalent to a duty. We owe--with all
these miracles of the living world centered and perfected in our
bodies,--a duty equally grand and difficult. Let us ennoble ourselves.
John Fletcher wrote a beautiful metaphor in very clumsy verse when he
said:

     Man is his own star, and the soul that can
     Render an honest and a perfect man
     Commands all light, all influence, all fate,

     Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
     Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
     Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.


HOLY WRIT.

The Lord has well loved man: "He found him in a desert land, and in the
waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept
him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest,
fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them,
beareth them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him." "The Lord
hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded
him to be a captain over his people." "When I consider thy heavens, the
work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained,
[then] what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man,
that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him


A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS,

and hast crowned him with glory and honor!" "I have set the Lord before
me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." "Thy rod and
thy staff they comfort me." "I have been young, and now am old, yet have
I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." "For a
thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as
a watch in the night." "For all our days are passed away in thy wrath:
we spend our years as a tale that is told." "So teach us to number our
days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." "Thy word is a lamp
unto my feet and a light unto my path." "He giveth his beloved sleep."
"A man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps." "One
event happeneth to them all." "Then shall the dust return to the earth
as it was; and the spirit shall turn unto God who gave it."

We perceive, upon a glance at this broad subject, that a book would be
better fitted to its treatment than a chapter, and yet a chapter alone
will aid in attuning the mind to the nobility of our destiny. A single
thought entering the mind at the right time will turn the current of a
life. Let us elevate and strengthen our present into the nobler
foundation of a happier future on earth and a blissful eternity in
heaven. We are endowed with shame. Let it keep us from meriting the
stinging epigram: "God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man."




WOMAN.

     She was a phantom of delight
     When first she gleamed upon my sight.

     And now I see, with eye serene,
     The very pulse of the machine;
     A being breathing thoughtful breath,
     A traveler betwixt life and death;
     The reason firm, the temperate will,
     Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
     A perfect woman, nobly planned,
     To warm, to comfort, and command
     And yet a spirit still, and bright,
     With something of an angel light.--Wordsworth.


"Man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the
glory of the man," says the great Book. This is so true that most of the
charities and mercies for which mankind gets credit in his own moral
intelligence are inspired by the charitable and merciful attributes so
characteristic of true womanhood. Campbell, in the "Pleasures of Hope,"
speaks thus of the Garden of Paradise:

     The world was sad--the garden was a wild,
     And man, the hermit, sighed, till woman smiled.

And lovely woman has smiled forever. Into the lot of life she has put
all that has endeared it or made it tolerable; into the hope of the
hereafter she has ever breathed the breath of life and kept it a living
force. Besides the charms she has for man as a thing of superexcellent
beauty, woman has ever held him in the second greatest debt he owes. She
teaches him, not less, a greater debt (to God), and brings him before
that Chief Creditor with little thought of her own dues. Upon


A SUBJECT SO PLEASANT TO MAN,

it is not strange that he has spent his days in framing speeches to
reward the admirable devotion of woman, and it is pleasant to believe
the object of those encomiums has received them as the most desirable
form of remuneration. She has listened to his praise with beating heart,
and blossomed into greater loveliness. She has had no greed of money,
save as it would array her in beauteous raiment, that she might better
guard the love she has won; she has had little ambition, save as she
might be of service to her mate, whose unquiet soul has never ceased
its


PLUNGING INTO THE NIGHT OF DESTINY,

the storm of life. But she has had great powers of love, great powers of
sacrifice, great depths of forgiveness, great fountains of tears--those
still waters where bathes the human soul and rises clean before God's
sight. "Women are the poetry of the world, in the same sense that the
stars are the poetry of heaven," says Hargrave; "clear, light-giving,
harmonious, they are the terrestrial planets that rule the destinies of
mankind." "Man," says Washington Irving, "is the creature of interest
and ambition. His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of
the world. Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song
piped in the intervals of his acts. But a woman's whole life is


A HISTORY OF THE AFFECTIONS

the heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it
is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her
sympathies on adventure, she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of
affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a
bankruptcy of the heart." "O, if the loving, closed heart of a good
woman," cries Jean Paul Richter, "Should open before man, how much
controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues,
would he see reposing therein!" "Honor to women!" sings his
brother-countryman,


SCHILLER;

"they twine and weave the roses of heaven into the life of men; it is
they that unite us in the fascinating bonds of love; and, concealed in
the modest veil of the graces, they cherish carefully the external fire
of delicate feeling with holy hands." "Win her and wear her, if you
can," says Shelley; "she is the most delightful of God's
creatures--Heaven's best gift--man's joy and pride in prosperity--man's
support and comforter in affliction." "Her passions are made of the
finest parts of pure love," says Shakspeare. "Her commands are caresses,
her menaces are tears," says Rousseau. "She was


LAST AT THE CROSS, EARLIEST AT THE GRAVE,"

says Barrett. "Her errors spring almost always from her faith in the
good or her confidence in the true" declares Balzac. "She has more
strength in her looks than we have in our laws, and more power by her
tears than we have by our arguments," says the Duke of Halifax, a great
statesman. "All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of
woman," says Voltaire, skeptic in all else. "Women in their nature are
much more gay and joyous than men," writes Addison, "whether it be that
their blood is more refined, their fibers more delicate, and their
animal spirits more light and volatile; or whether, as some have
imagined, there may not be a kind of


SEX IN THE VERY SOUL,

I shall not pretend to determine." "It is not strange to me" says Boyle,
a good, sensible man, "that persons of the fairer sex should like, in
all things about them, that handsomeness for which they find themselves
most liked." Man reviles woman for her vanity. At the same time it is
the particular delight of the man who will himself wear no decoration to
load upon his willing wife the trinkets of his fancy as far as his purse
will pay for them. Without woman's almost savage love of display, man
would be robbed of nearly all the pleasure which


PERSONAL ORNAMENTS

now give him. He loves woman, just as she is. Just as she is she is much
above the level of the thing he would love had he not her to claim his
rapt attention. Man smiles at woman's weaknesses, but if he thought of
his great meanness of soul when his mercy and fidelity are in the scale
against her own, he would look grave and troubled. She dresses with
expense and variety, because it is the first ordinance of her master.
Her very love of dress is the sign and seal of her intelligence. If it
be folly, arraign man at the dock! Says


STAID OLD DR. JOHNSON:

"We see women universally jealous of the reputation of their beauty, and
frequently look with contempt on the care with which they study their
complexions, endeavor to preserve or supply the bloom of youth, regulate
every ornament, twist their hair into curls, and shade their faces from
the weather. We recommend the care of their nobler part, and tell them
how little addition is made by all their arts to the graces of the
mind. But when was it known that female goodness or knowledge was able
to attract that officiousness, or inspire that ardor, which beauty
produces wherever it appears? And with what hope can we endeavor to
persuade the ladies that


THE TIME SPENT AT THE TOILET

is lost in vanity, when they have every moment some new conviction that
their interest is more effectually promoted by a ribbon well disposed
than by the brightest act of heroic virtue?" Listen to the praise of
practical John Ledyard, whose word has the solid ring of fact about it:
"I have observed among all nations [that he had seen, the statement not
being applicable to a majority of the savages] that the women ornament
themselves more than the men; that,


WHEREVER FOUND, THEY ARE THE MOST CIVIL,

kind, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be
gay and cheerful, timorous and modest. They do not hesitate, like man,
to perform a hospitable or generous action; not haughty, nor arrogant,
nor supercilious, but full of courtesy and fond of society;
industrious, economical, ingenuous; more liable, in general, to err than
man; but, in general, also more virtuous, and performing more good
actions than he. I never addressed myself in the language of decency and
friendship to a woman, whether civilized or savage, without receiving


A DECENT AND FRIENDLY ANSWER.

With men it has often been otherwise. In wandering over the plains of
inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and
churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the widespread regions of the
wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever
been friendly to me, and uniformly so: and, to add to this virtue, so
worthy of the appellation of benevolence, these actions have been
performed in so free and so kind a manner, that, if I was dry, I drank
the sweet draught, and, if hungry, ate the coarse morsel with a double
relish." Woman may read


THIS CANDID TESTIMONY

with a blush of gratification, for there breathes no flattery in
it--only the serious observations of an old man bent on getting
knowledge by personal experience. "A man may flatter himself as he
pleases," says Sir Richard Steele, "but he will find that the women have
more understanding in their own affairs than we have." Man suffers in
his loves for woman. She often casts him on the rocks like an angry
unfeeling sea, but when, at last she has smiled upon him, he becomes a
broader, better man. Without the companionship of woman, man is truly
half-made up. He loses his self-esteem, he lives without laws, without
churches, without hospitals.


THE WESTERN WILDS,

during the early period of their settlement by Americans, have furnished
us with accurate views of society without women. And what has that
society been? More a den of wild beasts than a congregation of the most
reasoning of God's creatures! There we find men living in constant
suspicion of their comrades, in constant danger of hazarding their lives
for some sentimental canon of personal vanity that, if they were boys in
civilized society, would be flogged out of their moral code.


THE WHOLE HISTORY OF HUMAN SICKNESS

is a continuous outcry of the goodness of woman. Wherever the red hand
of war has risen to smite, there the white hand of woman has hastened to
soothe. After the roar of the conflagration and amidst the ruins piled
up by the earthquake ever has that sweet minister sought out the hungry
and succored the suffering.


CRITICISM OUT OF PLACE.

One does not feel that he can do any good by criticising woman. We love
fruit that is perfect. We do not describe, and we would have little
thanks for a description of, those specimens of cherries, strawberries,
or grapes which fail to realize our anticipations of a delightful
product of the orchard, the garden, or the vineyard. But I have perhaps,
by showing the respect in which men of intellect and honor hold a good
woman, given needed encouragement to patient hearts, and testified my
own humble regard for womanhood.




FATHER.

     His hair just grizzled,
     As in a green old age.--Dryden.


The word _papa_, I believe, goes back, just as it is,
through all the languages, to the Sanscrit, and even beyond to the
unknown Aryan, the stock of our civilized tongues. The Pope is _papa_,
kind father, in Italian. How his name ever came to be twisted into the
ugly sound we hear in English is a problem, for the difference on the
feelings between the sounds of Pope, and _papa_, kind father, cannot
well be exaggerated. The kind father of a good man occupies an enviable
place in that man's thoughts. It is no passing admiration; that father
is no hero of to-day no study of to-morrow, no dim recollection when the
future shall have come--but an active exemplar, an honored memory, a
potent spur and stay combined--a spur to urge to all a man should do; a
stay to curb unwisdom's flying feet. That father has toiled in weariness
that his son might follow an easier path of life. Perhaps you now tread
that path. How carefully should your steps be taken; how earnestly you
should climb to reach the round which meets your self-denying parent's
gaze! With him there have come few paroxysms of delight in his labor. He
has not been endowed with that mysterious joy your mother has felt in
all your existence. He has delighted in you because he hoped you would
bring honor to his house; he would rather you had not lived than to see
you in a prisoner's cell--far rather. This could not be said of your
mother. She would be contented that you had lived at all, that you had
looked into her eyes and laughed. Your father has taken care of you,
dutifully. Repay him in kindness. "Honor thy father and thy mother, that
thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
This was graven by the Lord in the marble tablets on Sinai, and has been
in turn graven on the countless millions of hearts that have beaten
"their short funeral marches" since that awful hour.


ALL SOCIETY

has at one time or another rested on the sustaining power of the father.
The patriarch, in ancient times, protected and sustained his dependents,
and, in return, received their entire allegiance, wielding over them the
power of life and death, and thus initiating the first form of human
government. Next came the cities where the government was formed by all
the fathers together in council, and our village and city legislators
are, to this day, called "the city fathers," although the reverence in
which so august a body was once held has departed with the silent flight
of the dignity of our modern convocations. Some one has said of


A FINE AND HONORABLE OLD MAN,

that he is in the childhood of immortality. "One's age should be
tranquil," says Dr. Arnold, "as one's childhood should be playful; hard
work at either extremity of human existence, seems to me out of place;
the morning and the evening should be alike cool and peaceful; at midday
the sun may burn, and men may labor under it." See to it, if it be
within your power, that your father has the rest due to the evening of
his days. Let him sit in the cool. Let him listen to the voices of his
night--the crickets that cry out his mortality and the nightingales that
sing of Paradise!


"GRAY HAIRS

seem to fancy," says Richter, "like the light of a soft moon silvering
over the evening of life." "Old age," says Madame Swetchine, "is not one
of the beauties of creation, but it is one of its harmonies. The law of
contrasts is one of the laws of beauty. Shadows give light its worth;
sternness enchances mildness; solemnity splendor."


EXPERIENCE.

"Old age was naturally more honored," says Joubert, "in times when
people could not know much more than what they had seen." There are
still many avenues of learning in which practical experience seems to be
paramount in value. In business its great worth is never underestimated.
You have heard of the partnership built on a contribution by one
firm-member of the money, and by the other of the experience; and of
the dissolution of that firm, leaving the one who put in the money with
all the experience, and the one who put in the experience with all the
money! The practices of law and medicine are famous for the need of age,
which they harness anew with the labors and exertions ordinarily
demanded of youth. "Tell me," says Shakerly Marmion, "what you find
better or more honorable than age. Is not wisdom entailed upon it?


TAKE THE PRE-EMINENCE OF IT IN EVERYTHING--

in an old friend, in old wine, in an old pedigree." "I venerate old
age," says the great and good poet Longfellow; "and I love not the man
who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of
evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of
twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding." "It is only
necessary to grow old to become more indulgent," writes Goethe; "I see
no fault committed that I have not committed myself." "An aged
Christian," says Chapin, beautifully enlarging on Goldsmith's and Dr.
Donne's ideas, "with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that
those points of earth are whitest which are nearest heaven."

[Illustration: OLD AGE.

"Age is the outer shore against which dashes an eternity." Page 401.]


"LIKE A MORNING DREAM,"

again says Richter, "life becomes more and more bright the longer we
live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled
us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter
as we approach the end." "Time has laid his hand upon my heart gently,"
says Longfellow, "not smiting it; but


AS A HARPER LAYS HIS OPEN PALM

upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations." "I think that to have known
one good old man," George William Curtis says, "one man who, through the
chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his
hand, like a palm branch, waving all discords into peace--helps our
faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons."
"He that would pass the declining years of his life with honor and
comfort," says Addison, with fine opposition, "should, when young,
consider that he may one day become old, and remember, when he is old,
that he has once been young." On the principle that blessings brighten
as they take their flight we come to love the sunshine and the birds and
all God's glorious works just as we grow old.


"IF WE NEVER CARED FOR LITTLE CHILDREN BEFORE"

says Lord Lytton, "we delight to see them roll on the grass over which
we hobble. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, care-worn
son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild.
It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened
by the autumn, and feel most delight in the returning spring." "Winter,"
says Richter, "which strips the leaves from around us, makes us see the
distant regions they formerly concealed; so does old age rob us of our
enjoyments, only to enlarge the prospect of eternity before us." Seneca
says that there is nothing more disgraceful than that an old man should
have nothing to produce as a proof that he has lived long except his
years. I love Longfellow's picture of


THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH,

the mighty man. It has been set to one of the best musical
accompaniments that I have ever heard. When the verses below are
reached, the key is changed to one where the sadness intensifies, until
the honest old heart hears the "mother's voice singing in Paradise:"

     He goes on Sunday to the church;
       And sits among his boys;
     He hears the parson pray and preach,
       He hears his daughter's voice,
     Singing in the village choir,
       And it makes his heart rejoice.

     It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
       Singing in Paradise;
     He needs must think of her once more,
       How in the grave she lies;
     And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
       A tear out of his eyes.

I wish, instead of merely printing these simple words, I could breathe
them out to you, as some great tenor or baritone like Sims Reeves or
Santley sings them--there is such a world of human life and feeling
hidden there, ready to spring forth with the touch of sympathetic
sounds!


NOTHING BECOMES A YOUNG MAN SO MUCH

as a respectful demeanor toward a reverend man. Nothing lowers a man so
much as flippant speech concerning his elders. The young man with the
most dignity has the most deference for age. He takes sincere delight in
bowing before ripe years and wisdom. Alas! how sad that ever age should
come to one who is not fitted for its honors!

I have known a son to thwart every dream of his father. I have seen the
parent, struggling with adversity, yet succeed in opening before the
child a career of honor and comfort; and I have seen the son clutch
those opportunities as a highwayman seizes upon the wayfarer, and
throttle them in the dust and ashes of failure and disgrace. How sad the
picture!


A BRIGHTER VIEW.

I have seen a parent toil for years, carrying to his cottage the wages
which should support his son in seven long years of careful education. I
have watched that son in his ceaseless studies and found he thought only
of gladdening his father's heart. I have seen him graduate second in a
class of one hundred and fifteen, and then after two years of additional
study, first in a body of eighty young men, each of whom was a scholar.
The best men of a great city have given that young man encouragement.
Their homes and their wives and their daughters have smiled at his
approach, and his course has been upward without a fall, and with few
pauses for rest. Has he forgotten his poor father? No. He still lives
in the cottage, and will make the small house with a great man in it
more hospitable and more honorable than a wide door that swings open to
a narrow soul. How pleasant the picture!

[Illustration]




MOTHER.

     A mother is a mother still,
     The holiest thing alive.--Coleridge.


     Not learned save in gracious household ways,
     Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
     No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
     In angel instincts, breathing Paradise.

     Who looked all native to her place, and yet
     On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
     Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
     Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,
     And girdled her with music. Happy he
     With such a mother! faith in womankind
     Beats with his blood.--Tennyson.


So high and holy a title as mother cannot fall too
reverently from man's lips. That he might live the mother has gone down
into the valley of the shadow of death; that he might thrive she has fed
him with willingness from her own weak body, and grown spectre-like as
he grew strong and importunate; that he might go among his fellows on an
equal footing, she has toiled with his small weak brain teaching him the
beginning of his education and tilling "a rank unweeded garden;" that he
might have everlasting life, she has instilled into his mind that
saving fear of God, which, though he think himself an atheist, will
claim the mastery when Death grins by his couch, and grant him a stay of
the awful judgment till he may make his peace with a Creator whose mercy
endureth forever. Everything a man is he can owe but to his mother;
everything he may be in future life has possibly come from her fond
intercession, her gentle admonitions. "Unhappy is the man for whom his
own mother has not made all other mothers venerable," says Richter. "The
future destiny of the child,"


SAYS NAPOLEON,

"is always the work of the mother," and it is certain that he had ample
reason in his own remarkable career for making this important admission.
He inherited from his mother all those attributes which made him great,
and owed his sudden downfall to none of her teachings. She was noted for
her sagacity and prudence, but possibly it required more than human
sagacity and prudence to balance the mighty impulses which moved
Napoleon Bonaparte. "A father may turn his back on his child," says
Washington Irving, "brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies,
husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother's
love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of
the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that
her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still


SHE REMEMBERS THE INFANT SMILES

that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful
shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can
never be brought to think him all unworthy." "There is in all this cold
and hollow world," says Mrs. Hemans, "no fount of deep, strong,
deathless love, save that within a mother's heart." "Even He that died
for us upon the cross," says Longfellow, "in the last hour, in the
unutterable agony of death, was mindful of his mother, as if to teach us
that this holy love should be our last worldly thought--the last point
of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven." Who
ever saw


A MOTHER ROMPING WITH HER THREE-YEAR-OLD

that did not look upon her as one of the happiest, therefore,
necessarily, one of the best of God's creatures? O, in that peek-a-boo,
that capturing of that last squealing "pig," the little toe, that
paddy-cake opera, is there not the one great bliss of life, to be happy
in making others happy? And how the laughter rings through the house!
And then the toil and self-denial for the stocking and the tree


AT CHRISTMAS!

Is it any wonder that the child is so easily deceived, and credits all
his joys to unseen ministers? It would not be hard to convince the
philosopher himself of the dual earthly character of the mother, visibly
a woman, invisibly but not the less really to her child, an ethereal
spirit of mercy and goodness! What gnaws her cheek and cheats Death into
the belief a flag of truce summons him to the final parley? Has not her
babe, her hope, been fevered and in pain, and should she sleep lest it
should leave her on this world behind, that then would need her not?
"Canst bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" No more can her
anxiety be


FETTERED INTO SLEEP;

no more can her quick ear be deafened to the little wail that echoes
pitiful within the chambers of her heart! When we remember the great
passion of motherhood, the intensity of the drama, the prolongation into
years of its deep interplots, we cannot marvel longer at the perennial,
lasting character of the mother's love. Given, the marvel, there is no
further marvel. Given life, the scientists say, there is no other
problem on this narrow world. And thus the marvel and the mystery never
grow less.


MAN ENTERS THE WORLD,

of all animals the most pitiable and weakly. Left to himself he would
immediately perish. Extinguish the mother's love and he would at once
perish. His growth is by far the slowest of that of all animals,
therefore the wisdom of God in so lengthening the tenure of the mother's
solicitude. The mighty man who wields the iron halberd which no two
people can lift was still a helpless infant, unable to put his own
chubby fist into his own mouth! The autocrat who sweeps whole
communities into Siberia with a stroke of his pen was ill when his
mother was alarmed, was in agony when she was indiscreet with her food!
She cannot forget this. It is but yesterday she dried his flesh to keep
it sound. It is but yesterday she let him bite his aching gum upon her
finger, wishing the ache might go from him to her--hoping that if he
gave her pain he would have less. One can well pardon the vanity that
would lead a son to insist that his mother should accompany him to


THE EXECUTIVE MANSION OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC,

that she might behold him enter upon the Chief Magistracy of fifty
millions of freemen, gained by the first choice of a majority of those
freemen, yea, by the unanimous first and second choice, for none so
ready to fight for his right to rule as he who yesterday voted for an
honored opponent--the very summit of true political ambition--the apex
of the mother's boldest hope! "The mother's love is indeed the golden
link that binds youth to old age," says Bovee; "and he is still but a
child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow,
who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the
gentle chidings, of


THE BEST FRIEND

that God ever gives us!" I knew an aged woman, who interested me very
greatly in tales of "her boy"--that good son who had so often proven his
gratitude for her long love. One day, chancing to consider her great
number of years, I inquired how old "her boy" was, and found that he had
been a grandfather for twenty-three years, and had lately had the
satisfaction of holding a great grandson in his arms. Still he was her
curly haired-boy--she could remember him in no other condition of life
with so much satisfaction.


"I WOULD DESIRE FOR A FRIEND,"

says Lacretelle, "the son who never resisted the tears of his mother."
"Love droops, youth fades, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's
secret hope outlives them all," sings Oliver Wendell Holmes. "At first,"
says Beecher, "babies feed on the mother's bosom, but always on her
heart." "Stories first heard at a mother's knee," affirms Ruffini, "are
never wholly forgotten--a little spring that never quite dries up in our
journey through scorching years."


"AN OUNCE OF MOTHER,"

says the Spanish proverb, "is a pound of clergy." "The mother's heart is
the child's schoolroom," says another writer. "Men are what their
mothers made them," says Emerson, in study of Napoleon's idea; "you may
as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere,
as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that
jobber." "It is generally admitted," says Theodore Hook, "and frequently
proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which
men possess, are derived from their mothers." "It is well for us," says
Bishop Hare, "that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand
half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with


A CONCEIT OF OUR OWN IMPORTANCE

which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose
mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to
know the sense of it." Perhaps the praises of our mothers tarry in our
brains too long anyway. It may be a provision of nature that woman shall
inspire her child with sufficient self-esteem to take him through the
world with a first-class ticket, a cabin passage, that he may escape the
poor accommodations of excessive humility, the steerage of the ship of
life. It seems incredible that our mother was mistaken in thinking her
boys the brightest, best, and most creditable in all the region
roundabout! Let us by our lives, marvel rather at the correctness of her
vision than the blindness of her love.


"SHE WHO HAS LOST AN INFANT,"

says Leigh Hunt, "is never, as it were, without an infant child. Her
other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the
changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child;
for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into
an eternal image of youth and innocence." The mother teaches us the one
grand lesson of


UNALTERABLE FIDELITY.

"Nothing is more noble," says Cicero, "nothing more venerable." One of
the most beautiful tributes to an aged mother was written by Lamartine.
"The loss of a mother," he says "is always severely felt. Even though
her health may incapacitate her from taking an active part in the care
of her family, still she is a sweet rallying-point, around which
affection and obedience, and a thousand endeavors to please,
concentrate; and dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn! It
is like that lonely star before us; neither its heat nor light are
anything to us in themselves; yet the shepherd would feel his heart sad
if he missed it when he lifts his eye to the brow of the mountain over
which it rises when the sun descends."


THERE ARE MEN WHO FORGET THE CLAIMS

their mothers have upon them. Of such ungrateful wretches, though
clothed in outward excellences, the pen can write nothing too harsh in
justice. As old Dr. South says, "the greatest favors are to such a one
but the motion of a ship upon the waves; they leave no trace, no sign
behind them. All kindness descend as showers of rain or rivers of fresh
water falling into the main sea; the sea swallows them all, but is not
all changed or sweetened by them. If you look backward and trace him up
to his original, you will find that he was born so; and if you look
forward enough, it is a thousand to one that you will find that


HE ALSO DIES SO.

The thread that nature spins is seldom broken off by anything but death.
I do not by this limit the operation of God's grace, for that may do
wonders." Be glad, if you are ungrateful, that a wise man has given you
so good counsel to pray--and pray as you do when you think yourself in
extreme peril!


IF YOUR MOTHER IS YET YOUNG,

you have many years of her great friendship before you. Try and pattern
after her boundless affection. Let it melt into your heart and make it
warmer. If "age has snowed white hairs" upon her head, treasure her the
more fondly during the few swift years she will be left to you. Soon she
will go to her reward, and you will be without the only friend of man
whose love seems to be inalienable--whose esteem he cannot barter away,
either in greed or in vice.


THE MOTHER OF MOTHERS.

In almost every community there is "a mother in Israel," a mother of
mothers, whose great heart is like the ocean, and claims the outpourings
of every stream of life. To these grand souls of virtue and goodness let
every man bow in reverence, for they are mothers to the motherless. When
the Reaper came forth to reap he aimed to take the richest sheaf, but
lo! the mother in Israel gathered the orphans together, and poured out
her tenderness upon them.

[Illustration]




LOVE.

     Had we never loved sae kindly,
     Had we never loved sae blindly,
     Never met or never parted,
     We had ne'er been broken-hearted!--Burns.

     Dear as remembered kisses after death,
     And sweet as those for others; deep as love.
     Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
     O Death in Life! the days that are no more.--Tennyson.


Love, says Cowley, "is a great passion, and therefore I
hope I have done with it." I think most people will agree with this
sentiment. Love is such a tyrant, it leaves common sense so little to
say, that the majority of people are heartily glad when reason returns
to her throne and the thrilling lunacy is a remembrance instead of a
fact. The remembrance is sweet, and has no angry thorn, no peremptory
mandate. The young man is going along in the full enjoyment of his life,
when suddenly a huge coiled spring, the existence of which has not
attracted his notice, is loosed in his breast, his whole intellectual
forces centre on the attainment of one object, and a mental strain
begins which is of the exact nature of madness, and has ever been termed
so by people who have looked at things merely by what they have seen. In
the highly-feverish state of the brain the nerves of the whole system
soon become involved, the stomach refuses to perform its functions, and
physical emaciation and deep melancholia rapidly ensue. The obvious
reason is the insane state of the brain. Nature has suddenly impressed
that organ with the one idea that a certain fair maid is actually
without the faults of her associates. She is the prize of the whole
world! Had the world the information of her perfections which is lodged
in this young man's secret brain, there would be a war of extermination
for her possession--a second sack of Troy at the very least. Deep pity
for other men with wives, who cannot marry this maiden, and pity for
young men who have seemingly preferred other maidens, intermit with joy
that all the world has been so blind.


CAUTIOUSLY THE YOUTH ADVANCES

toward his prey. The expedition is one of tremendous importance,
therefore his exceeding amount of thought. When he is in the ineffable
presence, he is there as an actor in a tragedy, or as a tenor in an
opera. He has almost counted his hairs; he certainly counts the winkings
of his eyelids! Can any detail be unimportant in an undertaking of such
measureless risk? It is no wonder, then, that a young man who is giving
as much thought as this to a young, thoughtless girl is not worth much
in his business for the time being! In fact, it is a miracle to him,
after


SOME DOOMFUL FROWN

from his queen, that he has survived the night and goes to his work at
all! He is confident that it is base habit. "O, that this too too solid
flesh would melt!" he cries, as his dissatisfied employer, or father,
requires some reasonable action and fails to get it. In after-life this
same young man is glad the "grand passion" will never come to him again.
He feels that it has not heightened him in his own regard. His love may
have been smooth or it may have been swallowed in the quicksands of
adversity--the difference is small. It is not creditable to the human
brain to be so hoodwinked and purblind as Cupid makes his victims. But


LOVE RULES THE UNIVERSE,

having its climax in God himself, and its earthly ideality in the
mother's affection. We should not complain that when the potent essence
is first administered to us it shakes us seriously. Without this
passion, selfishness would triumph, and man would not take on the cares
of wedded life. Society and religion would wither. The world would be a
howling den of chaos and deep crime.


HOW HAVE THE SAGES LOOKED UPON LOVE?

I think they are inclined to praise it, as a whole--to indorse it merely
as a sensation, a passing gratification. It has always, on the contrary,
seemed to me like an exquisitely painful means to an exquisitely
beautiful end. The warm genial love of the home--the love which is as an
open grate, cheerful, and which is without those thunderstorms needful
to clear the heavily charged atmosphere of youthful love--pleases and
repays me for "the dangers I have passed." "The greatest pleasure of
life is love," says Sir William Temple. "Love is like the hunter," says
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "who cares not for the game when once caught,
which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless
eagerness." This is true of only a minority of the hunters. I have more
frequently bought additional fish than thrown away those I have caught.
Why? Because the weariness and difficulty of catching two or three rock
bass had impressed me with the value of a whole string of fish. You have
seen


THE ANXIETY OF THE CAT

to make the captive mouse believe she is not on guard. She walks away
with the utmost indifference. But let the mouse so much as move its
crushed little body, she is upon it with the ferocity of the greatest
members of her agile tribe. So it is with us. Let our possession escape
us, our consternation is complete. Again the spring uncoils, and again
we are madmen. "A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love
that would seem hid; love's night is noon," says Shakspeare. "It is
better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all" sings
Tennyson. "Nothing but real love," says Lord Lytton, "can repay us for
the loss of freedom, the cares and fears of poverty,


THE COLD PITY OF THE WORLD

that we both despise and respect." "Love," says Sir Thomas Overbury,
wittily, "is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath
made." "To reveal its complacence by gifts," says Mrs. Sigourney, "is
one of the native dialects of love." "Love is never so blind as when it
is to spy faults," says South. "Love reckons days for years," says
Dryden, "and every little absence is an age." "Where love has once
obtained an influence," observes Plautus dryly, "any flavoring, I
believe, will please." "That is the true reason of love," says Goethe,
"when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could either have
loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us."


"NO CORD OR CABLE CAN DRAW

so forcibly or bind so fast," says melancholy Burton, "as love can do
with only a single thread." "Where there exists the most ardent and true
love," says Valerius Maximus, "it is often better to be united in death
than separated in life." "A man of sense may love like a madman," says
Rochefoucauld, "but not like a fool." Says Addison, who was a bachelor,
and knew little about the heart: "Ridicule, perhaps, is a better
expedient against love than sober advice; and I am of the opinion that
Hudibras and Don Quixote may be as effectual to cure the extravagance of
this passion as any one of the old philosophers." "Love lessens woman's
delicacy and increases man's," says Richter. This accords with common
observation. "It makes us proud when our love of a mistress is
returned," says Hazlitt, in a rambling manner; "it ought to make us
prouder still when we can love her for herself alone, without the aid of
any such selfish reflection. This is the religion of love." All such
argument proceeds on the theory that love is a sawing of wood, a digging
of potatoes, or some such "emotion," to be entirely controlled by the
will and regulated by the decencies. "Loving," says Shakspeare, "goes by
haps; some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps." "The accepted and
betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden, in her
acceptance of him," says Emerson, again; "she was heaven whilst he
pursued her as a star--she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one
as he." I do not think Emerson has got exactly the right idea of the way
a lover feels just there. Here it is and nearer the truth--I do not know
the author's name:

     I've thought, if those dumb, heathen gods could breathe,
       As shapeless, strengthless, wooden things they stand,
     And feel the holy incense round them wreathe,
       And see before them offerings of the land;
     And know that unto them is worship paid
       From pure hearts, kneeling on the verdant sod,
     Looking to helplessness, for light and aid
       Because by fate they know no higher god:
     How their dull hearts must ache with constant pain,
       And sense of shame, and fear to be flung down
     When all their weakness must one day be plain,
       And fire avenge the undeserved crown.
     And reading my love's letter, sad and sweet, I sigh,
       Knowing that such a helpless, wooden god am I.

"The comparison of love to fire holds good in one respect," says Henry
Home, "that the fiercer it burns the sooner it is extinguished." "Love
me little love me long" says Marlowe. "The plainest man, that can
convince a woman," says Colton, "that he is really in love with her, has
done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he
can produce there is a silence in it that suspends the foot; and the
folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects." "Love is
but another name for that inscrutable presence by which the soul is
connected with humanity," says Simms. "The beings who appear cold," says
Madame Swetchine, "adore where they dare to love." "Man, while he loves,
is never quite depraved," says Charles Lamb. "It is possible," says
Terence, referring to the unquestionable temporary insanity of the
passion, "that a man can be so changed by love that one could not
recognize him to be the same person." "Solid love, whose root is virtue,
can no more die, than virtue itself," says Erasmus, who was probably
talking about a requited affection.


THE CASE OF THE POET PETRARCH,

who loved another man's wife all his life, simply because he fell in
love with her before she married the other fellow, does not strike me as
exactly the proper thing, or exactly the manly thing. I like better the
Sensible Shepherd of George Wither, who sang jauntily:

     Be she fairer than the day,
     Or the flowery meads in May,

     If she be not so to me,
     What care I how fair she be?

Kill off your love if it be not returned, as though it were a condemned
felon. The execution is a painful scene, but the effect on your manhood
is good. "True love were very unlovely," says Sir Philip Sidney, "if it
were half so deadly as lovers term it!" "There are few people," says
Rochefoucauld, "who are not ashamed of their loves when the fit is
over." "In love we are all fools alike," says Gay. "We that are true
lovers" says Shakspeare, "run into strange capers; but as all is mortal
in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly." "O love," cries
LaFontaine, "when thou gettest dominion over us,


WE MAY BID GOOD-BY TO PRUDENCE."

"Love can hope where reason would despair," says Lyttleton. "O love, the
beautiful, the brief!" exclaims Schiller. "Love at two-and-twenty is a
terribly intoxicating draught," says Ruffini. "At lovers' perjuries they
say Jove laughs," smiles Shakspeare. "Where love and wisdom drink out of
the same cup, in this everyday world, it is the exception," said Madame
Neckar. "The poets, the moralists, the painters, in all their
descriptions, allegories, and pictures," says Addison, "have
represented love as a soft torment, a bitter sweet, a pleasing pain, or
an agreeable distress." "O how this spring of love resembleth the
uncertain glory of an April day!


ADIEU, VALOR! RUST, RAPIER!

be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth!" says
Shakspeare. "I do much wonder," says the King of Thought, again, "that
one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his
favor to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in
others, became the argument of his own scorn, by falling in love."


"LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP EXCLUDE EACH OTHER,"

says DuCoeur. "Love begins by love, and the strongest friendship could
only give birth to a feeble love." "Love, which is only an episode in
the life of man," says Madame DeStael, "is the entire history of woman's
life." "Love is a spaniel," says Colton, "that prefers even punishment
from one hand to caresses from another." "A man loved by a beautiful and
virtuous woman, carries a talisman that renders him invulnerable," says
Madame Dudevant; "everyone feels that such a one's life has a higher
value than that of others." "There are no little events with love,"
says Balzac; "it places in the same scales the fall of an empire and the
dropping of a woman's glove." "There's nothing half so sweet in life as
love's young dream," says Moore. "Where there is love in the heart,"
says Beecher, "there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black
cloud with gorgeous hues." "The greatest happiness of life," says Victor
Hugo, "is the conviction that we are loved for ourselves--say,


RATHER IN SPITE OF OURSELVES."

"Love makes its record in deeper colors," says Longfellow, "as we grow
out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in
green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple." "The heart of a
young woman in love is a golden sanctuary," says Paulin Limayrac, "which
often enshrines an idol of clay." This thought, the reader can see is a
close neighbor of the Boston poet's idea of the "base wooden god,"
spoken of a while back. "We forgive more faults in love than in
friendship," says Henry Home; "expostulations betwixt friends end
generally ill, but well betwixt lovers."

"Gold," says Deluzy, "does not satisfy love; it must be paid back in
its own coin." "The platform of the altar of love," says Jane Porter,
with great accuracy of metaphor, "is constructed of virtue, beauty, and
affection; such is the pyre, such the offering; but the ethereal spark
must come from heaven that lights the sacrifice." "This passion is,"
says Dr. South, "the great instrument and engine of nature, the bond and
cement of society, the spring and spirit of the universe. It is the
whole man wrapped up into one desire, all the power, vigor, and
faculties of the soul


ABRIDGED INTO ONE INCLINATION."

"Samson was so tempted," says Shakspeare, "and he had an excellent
strength; yet was Solomon so seduced; and he had a very good wit." There
has always been one time in a man's life when he felt poets should sing
only of this one act in the drama of life. Here is the idea--the same
idea we have all had, only dressed in better raiment, for Alexander
Smith took great pride in the children of his brain: "Methinks all poets
should be gentle, fair, and ever young, and ever beautiful; I would have
all poets to be like to this--gold-haired and rosy-lipped, to sing of
love." Finally, said the Great Napoleon: "Love is the occupation of the
idle man, the amusement of the busy one, and


THE SHIPWRECK OF A SOVEREIGN."

Thus, if we will turn through the pages of our books, we will see
everywhere the marks of love upon men's minds. It is a rude bath, which
when we have grown more accustomed to the waters, delights and
satisfies, and in our sleep our dreams are beautiful. It is natural, and
therefore need not be called laudable--though if it were not a part of
our development, schools of love would be a necessity, to teach men how
to love without scandal in the sight of God.


THE FIRST ATTACK OF LOVE IS RIDICULOUS

to those not acting one of the two parts, yet it is well to remember our
own experience. "Love is the fulfilling of the law," says the Bible;
"many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown it." Neither
can the selfish aim nor the cruel jest of the parent whom it discommodes
do aught but fan the flame if God and not folly have truly lighted it.
The danger of handling carelessly the fire of the heart is one of the
gravest which confront the guardians of younger lives. The switch is
fixed; the train is approaching; if you attempt to turn the train you
must not only know where it is going after it shall be turned, but you
must have the skill to see whether there yet remains time to make the
movement with success. A wreck by a switchman is a fearful thing!




COURTSHIP

     "Their Love was like the lava-flood
     That burns in Ætna's breast of flame."

     And when with envy Time, transported,
       Shall think to rob us of our joys,
     You'll in your girls again be courted,
       And I'll go wooing in my boys.--Percy.


On flies time, and thus the tale goes on. You are in love
with an amiable maiden, and she is pleased. If you could see further
into her heart you would find she was idolatrous. But this matter of
courtship must have shown you how careless you have been with your money
through all those years you might have been hoarding it for this great
need. But you did not save your wages, probably, or if you did you are
an exceptional young man. You now need money. You should work about
fifteen months before you marry. It will be a long, tedious, unpleasant
pull, trying to the affections, and it is generally very trying to the
health; but it is necessary, and if you have not the persistence to save
money for fifteen months, in the meantime quarreling and making up, with
all the quarters of the moon, you have not the solidity of citizenship,
and will be better unmarried. "Successful love takes a load off our
hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders" says Bovee. Square up your
shoulders! Get under the load so that you can carry it! The days of
responsibility have come. The larger the responsibilities look, the
deeper the young man usually loves. The day of the Chicago fire a man
put up a pine shed on the ruins of a marble palace, and on his sign he
painted


"ALL GONE BUT WIFE AND HOPE!"

People who thought those two things a small capital were greatly
mistaken, for that same man is now rich again. When you hear of a man
being ruined by getting married, ask for names and dates. The name will
usually settle it. Along the front of the lake at Chicago is a
breakwater. In hot weather this pier is nearly covered with men of
leisure, taking midsummer-night dreams. They are the so-called
"harvesters" who start out in droves into the country after something
to do--"forced to search for work and not find it!" Marriage has not
ruined them. You will find that the men your adviser shows you who has
been ruined by marriage, was a born wharf-rat, fit only to be shot with
a gun big enough to save the expense of any further funeral.


THERE IS NO POSSIBLE CHANCE

of a man being worse off married than single. As a married man, he is on
the right path. As a single man, there is no anchor for him. He may be
here to-day, in San Francisco next week. Then, in two or three years, he
will be back, as poor as ever. You will have to work, of course. But you
have never before done your share of the work. If you are a smart man,
you can do your share and more too. You will have a home of your own.
You could never get one as a single man, perhaps, because you would not
need one.


YOU WILL BE SAFER

as a married man. It seems to me that a virtuous, sober, christian,
unmarried man should have twice the credit of a married man, for he is
certainly exposed to thousands of extra temptations. Everything is
natural in marriage. The builder has "builded wiser than he knew." At
thirty-five he finds himself well along on the successful journey of
life. His bachelor friend who has lived a selfish existence is poorer,
has lost the charm of youth, and is skurrying around to get a wife who
will be a queen and slave at the same time. His bachelor friend is


A LAUGHING-STOCK

among the last crop of young girls, who can recollect how he went with
their married sisters, and he will be satisfied with nothing above
eighteen, though his hair is dropping out, or frosting like a cold night
in September. If he had not been so selfish he would have been married
eight or ten years ago. Now


NATURE BEGINS TO ASSERT HERSELF.

The friends of his youth have formed the new ties that have come with
the march of the years. The trees have their leaves, and cast a grateful
shadow, cool and sweet. The bachelor is bare, and under his branches the
hot and withering sun pours down unpleasantly. You are lucky to have
escaped such a lot, for it is O, so lonesome and unsatisfactory to man!
It is not good for him to be alone. Now,


IN TALKING TO YOUR SWEETHEART,

there is one bearing alone which will bring forth good fruit. Be honest
and sincere. Remember that the philosophers and sages of the centuries
have been studying and marveling over the thing called Truth--why it is
that it always asserts itself--why it is that its parts always coincide
with each other, as though they had first been put together! When you
see cut stones unloading before the site of a building, you know by the
marks on them that, when they are put together, they will make a
fine-looking front, for the architect has copied them from the front of
some building which has, sometime or other, been erected just as this
projected structure will be. But here is


THIS QUARRY OF TRUTH;

you enter it without a human architect, hew out a stone, hew out
another, and another, and soon a beautiful edifice arises, in the walls
of which there is not a single peep-hole or blemish. Everything fits. So
bear yourself toward your future partner for life that when you enter
the quarry of your brain for her information, you also enter this quarry
of Truth. The stones you now cut out will stand as the buttresses of the
walls!


HOW SHOCKING IF THEY ARE LIES!

Tell her, when you tell her anything at all, the exact truth. Be very
careful about this. Tell her particularly about your money affairs. Your
happiness depends more on food and clothes than you are now able to
understand. But if you put in solid blocks of truth for the basement,
the finer developments of your life will join on with precision and
effect. I know a young man who went in debt for a fine span of horses
and wagon. His bride supposed they were his own, and he "let her
suppose."


A WHOLE AFTERLIFE

of the veriest toil and the most honorable career never wholly expunged
the blame which attached to him in both her mind and the minds of her
people. It was so foolish in him! One little speech, and long years of
bitter pride-wounding would have been averted. The young woman would
have married him, just as quickly, for it is easy to make terms before
marriage in this country. Do not promise to do things which depend more
on events than on yourself. Do not promise to love your future wife
always. She may prove unworthy of it. You may prove incapable of it.


INWARDLY MAKE UP YOUR MIND

to ennoble yourself so that your affections will solidify. The
companionship of a woman will do much to help you. Promise little by
word of mouth--everything by actions. Then, as your days come and go,
your character constantly comes more fully into the light, and that
light is one of broad, pleasant, humanly love. Your wife will be sure to
live happily, for you have built within her mind no extravagant
expectations.


LOOK AT A CIRCUS POSTER!

See the absurd and ridiculous promises made upon it! Why do they dare so
to humbug the people? Because, in no other way could they get people to
ride ten or twelve miles through a summer drouth to hand over their
money to the man who is anxious to get it! Here is a man in a chariot,
with tigers plunging under his rein like the rays from the sun.

[Illustration: COURTSHIP.

     "New hope may bloom, and days may come.
     Of milder, calmer beam,
     But there's nothing half so sweet in life,
     As love's young dream."]

Here is a pyramid of elephants four elephants high! Here is the
acrobat in the midst of the smoke and blaze of an Armstrong cannon,
beginning some flight to a far-off trapeze, or swing, in the air! It is
somewhat different inside.


THE CHARIOT OF TIGERS

is an enlarged rat trap with two sleepy, disgusted overgrown cats in
it--cats which do not thrive well in this cold land, and which do not
smell any too sweet and clean. The pyramid of fine-looking
picture-elephants is an ugly live elephant or two standing on a beer-keg
or two, which is a wonderful feat for elephants, of course, but not an
entertaining one to human sight-seers; and as a final swindle, the
cannon act is a man on a spring disguised as a wooden cannon, who is
thus hoisted a few feet into the air, where he catches hold of his
swinging bar and completes the usual act of an "aerial acrobat." "Fi
on't!" as Hamlet says; "reform it altogether!"


DO NOT "BILL YOURSELF TOO STRONGLY"

before your divinity. She would love you if she thought you were just a
common man, like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln; so, if you tell
her you are poverty-stricken and prodigal, and it be true, then she
will think that she had rather have a demi-god, poor as Job's turkey,
than a common young man, like your brother or your friend, with all the
gold of King Plutus! Bring to her an honest heart, and you will, indeed,
bring treasures before her, and she would have no right to complain,
even were she so inclined. Love does not seem to be a matter of
volition--


OF "WANT TO, OR DON'T WANT TO."

"No man or woman," says Arthur Helps, "was ever cured of love by
discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for
three long rainy days in the country, has done more to dispel love than
all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed." Just think of
that during all the time of your courtship. Dread the "living together,"
and when you come to stand the test, the test will not be too great for
you. A young man, truly, doesn't need to be married, as a full-grown one
does. But


IN ORDER TO REAP WE MUST SOW.

Our bachelor friend of forty wants to reap just as badly as you, but his
fields will be waste while yours will be growing. When you get your
life insured at twenty-one they charge you about ten times what the risk
really is. Why? Because, although they have not the least idea that you
are going to die now, they know the mortgage is on your life, and the
dues, when you pass fifty, would, in justice, be higher than mortal man
would pay. Therefore they even it up.


YOU LAY ASIDE A SURPLUS

for your old age, and, until lately, the courts held you could collect
that surplus, if your contract were not completed to the end of your
existence. Thus, in marrying, you are following the wise ordinance of
God. You are choosing a blooming, healthy young woman while you are
yourself fresh enough to attract her love and hold it. You are living as
a married man while you might, probably, live with more strictly selfish
personal comfort up to thirty-five as a single man; but you are,


AFTER THIRTY-FIVE,

immensely better off than the single man, and you will, besides, always
be given a better place in society than he, because society likes to see
every member in its ranks doing his duty like a man and helping to bear
the burdens as well as reap the benefits which our system of living
deals out to those who participate in it.


IF YOU HAVE THE CONSUMPTION

and the young lady also have that disease, consult the physicians of
your families. A very learned man, in a series of papers in the
_Atlantic Monthly_, some years ago, refused to forbid such marriages
entirely. Put yourselves especially under the care of your doctors, and
follow their advice implicitly. If the young lady, alone, is
consumptive, extend your engagement and wait for events. If you yourself
are thus tainted with disease, I have little hesitation in saying that
it is not manly to get married until you are entirely out of the reach
of pecuniary want without your labor, and even then there are other
considerations of nearly equal importance which should lead you to
frequent conferences with your family doctor.


YOU THUS SEE THAT "LIFE IS REAL,

and life is earnest." If you are healthy, thank God for it, and sing
merrily while you build the nest which will hold the mate in warmth and
comfort. After the harbor of refuge is built, the ship will find a
pleasant and ever-welcome anchorage during the big storms outside.

Take the daughter of a good mother.

[Illustration]




MARRIAGE.

     The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men;
     A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
     Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
     Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
     And all went merry as a marriage-bell.--Byron.


Quotation of this verse is made, not because it
celebrated a marriage--it, rather, commemorated the frightful carnage of
Waterloo--- but because it very faithfully represents the fashionable
beginning of wedded life, to which it alludes. There seems to be in
woman an inherited, instinctive desire for this kind of thing at her
marriage. It is cruel to deny her, therefore man usually goes through
with it like a martyr. My prejudices are so heartily enlisted against
"blow-outs" of this kind that I feel the compunctions of an honest
judge at sitting in such a case. Nevertheless, I may relate some things
I have seen, to show how badly a couple may start in life. Here is one
instance: The dust has filled the air for six blocks around some stately
church. The "hacks" and private barouches and coupes have been packed
together so that any movement was entirely impossible; the bride has
come like a queen of the orient; she has walked on flowers to the
vestibule; there she has passed under an arch of tuberoses; half-way
down the aisle a gate of jessamines and smilax has opened with a
smothering sense of richness; at the altar she has actually knelt on a
pillow of camellias (fifty cents apiece); and a fifty-dollar organist
has put on his full instrument, as though he were proclaiming the glory
of God most mighty, instead of the folly of man most miserable. Into the
church have thronged the elect, proud and disdainful; on the outside has
stared the vulgar multitude, too ignorant for anything but rapt
wonderment. From the temple of high-priced worship the celebrants have
passed, in a still more exclusive body, to a residence where a banquet
has been prepared by a man who generally makes ice cream for a living,
and where a dazzling display of wedding presents has been uncovered to
the careless gaze. Then the train bears away the twain of one foolish
flesh, and the farce is over.


OF COURSE IT WAS A FARCE.

The elect read the newspapers next morning with a smile. None but he of
the vulgar multitude was hoodwinked. The man and the woman have spent
all their money to purchase a "swell wedding." The presents were hired,
so were most of the "hacks." The florist has got part of his money. The
couple, six months afterward, are "beating" some poor landlady out of
their board, and the man, in all likelihood, will never again be heard
of. But the women have been intensely agitated by the event. They have
never thought about the subsequent aspects of the case.


NO ONE OF THE SAME "SET"

would be willing to spare a single "hack" or one double camellia. Why
did the young man and the young woman do it? They did it principally out
of vanity, in imitation of some rich person who desired to distribute
his money among hard-working folks and at the same time create a
feeling of envy among his fellows and "please the women folk."


LET US HAVE THE MANHOOD AND THE WOMANHOOD,

if we have five hundred or a thousand dollars, to buy those necessaries
of life which will enable us to live without debt after we are settled
for life. We are sailing out of the harbor. Would it not be ridiculous
for us to heave into the water our provisions, as a symbol of our
delirious joy?--would not our ship be a ship of death when we reached
the middle of the sea? There is just as much joy in a simple wedding
which has properly shown our respect for the event as the third in
importance of all which will punctuate our history. We have been born;
we will die;


WE NOW MARRY.

"A man finds himself seven years older, the day after his marriage,"
says Lord Bacon. "Men should keep their eyes wide open before marriage,
and half shut afterwards," says Madame Scuderie. "Marriage is a feast,"
says Colton, "where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner."
"Mistress," cries Shakspeare, "know yourself; down on your knees, and
thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love. For I must tell you
friendly in your ear,--sell when you can; you are not for all markets."
"To love early and marry late," says Richter, "is to hear a lark singing
at dawn, and at night to eat it roasted for supper." "Marriages are best
of dissimilar material," says Theodore Parker.


"TO BE A MAN

in a true sense," says Michelet, "is, in the first place, and above all
things, to have a wife." "It is in vain for a man to be born fortunate,"
says Dacier, "if he be unfortunate in his marriage." "When it shall
please God to bring thee to man's estate," says Sir Philip Sidney, "use
great providence and circumspection in choosing thy wife. For from
thence will spring all thy future good or evil; and it is an action of
life, like unto a stratagem of war; wherein a man can err but once!" "We
are not very much to blame for our bad marriages," says Ralph Waldo
Emerson;


"WE LIVE AMID HALLUCINATIONS,

and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are
tripped up, first or last. But the mighty mother nature, who had been so
sly with us, as if she felt she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into
the Pandora box of marriage some deep and serious benefits and some
great joys." "It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of
happiness," says Chapin; "it is also a bond of service. It is the most
ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for
human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature."
"Marriage" says Selden, "is a desperate thing;


THE FROGS IN ÆSOP

were extremely wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would
not leap into the well, because they could not get out again." Why were
they wise? They were not wise at all. I have seen frogs in wells who are
more contented than they would be outside. "Men are April when they woo,
December when they wed," says Shakspeare; but he also says that "maids
are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives,"
so it is an even tilt between two forms of human nature. "If idleness be
the root of all evil," says Vanbruch, "then matrimony is good for
something, for it sets many a poor woman to work." "In the opinion of
the world," says Madame Swetchine, "marriage ends all; as it does in a
comedy;


THE TRUTH IS PRECISELY THE REVERSE.

It begins all. So they say of death, 'It is the end of all things.' Yes,
just as much as marriage!" "Humble wedlock," says St. Augustine, "is far
better than proud virginity." "Never marry but for love," says William
Penn, in his will; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely!" "Strong
are the instincts with which God has guarded the sacredness of
marriage," says Maria McIntosh. We cannot bear this remark too
constantly in mind. You would not dare shut off your supply of water,
because you know you will need it. But you are sometimes tempted to shut
off your supplies of love; and men do sometimes do it, and


AFTERWARD GO MAD

from clear soul-starvation. "Up to twenty-one I hold the father to have
power over his children as to marriage," says Coleridge; "after that age
he has authority and influence only. Show me one couple unhappy merely
on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who
are wretched from other causes." "He that takes a wife takes care,"
says Ben Franklin. "I chose my wife," says Goldsmith, "as she did her
wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well." "Before marriage,"
says Addison,


"WE CANNOT BE TOO INQUISITIVE

and discerning in the faults of the person beloved, nor after it too
dimsighted and superficial. Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness
and miseries.


A MARRIAGE OF LOVE

is pleasant; a marriage of interest easy; and a marriage where both
meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship,
all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of
life." "It is the policy of the Londoners," says Thomas Fuller, "when
they send a ship into the Mediterranean Sea, to make every mariner
therein a merchant, each seaman venturing somewhat of his own, which
will make him more wary to avoid, and more valiant to undergo dangers.
Thus married men, especially if having posterity, are


THE DEEPER SHARERS IN THAT NATION

wherein they live, which engageth their affections to the greater
loyalty." "Matrimony hath something in it of nature, something of
civility, something of divinity," says Bishop Hall. "Though matrimony
may have some pains, celibacy has few pleasures," says old Dr. Johnson,
a bachelor. Again says he: "Marriage is the best state for man in
general; and every man is a worse man in proportion as he is unfit for
the married state." "Marriage is an institution," says Sir Richard
Steele "celebrated for a constant scene of as much delight as our being
is capable of."


ONE THING KEEP IN MIND!

When the sages, the critics, and the people who love to say smart
things, paint the infelicities of marriage, they as often paint simply
the general troubles of life, which are common to all people. The
bachelor is more apt to be kept awake by the crying child in the next
chamber than is the father in the same room with the child. The young
man quarrels with his landlady as often as the young husband quarrels
with his wife. The young man notoriously finds his wants as lightly
resting on the memories of those he hires to attend to them as does the
husband of the most careless wife. He cannot escape the sickness of life
with even the good fortune of a married man, according to the
statistics of the Government. The married woman is also healthier than
the maid. So, then, get the critics of the married state to specify its
various unhappinesses; then subtract from that schedule all that come
alike to the single state, and you will find that marriage, for its
separate joys, has not a separate set of troubles in as great
proportion. The very highest evidence of the usefulness and
agreeableness of marriage is gathered from the well-known haste in which
both men and women, when death takes away their companions, seek, in a
second marriage, a renewal of those relations which, in their opinion,
lend additional charm to the drama of life.




WEDDED LIFE

     You are my true and wedded wife;
     As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
     That visit my sad heart.--Shakspeare.

                                     She's adorned
     Amply that in her husband's eye looks lovely--
     The truest mirror that an honest wife
     Can see her beauty in.--John Tobin.


"Of all the actions of a man's life, his marriage does
least concern other people," says Selden, "yet, of all actions of our
life, it is most meddled with by other people." In fact, if people would
take home their attention thus so liberally bestowed abroad, it would
enable them to make matches of their own far better than those which now
burden the records of the churches and the courts. If a young man and a
young woman can be left alone three or four years, to wear into the new
relations they have assumed, there is little chance of their being
unhappily married. An instinct of the strongest character brought them
together, and is likely to hold them by its own force. Man is a creature
of habit. Strip him of his home after he has been for four years
habituated to it, and he will be unhappy, no matter how unpeaceful that
home may have been. Therefore, if possible, have your wife and yourself
in a house by yourselves for the first four years of your married life.
As a general thing this is possible, and I think a firm will, in most
cases, greatly aids the possibility of such a course. One thing, at
least, is clear,


NO HUSBAND IS DOING RIGHT

to admit to his home as a sharer of its comforts any other man. It is a
common sentiment among any two homeless young men that the first one who
marries shall take the other to live with him. Nothing is more absurd or
out of place. I do not think there could be so dangerous a foe to the
peace of the wife, in case the young man do not think his friend has
married wisely,--and he must think so, or he would himself have married
her if he could have done so. His criticisms will estrange the husband's
heart and cool his love. On the other hand, if he has admired the lady,
then the situation is all the more atrocious.


THOSE HORRIBLE EVENTS IN LIFE,

where a man's home is transformed suddenly into what has been bitterly
but justly termed a "hell on earth," are more than half the time
traceable to the carelessness of the husband in not throwing around his
wife those barriers which shall ever keep her from temptation. The wife
of pure instincts will generally object to the admission of another man
to her home as a member of it. How often her womanly and honorable
objection is overruled by the husband as the mark of an inhospitable
nature. Live alone. Let no one see your meannesses, for the third party
will remember and recite those meannesses where you would either never
have seen them, or have forgotten them altogether.


BE KIND TO YOUR WIFE.

If you find this difficult, begin by making up your mind that, during
the next week, you will not, under any circumstances whatever, speak a
cross word to her. Carry out this resolution as well as you can. Then
the next week takes off the strain. The natural tendency of cross words
to misery will so startle you that you will soon try it for another
week. You will do better on the second trial. This is important for your
own peace of mind, for, in scolding and fretting, the average woman, if
you get her started, can easily hold her own. This woman is bound to you
by stronger ties than you suppose.


GO OFF TWO HUNDRED MILES AND SEE!

She is also bound to you by very strong bonds in the law, as you would
find out if you deserted her. She is also entitled to a very high place
in your goings and comings, as society teaches you. When the President
is inaugurated, there is a front seat close by for his wife. The Chief
Justice administers the oath, and there is another front seat for his
wife, also. So you need not be afraid of doing her too much honor. Speak
to her respectfully. Perhaps there is a youngster watching you--you have
no idea how closely. This youngster will try on his hand governing his
mother, if he sees any opportunity whatsoever. Just look to it that he
does not see such an opening! Your wife as you will know, has cares of
a multifarious kind. Her hours of labor greatly exceed yours, though she
cannot concentrate her mind on one thing as you can. She is fitted, by
long years of inherited housewifery, to do this and then that with
untiring devotion to the interests of her household. You cannot, as a
general thing, lighten those legitimate cares save by your smiles. But
you are a selfish man if you increase them by requiring any great amount
of extra personal attention. You will find it her nature to minister to
you in many ways. Let her alone in it. Accept all gratefully, and do
something in return


BY WAY OF FORMAL RECEIPT.

You will grow happier day by day, and your wife will be the happiest
woman in the neighborhood. She will be proud of you because you have had
the brains to be happy and sensible. We hear a good deal of railing
against the general wisdom of getting married. There seems to be a sort
of popular contagion lately, making it fashionable to fling jeers and
jibes at the cares and sorrows of marriage. We find young men writing to
the newspapers that it costs them six dollars to board singly, and that
the same "style" of living and enjoyment could not be purchased at


A "BOARDING-HOUSE OF ONE'S OWN"

for less than twenty-two. And again the same sort of writer will assert
that he can quit one "boarding-house" when he pleases, whereas he must
eat the cold roast beef and cranberry sauce of the other until he
crosses the creek called Styx. Let me call this young man Mr. Bachelor,
and reply to him in about his own style:


A FEW THOUGHTS IN GENERAL:

1. A man named Payne wrote a seemingly-ordinary song entitled "Home,
Sweet Home." This piece, on account of certain sentiments conveyed, at
once received the seal of nearly universal approbation. It is safe to
say Mr. Bachelor and the class in which he may be placed were not among
those who accorded extraordinary attention to the little song. He is and
they are, therefore, at once separated from the vast mass of the people.
Evidently the sentiments of the song were based on experiences largely
known to the general gender and unknown to Mr. Bachelor.

2. The man Daniel McFarland was so worthless that his wife refused to
live with him, and, sadly enough, fell in love with still another man.
The worthless husband, discovering that Richardson was coming into
property which had not always been his own, resorted to an ambuscade,
and killed Richardson. To the dullest comprehension this act revealed a
deep jealousy. Jealousy is founded on a solid fear of losing something.
In this unhappy family, where the man believed he had nothing to care
for, he suddenly awoke to find he had thrown away a pearl richer than
all his tribe.

3. It seems to me as natural for a man to establish a home, with a wife,
as to grow a beard on his face.


SOME CONSIDERATIONS IN PARTICULAR.

1. At twenty-seven years of age a man whom I know met the finest young
woman he had ever seen. He wanted her and he got her. Five years have
passed.

2. At marriage the man found himself endowed with a godlike selfishness.
This he probably owed to the past struggle for existence. With this not
very estimable faculty he carried to his home a young woman endowed
with nearly the opposite faculties. She only acquired selfishness
through association with her companion. At the start, then, they were
both willin' oxen--one ox was willing to do all the pulling, and the
other ox was willing he should.

3. Now the man had also a high faculty called judgment. He continually
wondered why the woman did not despise him on account of his
selfishness. He soon discovered that it was because the woman lacked
sadly in judgment. The baby would lift up its voice in the night. That
baby must be attended to. The weather might be very cold. The man
despised that fact, but the woman, because it made her teeth ache and
her body cake and cramp, feared the cold. But the man also despised the
baby and all its appertainings--particularly the appertainings.
Therefore, the man debated within himself that he was very selfish, or
he would get up. Perhaps, being a "just" man, the way men go, he really
got up about once in a dozen times, but, candidly, he would probably
have seen that baby suffer ere he would have attended its wants any
oftener. The woman took it for granted that the man would not get up,
and yet she did not despise him. She did not have judgment enough to do
it.


VANITY AND SELFISHNESS.

4. A man's vanity and selfishness are present (to a woman's perception)
in every movement. She likes them. They are the characteristics of
masculinity.

5. The man entered matrimony with all the trepidation born out of
thinking too much about it. It seemed to him like buying a
fifteen-thousand-dollar horse on instalments. This is just as it seems
to Mr. Bachelor, too. It was a pretty good price, but it was a
high-stepper, a flyer, a beauty. It would take him all his life to pay
for it, and it might founder the first year. But he had never in his
life wanted anything the way he wanted that woman. Mr. Bachelor has not
yet got to that stage.


RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL.

6. There is little doubt that, speaking of man as an animal, unchastened
by the benign influence of religion, "the male hates the sick female."
The female knows that. Yet in return she exhibits toward the sick male a
tenderness that makes his hair stand on end when he thinks of his own
short-comings.

7. The man's astonishment at reaching thirty was tremendous. He found he
was changing, and that marriage was evidently


THE EXPRESS PREPARATION FOR THIS CONTINGENCY.

He used to go to the theatre a great deal. He did not then notice that
the air in the auditorium was more rotten than the midnight winds that
blow over Chicago from the industrious rendering-houses on her
outskirts. It is now a real hardship to go to an ordinary dramatic
performance, and he thinks theatre-goers are as a class the most
discontented people there are in society. He used to spend his earnings
in various other places which now weary him beyond measure, and are
equally wearisome to those bachelor friends of his who used to keep him
company, and are forced by single life, to still frequent such resorts.


THIS HE FINDS OUT

when his wife goes into the country for a week or two. Those two weeks
are never halcyon days with him. There is a smell about a restaurant
that eloquently pleads the sweetness of home, and there is a lack of
confidence expressed in a pewter spoon and a general disinclination to
believe that anyone is careful molded in with the thickness of the
teacup, which startle him at once into a better conception of his wife's
confidence in him.

8. My friend comes home and finds his dressing-gown and slippers in
front of the fire. He is tired and cross, and doesn't want to sling
ashes nor bang a coal-hod. But the sight of the fire makes him feel
better at once, and if there be no fire, there are no ashes. He sits in
front of a coke fire in a grate. His little girl brings his slippers and
carries off his shoes--or carries off one shoe and one slipper. Then he
falls to thinking that girls are poor property as compared with boys,
but that any kind of children are a pretty good investment against one's
old age. His increasing wonder is that the whole state of things is so
natural. His wife takes comfort in having him in the same room with her.
When he is reading and she is darning socks, she is the very embodiment
of the fine French expression "I am content." She is not as beautiful as
she once was. But


ALL THE ELEMENTS OF HER BEAUTY

are still present, and with a return of the flesh she has lost in hard
work she will have all her looks. A handsome woman is just as handsome
to a man as a handsome girl is to a green young man like Mr. Bachelor.
My friend is hugging the shores of personal expense very closely for the
purpose of having two weeks in the country with his wife during the heat
of July. This woman's face does not intoxicate him as it once
unquestionably did. Neither does the "Trovatore miserere," nor the
"William Tell" or "Poet and Peasant" overtures so delight him as once
upon a time. Nevertheless there is in him a secret joy of possession,
calm and pleasant, in contemplating the wife, and a quiet satisfaction,
in hearing the music, that the taste of his youth was so thoroughly
good.


A WIFE'S PRAYER.

9. When his wife goes to bed she loves to put her head on her husband's
knees to say her prayers, and he loves to have her. He has great
confidence in a woman's prayers, and he is disposed, selfishly but
correctly, to believe the supplication is nearly dual in its character.
In his speech he treats his wife as though she were the wife of an
honored friend. If he talked either loosely or coarsely to his wife he
might fall in love with any woman to whom he showed greater respect. He
would, beside, proclaim his folly, for woman has small sense of humor.


DEATH OR WORSE.

10. If my friend were suddenly to lose this home by the death of the
wife, he would receive an unmeasured sympathy from all thoughtful men
not included in the small class who never understood what there was in
"Home, Sweet Home," to set people to humming it. If he were to have this
wrenched from him by a sudden awakening of his wife to all his faults,
and as blind an infatuation with the faults of another man as was once
extended to his own, he would know just how Daniel McFarland felt. My
friend is induced to believe, however, that his wife will be strongly
under his influence so long as he does not inspire her with fear. He
will not pound her unless he falls to whisky-guzzling, which,
considering that he does not yet use tobacco, is impossible.


SO MUCH OF A PARTICULAR HOME.

By the study of other women than his own wife (which is a very unjust
mode of study) man learns to hate women in general. By observing his
wife, however, he is inclined to love all her sex. Again, by
contemplating himself he falls into detestation of all humankind. Such
"men" as young Mr. Bachelor have spent their time in exhaustive
subjective researches. They know themselves too well. They should, in
reforming, take an easy step upward, and, by contemplating the good
points of Swift's Yahoos, somewhat elevate their opinion of the species
which they so graciously ornament! A green old age is universally
admired. The color of greenness at thirty, however, is not fashionable.
If I have lacked in charity in defending the wisdom of married life, it
is because I have seen too much grass thrown at bad boys. When you hear
a fool prating of the misery of married men as compared with single men,
answer him according to his folly, or, perhaps better, answer him not at
all.




BACHELORS.

     I would not my unhoused free condition
     Put into circumspection and confine,
     For the sea's worth.--Shakspeare.

    When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live
    till I were married.--Shakspeare.


Nothing is further from the single man's thoughts than
that he will continue in the single state all his life. He expects, when
the young woman meets his gaze who satisfies either his esthetic or
pecuniary ideas, generally the latter, or both, to take that young woman
to his bosom and begin married life. This is a natural state of mind,
and there is no harm in indulging it. It shall be the object of a few of
these pages to present such aspects of the unmarried state of man as
have principally commended themselves to general attention. The bachelor
has plenty of arguments to keep him single while he is not in love. He
thinks the arguments keep him single, good fellow. He says, as I heard
one of them say: "I would ask the unbiased observer what there is in the
world, after all, to induce a man to commit matrimony. Some one will
say: 'To have some one to care for him when sick.' This is complimentary
to woman--indicating that she marries to become a nurser of the sick and
old. And must a man endure all the pains and throes of years of
matrimonial cyclones that he may have some one to stew his gruel during
the brief space of his last illness? If a bachelor have money, he will
have friends to care for him, no fear, and if he be poor, a wife is the
last thing in the world he needs. She divides his pleasures and doubles
his sorrows.


HE MUST DANCE TO FASHION'S TUNE--

a palatial residence, a corps of servants, a livery, and dresses from
Paris--for the sake of having some one to receive and entertain his
friends' wives. He must support his wife's relations, and endure no end
of feminine abuse, which is not always so feminine. The world is divided
into two classes: Those who are unmarried, but wish they were, and
those who are married, but wish they were not."


THIS IS A FAIR SPECIMEN

of the argument by which the bachelor convinces himself that he is
happy. If it _does_ contribute to his peace of mind, why should the
world care? And the world really does not care. When he comes to have
his gruel stewed for him in a hospital, or, worse yet, a boarding-house,
he finds out, all of a sudden, that he is really in the way, and that,
in his life of perfect selfishness, he has never secured that thing
which cannot be bought, yet which he so yearns for now in the hour of
his feebleness, a woman's love. A good long sickness has greatly
enlarged many a man's philosophy!

Still, it is not in the destiny of every man to have a wife, or to keep
her if he get one. It is not unwise, therefore to consider that state as
one of the phases of life, and to contemplate its various aspects, good
and bad, as we have the other conditions of existence. "A man unattached
and without wife," says Bruyere, "if he have any genius at all, may
raise himself above his original position, may mingle with the world of
fashion, and hold himself on a level with the highest; this is less
easy for him who is engaged; it seems as if marriage put the whole world
in their proper rank." "I have" says Burton, the melancholy, "no wife or
children, good or bad, to provide for, and am a mere spectator of other
men's fortunes and adventures."


THE ONE GRAND RESULT OF SINGLE LIFE,

so far as is generally noticeable, is selfishness. The chief lesson of
marriage is self-denial. Which is the more pleasing of the two traits?
When the bachelor views life, he sees nothing good in it, for it all
looks selfish. Being so deeply jaundiced, the eye tints everything with
yellow. At forty he is heartily sick of it all. Why? Because he has
learned that he has squeezed the orange dry. The faculties which God
gave him to be pleased with when a recipient have been worked to death.


HE HAS BEEN A RECIPIENT WITHOUT CEASE.

He has chewed on one side of his mouth all his life. The teeth on the
other side have loosened and are ready to fall out, while the overworked
molars on the other are about to run into decay. The faculties whereby
he was expected to please other people have become rudimentary, and he
can now no more fascinate other people than he can sing soprano. He
makes an effort to engage the interest of a young lady. The hollowness
of his attack at once arrests her attention. The ease with which he
speaks long sentences of admiration proclaims his long practice in the
art, and the utter lack of real meaning in them. He knows that the girl
will


LAUGH BEHIND HIS BACK,

and it irritates him, and disposes him to attribute her act to "the
falseness of her sex," when it is merely her keen intelligence in such
matters. The fact of the matter is, that though an old bachelor is
seemingly greatly smitten with nearly every young girl he sees, he does
not succeed in marrying because he is a hard man to catch. The young
woman takes his measurement. His devotion is overpowering, but she
easily sees that it is a sham. The bachelor looks at her glove, and,
instead of admiring the hand, as the "marrying young man" does, he says
"Dollar and a half!"


HE LOOKS INTO HER EYES AND FIGURES

on the probable cost of board for two. The time of mating is past with
him, and that young woman can see it "as quick as a flash of lightning."
He may be the man she could love if she "let go of herself," but his
slippery words do not mean "marry," and she "passes him around." He
loves to go to picnics and church sociables, for he must be amused, and
he hopes to find that pleasure in next Tuesday's donation party which he
did not get at last Friday's rehearsal.


THE TROUBLE ALL LIES

in his intense love of self. Society in general regards him as useful,
and pities him. The older women generally suppose he would marry the
first girl who would have him, and he himself hopes to sooner or later
to come across a lady who is superior to all others, and who has money
enough to pay her share of the expense of living. I wish him success,
for


HE IS GENERALLY A GOOD FELLOW,

and strictly a creature of circumstances. If we catch the small-pox
nothing is surer than that we will have it in spite of our pride. If a
man is cast into a mold of events where he is bound to be taught nothing
but selfishness, and to see nothing but the selfishness of others, the
wonder is that he will assume, in the matter of self-denial, those
relations, even for a day, which he so assiduously avoids for life.


SCHOLASTIC OPPORTUNITIES.

The single man has a fine chance to be "a scholar and a ripe good one."
Having been denied the joys of a household all dependent on him, he may
surround himself with books, he may pursue investigations, he may gather
the ideas of the wits and the thinkers, and he may thus broaden his
brains until he is the honored associate of the best minds in his
region. This form of happiness is, to those who are within reach of it,
one of the most satisfying within the gift of God. There is no reaction,
there is no sorrow.


MAN LIVES TO LEARN,

after all. If the mind goes on in the culture of those high qualities
which have been inwoven with his weak frame, it seems to me his
selfishness has been well disposed of. The dollar which, in the cautious
mind, was begrudged to a wee toddler who never lived, for a pair of
shoes, has been placed where it has brought new knowledge of the power
and wisdom of God, the Creator and Conservator of the Universe. The
wisdom thus born out of selfishness will inculcate in those to follow
him the folly of selfishness, and the tastelessness of its brightest
apples of gold.


BE KIND TO THE OLD BACHELOR.

When he tries to be friendly, give him a lift. His mode of life has left
him with many advantages for usefulness which married people have not
got. On committees and in preliminary work he is often the best man in
the neighborhood. At funerals, in sickness, he has been known to be
almost the very instrument of the merciful Father. Teach the young
ladies that he is harder to "catch" than they suppose, and perhaps they
will turn toward him a portion of their character which will please him
better with womankind.


TO HEAR SOME MEN TALK,

and from experience, too, you would think that a breed of creatures born
from such women as are now living would be a herd of monsters, incapable
of civilization and refinement. And yet the world will go on, and we
know, almost, that our posterity will bring about wonders in the arts
and sciences, and perhaps even in society itself,--wonders which will
even surpass the triumph of our own generation. We are on the eve of
both traveling and talking through the bare air. We are in a way to
avoid the worst of our wars. It cannot be that the women who will bear
the men who will do all these things are to be


JUDGED AS THE BACHELORS VIEW THEM.

The bachelor sees as through a glass, darkly. Being, for the time,
incapable of the passion of love, having failed to exercise it when it
came upon him, he thus rails at woman. If you are young enough, watch
the events of the next thirty years, and see how they will give the lie
to such a tirade as this, from


THE SAME BACHELOR

I quoted at the start: "Not one-half of our marriages have unbiased love
as a foundation on both sides. (The love is usually on the man's side.)
A woman marries for money, position, spite, pride, contrariness, fear of
being an old maid, or for a home which she thinks will afford her more
pleasure than the one she leaves. Love is the last thing to enter her
head, and never her heart. Men of real sound judgment in business throw
this judgment entirely aside when they come to select a wife. A man
might better remain single than marry with the chances nine out of ten
in favor of his making a mistake for life."


SEE HOW LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

of anybody's good points this gentleman displays. The young woman who
has worked at ironing in the forenoon until her feet were swollen and
her head has got dizzy, comes into the parlor in the evening, all frills
and tucks, all "highty-tighty," all full of fun and God's good humor,
and impresses my friend with the belief that she has never done an
honest hour's labor in her life! Pshaw! she has got more pluck, and
nerve, and "sand," than half a dozen men, when it comes to where the
need is! She is going to be


THE MOTHER OF AN AMERICAN,

and Americans are not noted for their servility, their laziness, their
mediocrity, or their lack of brains! For shame, then to judge a young
woman as she appears to you when she is anxious to get rid of you! How
would you like to be judged solely at those times when you were
"carrying on," and "didn't care whether school kept or not"? That is
precisely the way this gentleman has spoken of young women a page back.
He thinks they love no one because they have never loved him! He never
loved them, and how could he expect them to be swindled? Read his
remarks over again, and see how events themselves deny his correctness.


HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAS HE SEEN

follow a drunken wife into a gutter? And, on the contrary, has he not
seen the reverse of this sad picture many a time? I heard a Judge say to
a poor woman once,--she was all scars: "I would send this woman-beater
to the work-house for two hundred days if I did not know you would
starve yourself to pay his way out." And then the poor, foolish,
faithful heart appealed to his Honor to "spare the man, just once more;"
she was sure he was a little the worse for drink when he misused her.
What does our friend call this thing in woman, if it be not love? The
being capable of a wife's love, and a mother's love, and a sister's
love, is not much in danger of the criticisms of a man who has only a
front-porch knowledge of all her sex!




SICKNESS.


Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are
unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a
bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm
which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led
down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit
heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those
vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains
will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our
health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of
bread to spare. But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten
our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we
bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in
upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had
crept through our bones in some frigid chill. There is no boon so great
as health. Of course everybody _admits_ that. But why can we not attach
meaning to it? If a man rise in a public gathering and say "I will give
a hundred dollars!" he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his
hearers know. But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say


"PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH

at all hazards!" no significance so deep attaches, though the one
statement is a thousand times as important as the other. I cannot
understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we
are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that
suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really
had any vivid feeling for the sick. On this earth each one has to do his
own suffering--the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby
in the hut of the miner. All who are well go their way rejoicing, even
having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled
associate. It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a
salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed
as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed. Two
men of affairs meet. One says:


"HOW ARE YE?"

The other responds: "How are ye? Are you going to be at the meeting
to-night?" etc., the conversation being now under full headway. The
words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have
lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not
exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was
such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it
off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more
astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick
man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and
bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of
those who stand at the bedside.


BEHOLD THE STRONG MAN IN THE FEVERISH AIR

of the sick-chamber. Last week all his clock-wheels worked with ease,
and merrily struck the hours of feast and sleep. Afterward the wheels
dragged a little and annoyed him some. Suddenly a whole handful of sand
was thrown into the cogs, and the cogs have been grinding it and the
hammer striking continuously ever since. His brain is distracted, his
soul is sorely perplexed, and his mind is like an infant in
house-cleaning time, strangely in the way and infinitely aware of it.
Here lies proud-riding vanity, thrown from his high saddle. Kindnesses
are showered on him of which he feels that he deserves few, and yet
wants more.


SYMPATHY IS EXPRESSED

for him which greatly moves him, for he is accompanying the words he
hears with the ills he feels, while the speaker is speaking a
conventionality which he would feel had he the ability. The sick man
mentally resolves that all the mistakes of his life shall be corrected
if he shall survive, and yet there are few who are able to fulfill the
programmes thus formulated--frequently the thriftless man is more
prodigal after an illness which has stabbed his pride with an
advertisement of his indigence than he was before his great vow of
future economy was recorded up on the ceiling, where,


IN THE RIFTS OF THE PLASTER,

the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi! Perhaps if the would-be
reformer would take a look frequently at those objects in his whilom
sick-room which so riveted his fevered attention, some of their old
association would return upon him, and do him good. The ancients
practiced the memory in this way. After a course of meanderings through
a garden, each object represented and recalled some piece of knowledge
which it was important the pupil should retain in his mind. "Few
persons," says Thomas a Kempis "are made better by the pain and languor
of sickness; as few great pilgrims become eminent saints." Here lies
your bachelor now. He has always felt that when he got sick he could get
his gruel stewed as well by the hired girl of his landlady, as the
French say, as by a wife. He lies up there, O, so in need of care and
kindness!


HIS BRAGS WERE MADE IN TIME OF STRENGTH,

and he expected to have strength to keep himself stoical. But now he is
weak,--weak and truly miserable. He hears the people come in to their
supper, go to their rooms, wash, run gayly down-stairs, chat, go down
another pair of stairs,--and then come the jarring sounds of plates and
knives and spoons, and, worse, the sickening smell of victuals. How can
they laugh and joke when he, a man and a brother, lies sick of a fever?
Ah! my friend, it would not be so were you the head of the house. All
would be changed. The supper-hour would come with a hush instead of a
clatter. The light stol'n forth o' the building would leave the whole
house in gloom. And in your selfish soul you would be glad, for God so
made all of us! Now you turn yourself to the wall, and marvel at the
lightness of human words and


THE GREEDINESS OF HUMAN WANTS.

You are little to be pitied in justice--greatly, in mercy! Lie there and
pity humanity, for they would be all like you, did not they follow in
nature's paths, where the roses of the wayside hide more of their
ugliness. All I would impose is that you walk where you will look least
hideous, even in your own eyes.

As, in Paradise, when Milton was all ablaze with poetic glory, he waved
his more than kingly sceptre and thus ushered in the night--

     Now came still evening on--
                   Now glowed the firmament
     With living sapphires: Hesperus that led
     The starry host rode brightest--

--So does woman, soft as still Evening, shining as all the starry hosts
with goodness and with mercy, come into the night of disease, and soften
its harsh desert with the dews of her kindness. Sickness teaches us how
good and true is woman, how useful in the world, how necessary to our
welfare and proper destiny. If any man have learned this on a sick bed


HE HAS NOT BEEN SICK FOR NAUGHT.

He is a man of progressive ideas and unfolding nature. Sir Walter Scott
has put into words a thought that has ever had man's approbation:

     O woman! in our hours of ease,
     Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
     And variable as the shade
     By the light, quivering aspen made;
     When pain and anguish wring the brow,
     A ministering angel thou!

"It is in sickness," says Hosea Ballou, "that we most feel the need of
that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for
our comfort and even necessities. This desire, opening our eyes to the
realities of life, is an indirect blessing." "Sickness," says Burton,
"puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in
the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear,
and brings us to a sense of our duty." "It is then," says Pliny, "that
man recollects there is a God, and that he himself is but a man. No
mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt."
"In sickness," says Shakspeare, playing with his prepositions, "let me
not so much say, 'Am I getting better of my pain?' as 'Am I getting
better for it?'"


LET US THEREFORE GIVE UP THE IDEA

of those great reformations which we formulate upon our mattresses of
misery, and rather confine ourselves to a few betterments of our lives
which are possible. If we are spendthrifts, we should vow to spend our
money for goods of more solid worth than a taste of this thing, a whiff
of that, or a sight of the other. If we are proud, let us resolve to
speak kindly at least to those who have been lately ill. If we are
stingy, let us make ready to give, notwithstanding, to those who need as
badly as we have needed. If we are doubtful of the goodness of the
gentle sex, let us at any rate thereafter except forever their
qualities as a faithful succor of


THE MOST MISERABLE OF CREATURES,

a sick man who cannot move from his bed of pain and discontent. If we
are impenitent, let us arise out of our wearying couch respectful to
those who worship God, and reverent also before God in the presence of
other worshipers. Perhaps if we aim our sudden goodness at a lower mark,
we may make a record that will not entirely proclaim (as the quick eye
of Pope has cynically perceived) our unpromising folly, and our
unteachable ignorance of human nature.

[Illustration]




SORROW.

     When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
     But in battalions.--Shakspeare.

     But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
     And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.--Campbell.


Gathering clouds crowd thickest round the tallest
mountain, yet do their summits, far up above, forever gaze out upon the
undimmed sun. So is it with the great heart smitten with deep sorrow.
There is no soul upon whom the glory of God's love falls more serenely
and uninterruptedly. There is no better friend, no lovelier associate.
"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." And comfort
does come, in the broad and kindly love and mercy toward humanity which
those who have known suffering so frequently evince, "Out of suffering
have emerged the strongest souls;" says Chapin, "the most massive
characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation
robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful
first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice
of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a
sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their
eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of
thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns
all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge."
Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:

     One weeping heart may tone a rural scene
     To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend;
     The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse,
     And swans, in soft and solemn silence float--
     Grief's snowy celebrants.

It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its
sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this
phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency,
for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us,
yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our
associates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of
mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown
faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,


A WIFE LOSES HER HUSBAND.

The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the
sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may. She finds a bitterness
within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation. Why
should the blow have singled her as its object? Then, with the lapse of
the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic
effects on both mind and body accompanying them. She wanders into the
woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from
her dead husband for the first time, and her


CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the
woods in search of a butternut tree which lives like a hermit in the
deep of the forest. It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago! It
has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand
of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it. "O, my poor,
dear husband, have I so forgotten you?" she cries in mental sackcloth
and ashes. And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before
her and appall her. The time flies by. Soon still another season is
here, with


A TROOP OF LITTLE TRAITORS, HAPPY MEMORIES,

carrying her "over the hills and far away" into that dim past whence she
emerged, all happiness and health. The conscience now has loosened its
harsh rule. The memories play in her brain like children on a lawn, and
their merry music often drowns the dirges still sadly chanted in her
deeper soul. And thus the winter passes--not in a whirlwind of grief as
did the summer, whose days she never saw, or will not know she saw,
until they come again hot and heavy with the association of her
bitterness. But it is safe to say her dread of those days will exceed
the actual grief they cause her, and she can soon look back upon her
sorrow, and say that she has mourned


RATHER NOT ENOUGH THAN TOO MUCH.

If there be joined to this a new association, one that nature and God
have both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and
again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by
those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not
suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical,
we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness
of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He
has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a
maiden. Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether she love him or
not, for


HAS HE NOT PROCLAIMED IT TO HIS OWN SOUL?

She loves him not! The test is come. He must despise himself as a
shallow-hearted hind, or dwell in extacies of adoration over one who
will resign herself into the keeping of another, a thing most detestable
to this young man. Either horn of the dilemma shows him life, true life.
Not a poem or a dream, but as a range of mountains would form if they
were piled down from some other world; first a row of little peaks, then
monster heights arising where valleys hid, and valleys forming on the
points of peaks.


THIS YOUTHFUL PEAK OF GRIEF,

the young man finds in after years, is but the more substantial bottom
of two slopes which rise sublimely toward the zenith of his life. He
banishes his false conceptions of the grandeur of the human mind. He
banishes an attachment which had not a substantial girder under it, and
within a few years his heart is all the broader, gentler and more
charitable for his young sorrow. Do not think me underrating the
poignancy of ill-requited love. It is no mean sorrow. But no great mind
ever was crushed under it. No great mind ever was crushed under any
sorrow dealt out to humanity.


TRUE GREATNESS,

after all, lies in true humanity, true understanding of the feebleness
of our nature and our capacities. We do not overload an animal, merely
because it evinces a willingness to make an effort. We therefore must
not overweight our soul with sorrow. We must not nurse our woe. We must
not have that grand, conceited idea of our nobility which demands of us
a great long future of melancholy; but rather must we nurse our bodies,
suspecting our liver if our soul be heavy, and blaming our chamber if
our brow be clouded. Then, if a high intelligence wait at the couch of
our sick soul, as does faithful woman by an invalid, soon will vanish
all the clouds, soon will come a brighter vista in the journey of our
lives. We are as God has made us, weak, miserable and sinful. Let us
expect from ourselves conduct becoming a being weak, sinful and
miserable. It would seem that this is the secret of those great lives
who profit by adversity. They have charity, for they have erred. They
have hope, for it has been their true anchor, never failing. They have
withal more consistency than have we, though they have


NEVER MADE SUCH HIGH-SOUNDING REQUISITIONS

on their untried natures. Where they have stepped into the stream of
their existence in some new fording-place, they have gone with great
caution, not with an immature confidence born of naught save foolish
audacity. Their river of life is an open water before their pleasant
eyes; they prepare not for a flood in the fall, neither do they make
ready to pass over dry-shod when the waters come down in the spring.
Though they have the more mercy, they make the lesser appeals for mercy;
though they have the more strength, they pray the oftener for aid.
Sorrow has brought it about. Affliction has stretched their
heart-chords


INTO TRUE HARMONY.

"The safe and general antidote against sorrow," says Dr. Johnson, "is
employment. It is commonly observed that among soldiers and seamen,
though there is much kindness, there is little grief; they see their
friend fall without any of that lamentation which is indulged in
security and idleness, because they have no leisure to spare from the
care of themselves; and whoever shall keep himself equally busy will
find himself equally unaffected with irretrievable losses. Time is
observed to wear out sorrow, and its effects might doubtless be
accelerated by quickening the succession and enlarging the variety of
objects."

[Illustration: SORROW.]


THERE IS ANOTHER AND AN UNHAPPY PHASE

of sorrow. "When it is real," says Madame Swetchine, "it is almost as
difficult to discover as real poverty. An instinctive delicacy hides the
rags of the one and the wounds of the other." "The deeper the sorrow,
the less tongue hath it," says the Talmud. "Light griefs do speak," says
Seneca, "while sorrow's tongue is bound." "The wringing of the hands
and knocking of the breast," says Dr. South, "or the wishing of one's
self unborn: all are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and
ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the
greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind."


NOW COMES RELIGION,

shining down into this Alpine valley of grief, not as the sun of the
Alps, but as a continual orb of light; not between a few short hours in
a "long, long weary day," but as a constant illumination of the soul,
irradiating its beams out upon the countenances of God's afflicted, and
setting them before mankind as a beacon for groping humanity. I know of
no more perfect expression of the power of sorrow to chasten the soul
and draw it nearer the Maker than is contained in


MARIA LOWELL'S "LAMB IN THE SHEPHERD'S ARMS."

I quote it as giving that lesson which my humble prose would never
teach:

     1. After our child's untroubled breath
          Up to the Father took its way,
        And on our home the shade of death,
          Like a long twilight, haunting lay,

        And friends came round with us to weep
          Her little spirit's swift remove,
        This story of the Alpine sheep
          Was told to us by one we love:

     2. They, in the valley's sheltering care,
          Soon crop the meadow's tender prime,
        And, when the sod grows brown and bare,
          The shepherd strives to make them climb
        To airy shelves of pastures green
          That hang along the mountain-side,
        Where grass and flowers together lean,
          And down through mist the sunbeams glide.

     3. But nought can tempt the timid things
          That steep and rugged path to try,
        Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,
          And seared below the pastures lie;
        Till in his arms their lambs he takes
          Along the dizzy verge to go,--
        Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
          They follow on o'er rock and snow;

     4. And, in those pastures lifted fair,
          More dewy soft than lowland mead,
        The shepherd drops his lowly care,
          And sheep and lambs together feed.
        This parable by Nature breathed
          Blew on me as the south wind free
        O'er frozen brooks that float unsheathed
          From icy thralldom to the sea.

     5. A blissful vision, through the night,
          Would all my happy senses sway,
        Of the Good Shepherd on the height
          Or climbing up the starry way,
        Holding our little lamb asleep;
          And like the burthen of the sea,
        Sounded that voice along the deep,
          Saying, "Arise, and follow me."




POVERTY.

                              'Tis a little thing
     To give a cup of water, yet its draught
     Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips,
     May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
     More exquisite than when nectarean juice
     Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.--Talfourd.


Real poverty, it may not be impossible, is to the
individual, more of a question when directed to his country than to his
actions. In Ireland or Italy, it seems to me, the greatest of individual
excellence in sobriety and economy may not shield the citizen from
abject want, which is a terrible thing. But in America the man who is
often called "poor" gets as much rest for his body and quite as
beneficial food for his stomach as the man whose wealth is the wonder of
the world. It is a magnificent land where there is so much food raised
and so many clothes made that a man calls himself poor if he have only
plenty to eat and wear! Our definition of the word "poverty" is a
marvelous corruption of the word. To be poor in the true sense of the
word, in this great land, one must have either been sick or criminally
negligent. Many a clerk eats as much and dresses as well as Vanderbilt.
What does Vanderbilt do with the great number of millions which he
controls?


HE FEEDS AND DRESSES AN ARMY

of about one hundred thousand other men. If he kept his wheat, it would
rot. If he kept his clothes, they would pass into speedy decay. By
spending one hundred and fifty million dollars he is enabled to secure
services which return an aggregate result of about one hundred and
sixty-five million dollars in a year. Men have eaten up his first one
hundred and fifty million dollars, but their works are worth one hundred
and sixty-five million dollars, and he has fifteen million dollars
profit. Suppose the men took his one hundred and fifty million dollars
away from him and ate it up and wore it out in a year, doing no work in
the mean time. At the end of the year they would begin starving if they
relied on him alone, and he would have neither one hundred and fifty
million dollars capital nor fifteen million dollars profit.


VIEWED AS IT IS,

Vanderbilt is really only richer than other people to the extent that he
can gratify rational desires more than others, and this at once puts him
alongside hundreds of thousands who have money enough to purchase
everything they can rationally want. In the system of labor for wages,
Vanderbilt is only a commander, having the largest force intrusted to
his supervision--or paid with his money; the thing is the same. Almost
all


THE ENORMOUSLY RICH MEN OF THE WORLD

have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions
seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens. Not many years ago
Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent
Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of shifting
the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be
less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune
bring about its foolish and chaotic reign. The cares of great wealth are
a class of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.


THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and
the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit. Men
who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon
being stranded on that shore of ill-repute to find the sun shining more
brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the
ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was
not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president's parlor, and no
conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an
ante-room.


BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT

is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at
once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men
on board a ship, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched
state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once.
No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him
to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to
the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this
baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to
comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the
consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then,
view poverty as


A REAL, ACTIVE, "INCONVENIENCE,"

as the French wit has put it. "One solitary philosopher maybe great,
virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty," says Isaac Iselin, "but not
a whole people." "Poverty" says Lucian, "persuades a man to do and
suffer everything that he may escape from it." "It requires a great deal
of poetry to gild the pill of poverty," says Madame Deluzy; "and then it
will pass for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure."
"A generous and noble spirit" says Dionysius, "cannot be expected to
dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread."


"HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL

is the poor man's life," says Bovee, "with the light of childhood at
one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life
at the other extremity!" "Poverty," says Euripides, "possesses this
disease--through want it teaches a man evil." "Poverty," says Saadi,
"snatches the reins out of the hands of pity," which is true only in one
sense.


MANY PEOPLE ARE GOOD

who would not be so good were they poorer, but the Irish in Ireland are
perhaps the poorest and at the same time the most pious people of whom
we read or hear. "Poverty makes man satirical, soberly, sadly, bitterly
satirical," says Friswell. "Men praise it," says Alexander Smith,


"AS THE AFRICAN WORSHIPS MUMBO JUMBO--

from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it." "It oft
deprives a man of all spirit and virtue," says Ben Franklin; "it is hard
for an empty bag to stand upright."


THE SCENES OF DARKEST POVERTY

in this land of ours are surely the results of ignorance and folly. With
the crops which follow each other in our favored region of the earth,
and with membership in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man
of America has an assurance that no picture so black can be drawn of his
lot "in the rainy day." We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat,
steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their
deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also
suffer. But, with industry and sobriety assured,


THE FANGS OF POVERTY

have been drawn, for the poor man in sickness receives his support, and
in health contributes his small share to his sick brother. In leaving
this painful branch of so vital a portion of any book devoted to the
improvement of humanity, let us abjure each other to fly from the sins
of idleness and waste, that make this dark panorama in a world which
could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fashion, even
now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give
work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium?
Let us come again to the follies of


FALSE POVERTY.

How ridiculous that one should _suffer_ from want of a frill or a
furbelow! "I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and
vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_," says the
eloquent Edmund Burke; "I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because
they are men." "It is the great privilege of poverty" says Dr. Johnson,
"to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure
without guard." Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the
habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to
our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says:


"POVERTY, IN LARGE CITIES

is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance." The tendency
of people in comfortable circumstances to move out of a pleasant cottage
into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one.
We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy
homes are thus ruined! It requires much brains to count the ultimate
cost. There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does
not look out of place in the new. There is additional work to be done
which had been entirely overlooked. The servant is a grievious expense.
We do not get the result of her work--only the profit. If she earn the
one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million
dollars. She must be "kept"--must add her clothes to the wash, her meat
to the dish, her bed-room to the house. She breaks with a smile. She
scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow. From every conceivable
cranny creep forth disbursements--the expenses of the rich man creeping
like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor. O, pshaw! why will men
and women do it? If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look
down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark
out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar's feast--


THE MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,

of the nineteenth century. I know of an actual instance of a family
being forced to eat the bread of charity within the walls of a house for
which they had engaged to pay, and had so far paid, the sum of two
thousand dollars a year as rent! What foolish thing a vain human being
will not do is a more difficult problem than what he will do. If we had
no rich people to fire up our self-conceit, we would be happier, though
we rose more slowly; yet are we to be despised for being willing to
throw the blame so freely from our shoulders. "Poverty is," says
Cobbett, "except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a
thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of
being thought poor--it is


A GREAT AND FATAL WEAKNESS,

though arising in this country from the fashion of the times
themselves." Let us shake off this fatal weakness. That man is a coward
who, from whatever reason, keeps up the expenditure of a rich man a
moment longer than his income will warrant it.


"POVERTY IS ONLY CONTEMPTIBLE

when it is felt to be so," says Bovee. "That man," says Bishop Paley,
"is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, who suffers the pains
of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man, properly
speaking, poor, but he." "The poor are only they who seem poor," says
Emerson, "and poverty consists in feeling poor." Doubtless you are
familiar with the story of the unhappy Sultan to whom the Magi,
traveling from the East to his relief, could give no hope unless he
could get and wear the shirt of a happy man. Proclamation went forth to
all the lands of the empire, offering glittering rewards for a happy
man. At last learned doctors and experts, who had gone out into the
outer regions, brought in a shepherd, who was vowed to be an entirely
happy man. But lo! when he came before the Magi, it was found that


HE HAD NO SHIRT!

The men who have caught this circling planet in the palms of their
hands, as God grasps the inconceivable universes, were born poor and
struggled in adversity; the men who have throttled the fiery lightning,
and chained the fire and the water into willing servitude, were poor
boys; the men who have developed the human imagination into a thing
almost perfect and unapproachable were poor boys; the men who have led
millions of their Maker's feet, were poor both in youth and age. Bear it
then, in mind, that all honorable endeavors to ease the yoke of life are
good; that all repinings whatsoever are totally ridiculous, and mostly
dishonorable.




FACTS ABOUT PROGRESS.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Tennyson.


One of the pillars upon which the atheists and social
iconoclasts and demolishers base their erroneous philosophy is a seeming
belief that the men of to-day work harder for a living than the men of
olden times. Now I will lay hold of this pillar, and, although I be not
Samson, I may yet hope to rend an ill-constructed edifice. With the aid
of a few figures and a little history the mind may possibly discern,
through the centuries behind us, some evidence of that progress which
Victor Hugo has called "the stride of God."

It is reasonable to suppose that the poor man, during the period of his
veritable history, has always, when not suffering severe privation,
eaten nearly the same amount of food in any given number of hours. We
may, I think, judge of the amount of work cast to his lot if we can find
the ruling values of several of the articles of food which have
contributed to sustain his life. I have chosen the earlier civilization
of England in my examples, not because the Book of Exodus, the Pyramids,
and the temples of Baalbec and Karnac fail to betray the needed
evidences of almost super human toil, but because the authorities at my
disposal touching upon earlier times fail to furnish me


THE SATISFACTORY COMMERCIAL DATA

also needed as a parallel. Let us, then, put our laborer in England in
the year 1350. He had at that time so far progressed that, under certain
very restricted circumstances, his life was preserved, and he was
allowed to earn wages for his labor. He worked fourteen hours for a
legal day's work in winter and fifteen hours in summer, but I have
everywhere in the following statements computed his hours as fourteen.
If he were a common laborer he received one penny. If he were


A SKILLED FIELD HAND,

he could earn three times as much money. The English penny is to-day a
very large copper coin, being worth two cents, but in those times it
weighed three times as much as to-day, as did all current coins. In
addition to this great weight, money was very scarce, and fully six or
seven times as valuable in many commodities as to-day. We will not err
far in calling the laborer's penny forty American cents. In 1350, then,
the skilled laborer earned 3 pence in a day. He paid of his dear money,
1 shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat, and £1 4 shillings 6
pence for an ox. This means that he paid eight days' (112 hours') labor
for his bushel of wheat, and 98 days' (1372 hours') labor for his ox.
The ox would to-day rate far below a "scalawag" at the Stock Yards of
Chicago or East St. Louis, weighing, perhaps, 400 pounds.


TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER,

in 1550, the same kind of a laborer earned 4 pence in a day. He paid 1
shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat and £1 16 shillings 7 pence
for an ox. This means that he paid nearly six days' (about 80 hours')
labor for his bushel of wheat, and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his
ox. The high price of the latter was justified by its great improvement
in weight and quality.


IN THE FORTY-THIRD YEAR OF ELIZABETH

the coinage was lowered to about its present weight. In 1675, therefore,
we see the laborer getting 7-1/2 pence for a day's service. But he was
compelled to pay 4 shillings 6 pence for a bushel of wheat, and £3 6
shillings for an ox. He thus was going backward, for temporary reasons,
however, and had to pay seven days' (98 hours') labor for his bushel of
wheat and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his ox. The ox had twice as
much beef on him as the ox of 1350.


AND STILL FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS,

the march of the laborer upward was retarded by wars, famines, and
"deaths," as their plagues were called. In 1795, one of the darkest of
those dark years, we find the skilled laborer receiving 1 shilling 5-1/4
pence per day (still of fourteen hours in winter, fifteen in summer). He
paid 7 shillings 10 pence for a bushel of wheat and £16 8 shillings for
an ox. This means that he paid five days' (70 hours') labor for his
bushel of wheat and 119 days' (1666 hours') labor for his ox. The ox
was what is technically called "a fair critter."


TO-DAY THE SAME LABORER,

working ten hours a day--counting all the perquisites which have fallen
to his lot,--the crumbs from the tables of his prosperous
superiors,--the same laborer, I say, gets 3 shillings a day. He pays 6
shillings for a bushel of wheat and £12 for an ox. This means that he
pays two days' (twenty hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 80
days' (800 hours') labor for his ox. The ox rates better than a
butchers' "beast," as the English say. In the meantime,


THE CHILDREN OF THE LABORER

have sailed across the ocean and settled in a land where the fields
yield steady harvests and where the genius of the inventor has exceeded
with its results the wonders of the Arabian Nights. In this land of
freedom and plenty the day laborer gets $1.50 a day. He pays 90 cents to
$1.30 for a bushel of wheat, and if he desire such food, he can pay $80
for a monster ox weighing 1600 pounds. He thus pays less than a day's
labor of ten hours for his bushel of wheat, and about fifty-three days'
(530 hours') labor for his ox. He does not need this high grade of
meat, however, as few English laborers ever buy from even the round of
such beef, and no ordinary American householder in city or country gets
as good once a year.


PROGRESS IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred
years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or
seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to
267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!

But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time _did not
work_, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he
lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a
vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never
unforeseen.


FOR INSTANCE:

"Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the
life of your child. Will you have it? No!! you will not pay one single
dollar to save the life of your little child! Here is a man, who, for
one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents,
will let his child be lowered into the grave--will listen to the clods
falling on its little coffin! But ah! I am provided against such men!
They cannot escape me! Here is a smaller package which will save your
child's life for fifty cents. It is yours. Death has missed his mark!"
Now, with the inevitable forethought of


THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND

whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the
laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve's surrender to "that
first grand thief who clomb into God's fold." Under a statute of Richard
II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to
another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor. This law
stood for centuries, and was reiterated in the seventeenth George II.
and the thirty-second George III., along with fixed wages for services
rendered. Personal liberty was held to be the privilege of the
proprietary class. By a statute of Henry VIII. (1536), children of five
years and up, were compelled to labor. A man able to work who refused a
proffer of work was, according to law, dragged to the nearest town on a
hurdle, stripped, and whipped through the town until his body was
covered with blood. For a second offense his right ear was cut off and
he received the bastinado. For a third offense he was put to death. An
act passed under Edward VI. (1555) provided that the able-bodied laborer
refusing work should be branded on the breast with the letter V and
adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years. The master might
fasten a ring about the neck, arm, or leg.


REFORM.

Under William IV., by the act of 1832, the laboring hours of children
were reduced to _ten hours_. By the act of 1847 women were included in
the ten-hour law. By 1867 the power of the English working man had
secured the permanence of a custom making ten hours a day's work. In the
factories of Nottingham, England, the men make as high as fourteen
dollars a week. Improved machinery has raised their wages. At the
spinning machines which formerly required two men, who each received
$4.50 a week, there is now required one man, who gets $6.25. At the
beginning of the present century the workman in these mills earned 4-1/2
shillings a week. At the present day he earns 10-1/2 shillings, with
twenty-four hours' less labor.


THE ENGLISH FIELD-LABORER

who now earns 3 shillings a day spends, for a family of eight, 15
shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, sugar and
schooling. How much cheese, tea, butter, washing, sugar and schooling
did our friend and his cubs of the fourteenth century enjoy?

Invention and economy are keeping far in advance of the effects of
growth in population. In 1766 England and Wales had but 8,500,000
inhabitants; now, there are 25,000,000. The same thing is


TRUE OF AMERICA.

I have for authorities "England, Political and Social" by August Laugel,
private secretary of the Duc d'Aumale, Notes and Queries, No 283,
Green's "History of the English People," "Froude's History of England,"
and current numbers of the _Mark Lane Express_.

In the terms applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf,
knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and
working-man--there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which
fell upon Saul of Tarsus as he journeyed toward Damascus.

To the man whose whole mind is given to the work he does, the time goes
swiftly. Many a man whom success has translated from the grocery, the
plow-factory, the farm, to the matting and the yellow bedsteads of the
seaside hotel, finds that he was happier at home, when he was poor, and
that he was then often far more comfortable in body.


THE ATHEIST

does not "look upon a beautiful face and see a grinning skull." He must
not, then, gaze upon the freest body of workingmen of all the ages and
see but a chain of quarry-slaves scourged to their dungeons.

     "God is a worker, He has thickly strewn
     Infinity with grandeur. God is love;
     He yet shall wipe away Creation's tears,
     And all the worlds shall summer in His smile."




FAILURE IN LIFE.

     Macbeth.     If we should fail--
     Lady Macbeth.     We fail!
     But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
     And we'll not fail.--Shakspeare.


You see that scrag over in the woods there? Crack! goes
the lightning! The scrag has been hit again! Unfortunate! Now, perhaps
you know somebody who is a scrag in society. When the thunder storms of
life roll and rumble, tell him to look well to himself. He is very
liable to another dose of disaster. Why is this? The reason is plain.
There is some particular attraction for the bolt which hits him. There
is a loadstone of reason in the earth at his roots for this constant
attack of misfortune. However badly off he may be, something still worse
will happen to him. If he have something profitable to do with his
hands, he will get a felon on his finger. If he have walking to do, he
will get a peeled heel. If he have only to sit and attend to a certain
thing, he will get the brain fever. If he be expected at seven in the
morning, his child will suffer an attack of croup at 6:45. The lightning
is darting around him silently all the time, a good deal like the
movements of a snake's tongue. After all, it is a scrag that has been
struck, and everybody laughs and seems to think it a good joke. It is,
indeed, close to the ridiculous to see the number of undoubted
afflictions which will beset


"A REAL OLD FAILURE IN LIFE."

He is a good old fellow. He hates with a mortal hate only one thing, and
that is hard work; that will make him deliriously ill inside of three
days. The boils, and felons, and fevers, and chilblains, and fractures,
and bereavements he has had are enough to fill an encyclopedia. He never
has worked long at any one thing, and he never will. He can relate to
you how the lightning broke off his biggest limb, knocked off his bark,
broke him off half-way up, finally split him clear through the trunk,
and never hit another tree in the whole piece of timber! This will bring
tears to his eyes, for it seems so strange to him. But if you get tears
in your eyes, also, hire him by the day for a while, and look into "the
pulse of the machine," you will soon understand the wonderful workings
of society, and the nicety of that order of things which separates the
wheat from the tare. When the winds of adversity sweep down upon us,


IT IS THE CHAFF WHICH RISES ON THE GALE.

Many a man with a bilious attack coming upon his system goes to his
work, sets his blood dancing, and, drives away the intruder before the
reinforcements of the disease arrive. The failure goes out to the enemy,
makes a weak parley, and opens his gates to the first squad that will
enter.


WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THESE RANK FAILURES?

Nothing. We can take warning from them. "A failure establishes only
this," says Bovee, "that our determination was not strong enough." This
is very nearly the truth. We fail because we feel the game to be hardly
worth the candle. We are not willing to pay the price and the value of
success. We had rather slide down the hill than climb up higher. When
you hit your head against a door in the dark, you are stunned. You are
then twice as likely as before to hurt yourself. Bear that in mind.
Stop. Move with the greatest of caution.


THIS IS WHY SHAKSPEARE SAYS

that when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
When you have failed, try and get a new start, clear of the consequences
of the last disaster. You know exactly where you erred, and can guard
against the weak places in your judgment, the cause of your defeat.
Above all, study the "dead rank failure" in your community, and do
everything precisely opposite to the way he invariably operates.

[Illustration]




GAINS AND BRAINS.

                               Virtue without success
     Is a fair picture shown by an ill light;
     But lucky men are favorites of heaven:
     All own the chief, when fortune owns the cause.--Dryden.


Lucky men are favorites of heaven, simply because they
have been endowed with that charming blindness which keeps them from
seeing when they are whipped in the battle of life. The man of success
has usually a greater sense of the value of a ten-dollar note than his
clerk who, like the braggart _Pistol_, has got the world for his oyster,
and expects to open that tough old mollusk with his rusty sword. The man
of success sees each young helper around him given better opportunities
than he himself had to begin with. His astonishment that inexperienced
young men should think they have no chance is always noticeable. He
half-envies some stripling soldier in the battle who is yet a high
private in the rear rank. The high private cannot understand how this
envy can be possible, and will not believe it exists. If you will study
the lucky man you will see that his "luck" is usually more of a matter
of course than an extraordinary happening. Reverse the thing, and you
can comprehend it. Here is a brakeman. He gets killed by the cars.


WAS IT NOT ASTONISHING?

Well, yes, it was; still, if anybody were going to be killed, the
brakeman would be the most likely to be the victim. Go to the accident
insurance office and observe how little anxious they are to take such a
risk, and what an enormous premium they ask when they do take one! Here
is a man running a powder-factory. The insurance men will not touch him
at all! Now our man of success is like the brakeman, in a sense. He is
always on the train, always between the cars, always standing in the
frog. If any such thing as luck is out, it must hit him, or some other
brakeman like him. Certainly, it will not touch the man asleep in his
house


HALF A MILE FROM THE TRACK!

You have a very small chance to draw money in a lottery, and it is a
very foolish thing to throw away earnings buying tickets--yet of two
fools who expected to draw the grand prize, that one would be the
greatest who had no ticket in the lottery! The man of success wants
something to strike around his premises. He, therefore, has got
conductors of the celestial fluid on his house, and on his barns. His
chicken-coops, his corn-cribs point to heaven, and even the stumps in
his back yard


BRISTLE WITH LIGHTNING-RODS.

Clap! comes the bolt; the man of success is the one who has been hit,
and those persons who do not understand it are astonished at his luck!
The man of success is a stone; there are a number of eggs who are bent
on dancing in the same cotillon with him; they think he has great luck
to last through to such music! The man of success is a thoroughbred; his
sire won a Derby; all the drayhorses believe that, when this lucky
thoroughbred runs,


THE EARTH MOVES BACKWARD

beneath his feet, to help him in overcoming distance! The man of success
is a lightning calculator; the spectators all think he is a lucky fellow
to guess at the sum of a great block of figures so quickly and always
guess right; they never could do it!


"LUCK" SAYS RICHARD COBDEN,

"is ever waiting for something to turn up. Labor, with keen eyes and
strong will, will turn up something. Luck lies in bed, and wishes the
postman would bring him the news of a legacy. Labor turns out at six
o'clock, and with busy pen or ringing hammer lays the foundation of a
competence. Luck whines. Labor whistles. Luck relies on chance. Labor on
character." The man of success who owns a mill is seen in the water up
to his waist, dragging a log behind him. "Is he not lucky to get his dam
fixed so soon after the flood!" say the neighbors. The man of success
who owns a grocery has got ten barrels of flour on the sidewalk, two
casks of petroleum in the alley, and twelve barrels of sugar on his
trucks. At night the barrels are all in their places, and, so far as I
have ever seen,--in the retail business, at least,--it was not the
clerks of the man of success who did


THE HEAVY END OF THE LIFTING.

"I never" says Addison, "knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent
man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest, who complained of bad
luck. A good character, good habits, and iron industry are impregnable
to the assaults of all the ill-luck that fools ever dreamed of." "Strong
men believe in cause and effect," says Emerson. "There are no chances so
unlucky," says Rochefoucauld, "that people are not able to reap some
advantage from them, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to
turn them to their own disadvantage."


WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LUCK,

we never mean that a man is lucky to be endowed with successful
qualities. So long as we do not go back to the real matter of fortune,
which lies in the character, let us, at least, be intelligent, and stop
talking about one man having any more good things happen to him than
another. There is only one sure thing about events, and that is the law
of chance. If men take to chance, they will come out even, if it be a
fair chance.


THIS IS CERTAIN.

If you try to match the penny some one has covered, and fail ten times
in succession, it is a certainty that you will succeed often enough, ere
long, to make your failures and your successes balance. Everything which
depends entirely on chance is exactly even. If the man you envy to-day
on account of some piece of unquestionably good luck, were to be as
closely watched to-morrow, he would be seen to suffer some piece of as
unquestionably bad luck. You cannot help noticing his good fortune, and
he never howls about his disasters.


FORTUNE TELLERS

thrive on this principle--taking even guesses, and trusting to the
victim's remembrance of all that comes true and his forgetfulness of all
that does not.

Put up your lightning-rods, get between the cars, begin making
powder--increase your probabilities of getting blown up, of having
something out of the ordinary run happen to you. If you are food for big
fish, go where the big fish are, and you will not be left over for
lunch. If you can be useful to a great railroad man, a great statesman,
or, even, a great nation, they are going to thrive on you. They will
take a taste of you almost before you know it. If you are smart, sober,
and were not born tired, there is no bad luck that can get even a shade
the best of you.

[Illustration]




DISCIPLINE.

     "Tarry a while," says Slow.--Mother Goose.


Our generation is formed largely of men who went to war
and experienced the trials and the combats of one of the greatest
commotions of all history. Upon those men was imposed the glorious rod
of discipline. "Thus far and no farther!" is written upon their broad
foreheads as plainly as the God of the great sea marks it on the rocks
with which he has hemmed the shores, and I would not wonder if the vast
prosperity of the present day were largely attributable to that stern
fondness with which the true man passes into the action of daily life,
and obeys orders under fire. Young man, carve yourself down to that
rugged line that will make you a fitting part of the structure in which
you are an element.


BE RATHER THE GIRDER

holding the building than the creaking clapboard flapping in the wind.
When you get an order from your employer, school yourself to move
mechanically to the action implied. Glory in it. Be sure, only, that you
are carrying out the wishes of your superior. Make it your pleasure. It
will become an intense delight. Suppose that you are allowed a holiday.
You return to your home and find a command to appear at your place of
business. A delay in finding you has happened. You can reach your
employer just at the end of business hours. You say "I will not mind
this; there is not time enough." Alas! You have done yourself


A CRUEL WRONG.

You have given an entrance to a wedge that will rend you in pieces. On
the other hand, you do not stop to look twice at the dial. You go. Good!
You have strengthened your character. You can depend on yourself. You
admire yourself. "I received your directions at 5.30. I have obeyed
orders." Drill of this sort will soon hew your mind down to the solid
heart of oak. You will know what you mean when you say a thing. "I will
get up at 6 o'clock." When 6 o'clock arrives, and you are aroused, your
mind is not


A MESS OF PULP,

ready to take the impression of the first lazy wish that comes over you.
No, your brain says resolutely, "I will arise," and lo! a victory!--and
no small one either. In this way, true firmness is made. It is a growth.
Beware of the insects which beset the lordly tree, withering its leaves
and driving its sap into the earth.

"Let us put a cable under the ocean," says Cyrus Field. "Tarry a while,"
says Slow. "Let us put the cities within actual speaking distance!" say
Bell, and Gray and Edison. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us print
thirty thousand newspapers in an hour, and give them out of the press
folded, and pasted, and cut!" say Potter, and Hoe, and Kahler. "Tarry a
while" says Slow. And yet, in spite of Slow and Sleepyhead, wonders have
accumulated upon wonders, until the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's
Travels are only the creations of a poor fancy, while the intimations
which the future affords us stagger the understanding and make us almost
idolatrous in our admiration of the quiet, keen-acting men who have
dared out into fairy-land and returned laden like the spies coming from
Canaan.

Our whole history is one of discipline. And what has it made of us? A
nation that has sung


THE DEATH-KNELL OF THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.

I think a good deal of these lines of James Russell Lowell:

     This land o' ourn, I tell ye's gut to be
     A better country than man ever see;
     I feel my sperit swellin with a cry
     That seems to say: "Break forth and prophesy."
     O strange New World, that yet wast never young,
     Whose youth from thee by gripin' want was wrung,
     Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed
     Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
     An' who grewst strong thru' shifts, and wants, an' pains.
     Nursed by stern men, with empires in their brains!

Another sweet poet has sung:

     Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
     Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

There can be no question that wealth is fast accumulating. Let fathers,
and mothers, and preceptors spur the rising generation to that love of
accuracy, of "right dress," as the soldiers say, which puts each man in
his place, certain to stay there as long as he has agreed to, and
certain to act when the fitting time arrives.


THE ORGAN AND ITS PIPES AND REEDS.

Perhaps I can impress the true necessity of discipline no more forcibly
than by comparing society to a grand organ upon which the Creator sounds
his mighty fugue of years. We are the pipes--some the colossal columns
which shake the world, and others the tiny tubes which make a feeble
cry, almost unheard. No one of us must sound his note save in that
proper place and at that proper time which Duty indicates. We mar a
perfect harmony by ill-tempered silence, and perhaps ruin the labors of
our associates by a continuous sounding of our own ridiculous reed.


WHEREVER WE ARE

In the factory, the counting house, the workshops of the grand
industries,--or on the broad acres which watch so fondly for the sun,
let us be careful, when there is a troubling jar, a fatal discord, that
our key is not the guilty one.




BOOKS.

                           --Books, we know,
     Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
     Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
     Our pastime and our happiness will grow.--Wordsworth.


By the aid of books we multiply our sensations a
million-fold. Often the reader actually feels what he reads. Such
impressions would perhaps never have fallen to his lot in the ordinary
way of getting experience. Our indebtedness, then, to the art of
printing, is perhaps greater than to any other of the remarkable
discoveries which have lent enduring charms to human life. And yet, with
all its progress, the book-reading world is still in its infancy. The
people do not read half enough, they do not discriminate wisely between
good reading and indifferent reading, and they read too much matter of
an ephemeral nature, little calculated to be of the slightest benefit to
them a week after its perusal. If a man lived on the banks of a
beautiful lake, and went down to its shore each pleasant day to take a
ride, and, after an excursion upon the peaceful waters, stove his boat
in, or cast it adrift, he would be actually following the practice of
our people of the present day. The man who owns a library in these
times, is considered either a book-worm or an opulent citizen. And yet
what treasures are within everyone's reach! Suppose you buy and read a
volume. You are


FILLED WITH IDEAS NEW TO YOU,

and you derive great pleasure. Keep that book a year and read it over.
It is safe to say you will gain more benefit and reap greater enjoyment
from the second perusal than from the first. A library of books, every
one of which you have read, is a mine without "walls." It is a merry
assembly of old friends ever faithful. Grief cannot drive them away.
Slander cannot alienate them. They cannot have rival interests. They
cannot want anything you have got, and you can take all they have got,


AND NOT ROB THEM AT ALL.

You have a memory which is as treacherous as the most of the other
attributes of human nature. You sit down and read two hours on an
interesting topic. A friend opens the same subject to you, a day
afterward, in conversation, and you fairly carry him by storm. That is
unfair, for you should say you have been "posting up"--but it shows the
value of a library. By frequent "posting" on whatever you have read, you
become a learned man, which is


A TITLE OF GREAT CREDIT AND DIGNITY

in most men's eyes. The men who read once and "read everything" are
never called "learned." _They_ are called "superficial." It is a little
unjust, for they have been just as studious as the "learned men," but
they have spread themselves out too thin. They have not bought and kept
the books they have read, and they cannot remember the vital points.
Suppose you recollect that Lord Bacon has said something very wise about
riches. That is all you can call to mind. That carries no impression to
anybody. If you had the book in which you saw the speech, you could
repeat it accurately, and the probability is that the next time you
referred to it you could give


THE GIST OF THE WHOLE THOUGHT,

and, by the next attempt, the language itself. You could say to your
friend when you were talking about wealth, that you have admired that
speech of Bacon where he says that he cannot call riches better than the
"baggage" of virtue; that he thinks the Roman word "impedimenta" still
better; that, as baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue; it
cannot be spared or left behind, but, in his quaint expression, "it
hindereth the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or
disturbeth the victory." Your friend would be gratified with so perfect
a figure of speech, and he would never call you "superficial." That is
real experience. It is not theory. A book has little value to a man
until he has read it at least twice. He has then labeled and
pigeon-holed it, and really needs to possess it.


A MAN OUGHT TO READ

his favorite portions of Shakspeare a thousand times--of the Bible a
million times. Reading is much more like painting than we think. Go into
a palace car. Do you think this polish was put on the wood with one
application of the brush--with two, three, four? No; it would possibly
be cheaper to cover it with silk plush than to go over it as the skilled
workmen have done. Let us buy less ephemeral stuff, to be set adrift
and stove in when we have skimmed over it. Let us season our reading,
polish it, grain it, varnish it, repolish it and revarnish it, until we
are just like it ourselves--clear, concise, intelligent. How enjoyable
it is to meet an intelligent person!


WHAT A CHARM

there is about a comrade who can understand what you say, and who can
swap ideas with you "even Steven!" It cannot be done without books.

Considering the vast importance of learning in saving labor and reducing
the actual cost of existence, there has been little growth in the
business of bookmaking compared with what there should have been. The
trade in books in America is large, because the country is large.
Everything is large here. Comparatively, however, it probably sinks
below fishing for mackerel as an industry. As it is now, a shockingly
large portion of the industry such as it is is given over to costly
bindings. It does not seem that the people, even when they first had
books, cared so much for the privilege of reading as they did for a
gaudy covering to the volume, on which they could expend a barbaric
love for ornament. The wise men of those times marveled, just as the
wise men marvel nowadays. "Learning hath gained most by those books,"
says Old Fuller, "by which the printers have lost." Our follies in the
way of "books that are all binding" are almost microscopically small
when put beside those of the olden times, when, one would think the art
of printing, being new, would have been best appreciated, for surely the
grass looks the greenest to us in the spring! Let us do something more
than


MAKE JEWELRY OUT OF THE ART OF GUTTENBERG.

"A book may be as great a thing as a battle," said Disraeli, and he
meant by that a decisive battle. Now there are sometimes very decisive
battles. A Turk once came up against the walls of Vienna and the walls
of Tours, in France, and, if he had got through, you and I would to-day,
so the scholars say, be "good Mussulmans," instead of Christians, living
in freedom and decency. "When a book," says Bruyere, "raises your
spirits, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for
no other rule to judge the work by; it is good, and made by a good
workman." The books you buy should have large clear type. They are to be


YOUR COMPANIONS THROUGH LIFE.

Your eyes will not be so bright in their old age. The volumes should not
be bulky--that is, for true, practical use. "Great books," says Clulow,
"like large skulls, have often the least brains." "Books," says Dr.
Johnson, "that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand,
are the most useful, after all." There is no objection to a costly and
beautifully-bound Bible, out of which you may read each day with added
veneration, but your sons and daughters should have pocket copies. From
these modest little volumes, the marvels of language and thought may be
gathered without seeming effort.

Do not be afraid you are spending too much money on reading. If you read
each book as you buy it, you cannot buy too many--that is, if you are an
honorable man, earning your living in the world, and not sponging it off
some one else. Read your book slowly, above all things. Read it as you
would ride in your boat on the waters, looking down at the pebbles, the
fishes, the grasses, and the roots of the pond-lilies which, being of
God's creation like yourself, send a responsive thrill of acquaintance
through your heart as you float above them. You can, at best, but glide
over a book. Even the writer has been but a passing observer of a few of
its truths. It is


THE RECORD OF THE CENTURIES.

Respect it. "My latest passion will be for books," said Frederick the
Great, in his old age. He had hardly looked down into the waters until
he got nearly to the other shore. Gibbon declared that a taste for books
was the pleasure and glory of his life; and Carlyle, who, it is
supposed, was better acquainted with books than any man who has yet
lived, declared that of all man could do or make here below, by far the
most momentous, wonderful, and worthy were the things we call books.


HELP OTHERS.

If any members of your family have the love of books, aid them in
satisfying it. Such are the salt of the earth. They are the blazed trees
in the dark forests of the present generations, to mark out that course
which shall, in future ages, be the highway of the whole world.




FRIENDSHIP.

     The friend thou hast, and his adoption tried,
     Grapple him to thy soul with hooks of steel.--Shakspeare.

     I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd,
     "How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!"
     But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
     Whom I may whisper "Solitude is sweet!"--Cowper.


"Whatever the number of a man's friends" says Lord
Lytton, "there are times in his life when he has one too few." "Life,"
says Sydney Smith, "is to be fortified by many friendships." Says Bishop
Hare: "Friendship is love without its flowers or veil." "A faithful
friend is the true image of the Deity," said Napoleon, who never
believed he had a true friend not a born fool. "A friend loveth at all
times," says the Bible. Says Herr Gotthold: "with a clear sky, a bright
sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty, but let
fortune frown and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will
prove


LIKE THE STRINGS OF THE LUTE,

of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the
stretch and keep the pitch." "What an argument in favor of social
connections," says Lord Greville, "is the observation that by
communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasures
we have more." Horace Walpole has given clear expression to one of the
chief pleasures of friendship:


"OLD FRIENDS

are the great blessings of one's latter years. Half a word conveys one's
meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of
thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is
affectionate, but can they grow old friends? My age forbids that. Still
less can they grow companions. Is it friendship to explain half one
says? One must relate the history of one's memory and ideas; and what is
that to the young but old stories?" "Fast won, fast lost," says
Shakspeare. Says Dr. Johnson: "If a man does not make new acquaintances
as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man
should keep his friendships in constant repair!"


ALL THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF THE SAGES

on this subject there is a tinge of melancholy. "There are no friends!"
says Aristotle. "There have been fewer friends on earth than Kings," says
the poet Cowley. Why is this? Let us peer into the solemn question. The
ideal of true manhood is easily formulated. Alas! what an abyss
separates a man's daily life, as it is, from that high quality he has
pictured in his imagination. We are all the time reaching for


THINGS WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND,

and could not assimilate with if they were placed at our disposal. In
this way a weary, well-read novel-reader, worn out in all lines of light
letters, enters a circulating library, and queruously asks: "Have you
any new books?" She expects a negative answer, and in that case would
suffer a keen disappointment. The man says "Yes," and brings out several
new books. Every one of these is new in every sense. It may be the most
trivial set of pages yet printed in this era of scribblers, or, yet, it
may be a great work, worthy of the attention of the thoughtful, and the
commendation of the pure in heart. Nobody can tell. Then, illogically,
she asks: "Is this good?" or "Is that good?" and upon being reminded
that she wanted something new or nothing, she asks for something by May
Agnes Fleming, or Mary Jane Holmes, and goes off happy, to re-read those
expressions which have so well pleased her in the past.

I think I espy in this exhibition of the working of the mind in a rude
and unsatisfactory state


A GENERAL PRINCIPLE,

just as potent in the mighty brain of Sir Isaac Newton or of Louis
Agassiz. Man idealizes the affair of friendship. He forgets whether he
really wants it or not, and then persistently inquires for it. It is not
in the library of possibilities. He therefore goes off angry and
disappointed. Could he get a glimpse at it, I am afraid he would walk
away satisfied with something more nearly en rapport with his nature and
his habits. Let us view this golden word friendship as man idealizes it:
Being a changeable thing, he views friendship (of which he knows
nothing), entirely by comparison with something of which in its turn he
knows but little. This something is always a mother's love for her son,
notorious as the strongest affection shown by our species. He therefore
doubles up this marvelous fact of a mother's love, and creates in his
imagination a reciprocatory agency co-respondent to this mother's love.
Now, with this magnificent product of invention, he goes forth into the
world, seeking for some man upon whom he may bestow a mother's love (of
which the "bestower" is entirely incapable), and who will, in payment,
respond with a mother's love (of which that man would, of course, be
also incapable). In the jargon of electricity a positive and a negative
are absolutely necessary to electric energy.


A MOTHER'S LOVE

is a deplorably one-sided action, but it is the highest and noblest of
the faculties of affection. Anything beyond it is ideal, made up of two
positives, and a thousand years ahead of us. Is it any wonder that when
man makes his experiments with the mother's love which he supposes
himself capable of bestowing that a universal wail arises, or that
Shakspeare, the greatest of mortal minds, brought in those awful
verdicts against mankind--"Lear" and "Timon of Athens"?


I THINK THAT IS WHY

the very deepest philosophers grow sad when they touch the question of
friendship. The problem is itself the saddest of commentaries upon the
weakness of our higher faculties. Separate man from his wife and family
and view him in his relations to other persons similarly placed, and the
result is not only unsatisfactory, but distressing to a mind anxious to
hold to a good opinion of humanity. Put to the right test the quality of
human friendship is found to be highly strained--to be liable to curdle
in the first thundershower--to sour upon the sensitive stomach. We at
once behold mankind forced to flee to God's kind institution of the
family and the home to escape a desolation of the heart which follows
fruitless efforts to kindle a blaze out of the damp driftwood of life's
general associations.

Now, what is possible? Spot friendship is possible, and delightful.
"To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day." Man is a social
animal. He "gregates," he flocks. Of nothing am I fonder than the
sparkle of a friend's eye, and the gabble of half an hour, or three
hours. But I ought not to build on any future gabbles, for, to-morrow,
lo! my friend may have discovered my ignoble reality, whereas he has
heretofore been shaking hands with my noble ideality.


ANOTHER THING

should always be considered: "Kindred weaknesses" says Bovee, "induce
friendships as often as kindred virtues." Here is Herder's beautiful
view: "As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it
dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the
evening shadows, till the sun of life sets." "People young, and raw, and
soft-natured," says South, "think it an easy thing to gain love, and
reckon their own friendships a sure price of any man's: but when
experience shall have shown them the hardness of most hearts, the
hollowness of others, and the baseness and ingratitude of almost all,
they will then find that


A TRUE FRIEND IS THE GIFT OF GOD,

and that He only who made hearts can unite them." Says the wise Lord
Bacon: "It is a good discretion not to make too much of any man at the
first; because one cannot hold out that proportion," and that is so, for
some of the strongest bonds of friendship ever felt have been woven
without thought of pleasure on either side at the commencement.

"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
death they were not divided." "I am distressed for thee, my brother,
Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was
wonderful, passing the love of woman."

"Very few friends," says Sydney Smith, "will bear to be told of their
faults; and, if done at all, it must be done with infinite management
and delicacy; for if you indulge often in this practice, men think you
hate, and avoid you. If the evil is not very alarming, it is better,
indeed, to let it alone, and not to turn friendship into a system of
lawful and unpunishable impertinence. I am for frank explanations with
friends in cases of affront. They sometimes


SAVE A PERISHING FRIENDSHIP,

and even place it on a firmer basis than at first; but secret discontent
must always end badly."

Let us love our friends for what they are to-day--not for what they
will be when we come to make unreasonable demands on them. The sun is
beautiful and delightful. It will not shine for us in the night nor, in
the daytime shine for us alone. We were bereft of our minds did we,
therefore, enter a cave and forswear all further pleasure in its genial
rays.


IT IS EASIER TO RAIL

against friendship than to enact our parts in that drama of life which
is to elevate the term. Thus we hear Goldsmith cry--

     What is friendship but a name,
       A charm that lulls to sleep,
     A shade that follows wealth or fame,
       And leaves the wretch to weep.

Yet this same Goldsmith was a burden on his friends. He did his duty to
posterity, in leaving them beautiful literature and song, but to his own
associates he was unsparing in his good-natured demands. It is safe to
say that he who tries to ennoble friendship is best worthy of the name
of friend, and he who belittles it, has fewer claims to man's humanity.
Everytime we deny the existence of a satisfying, friendship, we proclaim
aloud our own baseness. Let us avoid it.




ENVY

     Envy will merit as its shade pursue,
     But, like a shadow, proves the substance true.

     Pope.--Essay on Criticism.


No passion has been more universally recognized than envy
as the basest of all the traits that undermine the nobility of man; and
yet there is no obnoxious quality so universal in men's characters. In
the life of the good man it reminds one of the mice, in our houses,
which eat their way to our attention and their own destruction; for
there are few men who have looked into their own hearts who have not
seen the small but odious traces of this gnawing evil. Again, the mind
of the bad man, who has given himself entirely up to envy, is


A WOLF'S DEN--

a howling pandemonium, where no quarter is given, and where the merits
of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as
the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy
is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has
finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized
is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish.
When, as in Æsop's fables,


A TAILLESS FOX

is found advocating the disuse of tails, he is at once suspected, and
his influence greatly limited. For the world is waking up to the
meanness of envy. The world, in its better moments, is rising above it.
It is one of our principal duties, on entering the Temple of Life, to
search our hearts for the little fox with the sharp tooth. When we find
ourselves about to enter upon a course of action, either momentary or
long continuous, which will be adverse to another of our
fellow-creatures, let us ask: "Is there anything of envy in this act?"
If there be, let us refrain from acting--the soul is not yet pure, the
body fragrant.

Let us see how ignorant this contemptible quality of envy becomes under
the lenses of practical life. "Base envy withers at another's joy." What
has caused it? In nine cases out of every ten, it is simply the
one-sided view of an ignorant mind, which sees only the bare result of
unceasing efforts. Envy sees Fame on the peak. Envy therefore hates
Fame, and declares that there are no crags, or rifts, or snows, or
storms on the way up--that, the path is an easy one, over which all who
ever went that way traveled in preference to all other routes!

I lay upon a boarding-house bed day after day, one summer, sick of a
fever. On the one side, a building was going up, and workmen filled the
air with mighty din. On the other side, a young man sang


"DO, HOORAY, ME, FAH, SOLE, LAH, SE, DO!"

I thought: "The one will be a grand house, and the other will be a great
tenor, but oh the way is long. The feet grow weary!"

It has often seemed to me that this was my first true view of life, and
nowadays, when--I am tired, especially,--I do not envy the truly great
in any avenue of distinction. The walker has walked, the builder has
groaned, the fighter has fought, the scribe has scribbled, the statesman
has lied and betrayed. Any one of them will tell you his pay has been
sadly inadequate.


TAKE A MAN LIKE THEIRS.

Born in an age still drunk with the glory of Napoleon, but himself
infused with ideas of popular liberty; chained to the chariot of
circumstances, and made to swell the sawdust-magnificence of unpopular
kings and the ridiculous success of Napoleon III., the greatest impostor
of all history, this Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers went through a
life the bare retrospect of which would actually tire the mind. In his
old age this little lover and critic of greatness--this man who could
show the weaknesses of Napoleon Bonaparte so clearly that one would feel
the critic must be the superior of Napoleon--this squeak-voiced orator,
must have felt that whatever greatness might come to him in history was
well-earned--that the way had indeed been long!


THE SAME OF GLADSTONE.

Who in his sane mind would be Gladstone living any more than Homer
living? Of course, he survives those horrible crises in which public
duty has made him the most pitiable object, and in the most dreadful
complication of great interests shines forth as Venus fresh-lighted.
But I would not have Gladstone's fame for the boon of rest eternal, from
fear that his retrospect of inconsistency and apostacy would be its
accompaniment, its deeper shadow. Yet who shall blame Gladstone? He was
the executor and administrator of the policy of a parvenu Jew, one of
the very bad men of the earth. He


REAPED ANOTHER MAN'S WHIRLWINDS.

Forced into geographical relations with the Irish, an unwarlike people
with indomitable tongues, England has in the middle ages, naturally done
to this unwarlike people just what a warlike people would do in the
middle ages--taken everything. With painful volubility the unwarlike
people has for centuries sounded its fate over the world, touching the
heart of Gladstone and other good Englishmen, and tempting him and them
to many struggles. Behold him at the next step, then, in the role of
warring upon the unwarlike, of oppressing the oppressed, of answering an
Irish clack with a British click! Is it not pitiful? Gladstone fell ill
from it. He paid there and then for his illustrious name. And, next, of
those brave Boers! God nerved their quick muscles and darted straight
their wonderful eye; and when the single hand rose against the hundred
hands of British Briarius they were not forsaken. Oh! how clearly that
question seemed to an American! No geographical necessity was there--no
race hatred, no hotbed to foment conspiracy against the sister country
England. The independence of those Boers, if they desired it, ought to
have been fought for by England, by Gladstone, willingly,
irresistibly--in the very name of England's own love of liberty for
herself. And finally Gladstone so saw it.

What a puzzle are those Hibernians!


HOW BITING THE WITTICISM OF CHIN LAN PIN,

the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, that they are able to
govern every other country save their own! Behold a statesman like
Gladstone, forced to change his policy toward them the moment he has the
responsibility of governing them! Oh! what an opportunity for the little
foxes! How easily Envy spears him with its jest! How truly Envy shines
with the wings of that fly that passes all the sounder parts of a man's
body to dwell upon the sores! In this rapid glance across two of the
trials of a great man, across the path up to the peak where one
clambering must bind himself with strong ropes to his companions, that
if one sink into a snow-covered abyss the others may bring him forth--we
get, perhaps, a truer view of


THE MEANESS OF ENVY.

Let us look at Gladstone as the great, wise, good, learned man he is,
whose wreath of laurel covers a crown of thorns. And if we find an
associate making those fatiguing efforts that ever precede the
recognition of this cold world, let us glance rather at his efforts than
at his fame, that no rust may gather on the brightness of our eye, and
no withering cloud shut out the sunlight from our spirits.


I CANNOT CLOSE THIS CHAPTER

without imploring the reader to exterminate this characteristic of envy
altogether. Because it is at first so little and so ridiculous, envy
often escapes the hand of discipline. Yet the homely saying is a true
one that "they which play with the devil's rattles will be brought by
degrees to wield his sword," and the force of a nature given up to envy
is truly a two-edged sword from the bottomless pit, cutting both the
fiend who smites and the victim who smarts.




CONTENTMENT.

     Mrs. Lofty keeps a carriage--
           So do I.
     She has dappled grays to draw it--
           None have I.--Alma Calder.


Unquestionably, the baby-carriage of the poet, with
contentment, was a far richer establishment than the gilded barouche and
the dappled grays of childless Mrs. Lofty. Riches are often childless;
poverty is often contented. Happiness is a golden spell inwoven with
most of our lives at certain times, whether we be rich or poor. The
first surprise of the newly-rich comes in the non-discovery of
additional happiness. Additional cares and duties come thickly enough.
The greed of the envious, and the demands of the poor who are likewise
needy in thoughtfulness for their more fortunate neighbors, fall upon
the wealthy like a mist. There is no escaping it. As James Russell
Lowell says of a Scotch fog--an umbrella will afford no protection. They
must give all, or accept the hatred of those who believe it to be easier
to give than to receive. "Contentment is natural wealth," says Socrates;
"luxury is artificial poverty." Contentment is generally a sign of a
high class of character. "If two angels were sent down," says John
Newton, "one to conduct an empire and the other to sweep a street, they
would feel no inclination to change employments."


HUMAN GREATNESS

is at best such a little thing that wise men do not lament its absence
in their own persons. Our main pleasures are free to rich as well as
poor. What sight is so grand as the sun? What pleasure is greater than
to breathe? What fluid is more grateful for all purposes than water?
What music is sweeter than the singing of birds, the ringing of free
school bells and the hum of machinery? The extra pleasures which the
rich man, if he be foolish, tries to buy, almost invariably


END IN HIS EARLY DEATH,

and in his hatred of the whole world. Those noble men of wealth who gain
the plaudits of their fellows, have earned those plaudits just as poor
men would earn them--by service to their fellow-creatures. Man is not
constituted so that he can "take his ease" and be happy. The prisoner in
solitary confinement is forced to take his ease, and we are told that he
suffers terribly under the ordeal. Of course you have heard of


THE PRISONER IN THE DARK DUNGEON

who had three pins, and who gave himself employment by throwing them
into the air and then beginning the long search which should finally
secure them. Sometimes a pin would be hidden for years in a crevice. In
this way the prisoner preserved his mind from utter decay, and was
almost happy--nay, was really happy when his arduous labor would result
in the discovery of all three of the objects of his pitiful quest.
Instances like this should impress upon us the fact that the principal
sum of our happiness is inalienable. We cannot, in health, possibly lose
it. The hale pauper is far better off than the invalid Duke. We breathe
and eat and see and hear with ease. All of those offices of the body are
unquestionably delightful, as is proven by the relative view we get when
we are ill and can neither breathe nor eat nor see nor hear without
great suffering. "There is scarce any lot so low," says Sterne, "but
there is something in it to satisfy the man whom it has befallen." The
reason of this lies in this same fact that when the tree of happiness
loses superfluous wealth, it but loses its foliage.


THE POOR MAN CARRIES INTO HIS COTTAGE

all the great and marvelous blessings of life. He leaves outside only a
lot of artificialities, the most of which are so-called pleasures, but
are really miseries. If we cannot be contented without these
artificialities, we certainly would not be satisfied with an addition so
unimportant. "A tub was large enough for Diogenes," says Colton; "but a
world was too little for Alexander." Alexander valued the true blessings
of life as nothing, and the power of life and death over others as
everything. His disappointment and the contentment of Diogenes, who
viewed things more correctly, are matters of tradition. "Contentment,"
says Fuller, "consisteth not in adding more fuel, but


IN TAKING AWAY SOME FIRE."

Therefore, if you are spending so much money that you need more income,
take away some of the fire. If you reduce your expenses two dollars a
week, you have added nearly eighteen hundred dollars to your account in
fifteen years. If you wear your boots one month after you could well
persuade yourself to have a new pair, your new ones will not wear out a
month sooner for that reason!


GOOD FORTUNE OF OUR LITTLE EGOTISMS.

We are all, fortunately, greatly disposed to contentment with our lot.
We do not seem to realize it, but the importance of the pleasures of
life which cannot be bartered in, has its noticeable effect on the mind.
Horace remarked this ages ago, and Dr. Johnson has thus translated the
thoughts hinging upon it: "Howsoever every man may complain
occasionally," says he, "of the hardships of his condition, he is
seldom willing to change it for any other on the same level. Whether it
be that he who follows an employment, chose it at first on account of
its suitableness to his inclination; or that when accident, or the
determination of others, have pleased him in a particular station, he,
by endeavoring to reconcile himself to it, gets the custom of viewing it
only on the fairest side; or whether every man thinks that class to
which he belongs the most illustrious, merely


BECAUSE HE HAS HONORED IT WITH HIS NAME--

it is certain that, whatever be the reason, most men have a very strong
and active prejudice, in favor of their own vocation, always working
upon their minds and influencing their action." Let us be thankful for
that laughable egotism which is born with us, and within us, and which,
in this natural and unobtrusive affair of contentment, becomes a true
anchor, holding us inside the peaceful haven.




AMBITION.

     Marble may rise from crystal waters spanned
     By other marbles: founts may plash on stone,
     And fashionably-branched trees may stand
     As thieves upon a scaffold. Yet, how cold!
     How cold!


We are made up of elements. These elements should be well
balanced. The delicacy of equilibrium is what makes the perfect man, or,
rather, the honorable man. Too much avarice makes a contemptibly mean
man; not enough makes a foolish spendthrift, who is always appealing to
his friends for help. Too much bravery in man makes a bully; not enough
a coward. Too much speech in man makes a bore; not enough a "stick." Too
much hope in man makes a speculator and a gambler; not enough, a hermit
and a man-hater. So of ambition. It is a flame to be guarded--a willing
slave, an unpitying master. In its full sway it is the very essence of
self-conceit and selfishness,--two traits, a little of which goes a
good way. You know that you do not put much blueing into a washtub full
of water. Well, use ambition in the same sparing way. If you spill it in
using it, you will have a difficult affair on your hands. It may be just
possible, of course, that you have clothes to wash, so to speak, which
require the whole box or bottle. If so, your chance of happiness is not
great.


"HE WHO SURPASSES OR SUBDUES MANKIND,"

says Byron, "must look down on the hate of those below." "Who soars too
near the sun, with golden wings, melts them," says Shakspeare. We all
have upon us golden wings of happiness. Let us not soar near the sun.
"Fling away ambition," mourns old Cardinal Wolsely in Henry VIII; "by
that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, the image of his Maker,
hope to win by it?" "It often puts men upon doing the meanest offices,"
says Swift, "as climbing is performed in the same posture with
creeping." It has been aptly called by Sir William Davenant,


"THE MIND'S IMMODESTY."

Watch this petty man. He is consumed by a desire to be a little higher
than he now is. He is driver on a street car, in a city. Unconsciously,
he is an excellent driver. He has not become so by the silent care which
befits a real climber. No! he was born a horseman. But he was also born
ambitious. If he were private secretary to the President, he would want
to be President, simply because his attention would be more closely
directed to the Chief Magistracy than elsewhere.


BEHOLD HIM INSTALLED AS CONDUCTOR.

He rings the bell incessantly for a milk-wagon to get out of the road.
The passengers expostulate. One of them is drunk, therefore
extra-expostulatory. Our conductor beholds the moment arrived when he
must "bounce" the passenger. The passenger is landed free on track, with
only the conductor's badge in his mind, which he reports to the office.
The next day the conductor tells a passenger to get his feet off that
seat, or he will put him off. In a dispute which follows, the conductor
loses a chance to get across a swinging-bridge, and a passenger who has
thus missed a train, gets angry and reports the conductor. The driver is
quietly asked about our friend, and our friend is thrown out of his
place like a shot out of a gun. He is too proud to drive again, and
takes a trip into the country for his health. This homely drama is
played in all the hotels where head-waiters are employed, in all the
departments of business where head-clerks are needed; in all the great
stores where floor-walkers "strut their brief hour,"--everywhere that
gives an opportunity for little Envy to peep, from


THE RIDICULOUS AMBUSCADE

of some incompetent subordinate, out upon the goings and comings of
unsuspecting Merit. "There is a native baseness," says Simms, "in the
ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more
conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its
object." So, to me, there has always seemed a real baseness in these
attempts of unfit people, who have only their self-conceit for training
and their cheek for capital. Half our failures in business come from men
attempting something they know nothing about. A printer will open a drug
store, and a country dry goods merchant will start a daily paper in a
city! "Alas!" says Young, "ambition makes my little less."

Once in a while there is born, in every State, a soul which is to be
"like a star and dwell apart." It is to be gifted with qualities of an
exalted character. But it is also to be lashed with the scourge of
ambition. It is to stand, as William Penn said,


"THE TALLEST TREE,

therefore the most in the power of the blasts of fortune." How little
should we desire the dizzy niche in which it seats itself. Our little
heads would swim in the sickness of our unfamiliarity. We would fall.
"Remarkable places," said Madame Necker, "are like the summits of rocks;
eagles and reptiles only can get there." Napoleon, possibly, never had a
true friend in his life. He certainly never deserved one. Each year saw
him surrounded by new associates, whom he meant to sacrifice, if he
could.


UPON THE BLOODY FIELD OF ASPERN AND ESSLING,

he offered up Marshal Lannes. He was forced to stand by that brave dying
man and listen to his awful reproaches. So, again, in the terrible
carnage of Spain at Eylau, at Borodino, Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden,
Leipsic, Hanau, everywhere, he was compelled to hear the outspoken
protests of the men who had held the ladder for him--to stamp his foot
at the constant declarations of "Dukes," "Princes," and "Kings," that he
was a monster whose thirst demanded only human blood. At last, the whole
world cried out that it had had


"ENOUGH OF BONAPARTE!"

The expression became a war-cry, and the world escaped from the baleful
sceptre under whose shadow it had too long suspired. "What millions died
that Cæsar might be great!" cries Campbell. "None think the great
unhappy but the great," says Young. They deserve their unhappiness. It
is the mess of pottage to obtain which they have sold everything. Fame
has always seemed to the philosopher like some mountain in a polar
clime--cold, lonesome, inhospitable.

     Tall mountains meet, and giddy greet
       The clouds in their exalted homes;
     What may they show, save ice and snow,
       Unto the fleets that pass their domes?

     Their crests are bold with solar gold:
       Their charming cliffs enchant the eye;
     Yet earth shows not more dreary spot
       Than toilers in their heights descry.

     There points a peak which mortals seek--
       Fraught are its crags with human woes;
     Shrill through its fasts shriek envy-blasts--
       Forever drift hate's blinding snows.

     Its towering height beams with a light--
       The wondrous blaze of Glory's orb;
     Still those who gaze feel most the rays,
       While they who climb no warmth absorb.

     Contentment creeps--Renown climbs steeps
       Where consummations ne'er appease;
     Below, how oft, when Care's aloft,
       Unhappiness, distrusting, flees.

[Illustration]




THE REPUBLIC'S ANCHOR.

     In ancient times the sacred plough employed
     The kings and awful fathers of mankind.


A work of this character--a book for the home--would be
manifestly halt without some consideration of that grand subject,
Agriculture,--the tilling of the continents of this wide earth, to whose
fruitfulness the oceans apply their beneficent offices; to whose
generosity the sun lends his quickening rays of brightness and beauty.
"The awful fathers of mankind" to-day pay attention to the "sacred
plough" as in ancient days, aye, thousands of times as much attention!
The tribes which then wandered upon the globe have now increased until
Nature must needs groan with the load of her gifts to sustain them, and
the rulers must scan the sky, and send the telegraph out-riding the
storms, to warn the husbandman that danger to his crops
approaches--danger, which if not averted, were more deadly than the
hatred of an enemy on a foreign strand.

The magnificent, conservative forces of our Republic live upon its
farms. There is our safety in the hour of trial! Rome fell because


HER LOAFERS AND CITYITES

were the only voters. They had no homes to protect--they had only votes
to _sell_. But here, with our mighty experiment in human government, we
have an irresistible power, the elements of which are straight-thinking
men, who want only the right to prevail, and who have wheat and corn to
sell, but absolutely no votes! God be thanked for this! When the torch
of Communism shall


BURN THE SENATE HOUSE

in the city, the swords which were yesterday plow-shares will surround
the glaring pile, and steadfastly blot out of existence the conspiracy
of the beer-saloon and the "dead-fall;" when the bayonet of the gaudy
foreigner shall glisten on our coasts, the ranks of farmers will hurry,
side by side with the metropolitans, to chase the adventurers back into
the seas.

"Agriculture," says Zenophon, "for an honorable and high minded man, is
the best of all occupations and arts by which men obtain the means of
living." How true this is! One would think


"BUSINESS"

in the days of the Greek were carried on just as it is now--the
concourse of a pack of men turned wolves, hungry for trade, and
devouring each other in the absence of common sustenance. To succeed in
business in a city in this epoch, and to be at the same time a
high-minded and honorable man, is very rare--is usually the result of
employing lieutenants to do the "business," and keeping the "dirty work"
away from the knowledge of the principal. But when the farmer drives a
bargain with


"THE GOOD GODDESS"

how clean is the transaction! There is no lying, no cheating, no
treachery, no rivalry. How frank and open is the face of him who has
concealed nothing! How hearty is his laugh--for has he not laughed with
nature--with the twitter of the birds, with the low beating of the
bells? Has he not faithful friends--friends of a life-time? When he has
gone into debt has he not paid? Has he ever considered


FIFTY CENTS ON HIS NEIGHBOR'S DOLLAR

a full return, and has he walked into his neighbor's parlor (shabby for
lack of the fifty per cent) and congratulated him on the return of the
holidays? A spade is a spade with him. A thief is a thief. He does not
like thieves. He says so. Neither does his city cousin like thieves. His
city cousin is very careful not to say so. He does not like monopolies,
he says so. Neither does his city cousin like monopolies. His city
cousin would "turn off" any clerk who said so very loudly, let alone
saying it himself. He does not like corruption and hypocrisy. On this
point his city cousin has


POSITIVELY NO OPINION,

as "it really would ruin his business." Thus we see the farmer--free,
ingenuous, independent. Thus we see the city merchant--smooth, prudent,
sycophantic. Thank God for Agriculture! And now


CANNOT WE INSPIRE YOUNG MEN

with a little truer idea of life? Cannot we teach them that money in
itself is not what they want above all things? How little wealth the
really wise find necessary! On the farm is health, independence, high
standing--all within the reach of any young man. He certainly sacrifices
one or two of these objects when he enters a city. He can get money but
he will lose his health. If he get true independence he will be


ONE OUT OF TEN THOUSAND,

all the rest of whom are slaves. With the new combinations forming in
the business of the world, new experiences are constant. The man
employing three hundred fortunate workers to-day, may be himself
searching for work next year. The man getting $5,000 a year to-day may
next week be trying to find labor at a dollar a day, and may absolutely
fail. The financial panic has no such thing in store for the farmer. He
will live on, just as his brook runs on, and when the sleek magnates in
the hotel-parlor decree that he must lose his farm, as they need it for
a "colony," he will rise up and smite them, and thereafter the sleek
magnate will be an affair of the past. Young man, if you have not an
absolute genius for something else, stay on the farm. Read books which
will make you desire to be a pure man, just for the noble name it will
give you. If you can get as great a desire to be a good man as you have
to be a purse-proud man, you will be on the right track; for you will
see that honesty is easier in the perfumed fields than it is in the
polluted air of a city business-house. Read over the biographies, and
see how certainly all our great men got their greatness in the open air
of the country. Take a big city, for instance. Has it not surprised you
to see how few great men New York or Chicago have furnished to the
nation? The city levels men. It drags them down. Their individualities
are put into a dredge-box, and the flour of mediocrity is scattered on
all alike.


"IN A MORAL POINT OF VIEW,"

says Lord John Russell, "the life of the agriculturist is the most pure
and holy of any class of men; pure because it is the most healthful, and
vice can hardly find time to contaminate it; and holy because it brings
the Deity perpetually before his view, giving him thereby the most
exalted notions of supreme power, and the most fascinating and
endearing view of moral benignity."

Farmers, you take pains to get two teams, so that the boys can take hold
at the ploughing and in the corn. See to it that you also get the boys a
light wagon, so that they can go to a picnic or a bee without
discommoding you.


START YOUR BOYS OUT IN THIS WAY,

and they will not abuse their opportunities. Instead of going six miles
on Sunday to a lake or river, they will "turn out" of their own accord
and go to church with their heads up, self-reliant, perhaps just a
little bit proud. Why? Because when they sneak off to a river, it is
because they have nothing with which they are decently pleased for all
their hard toil. Make your home a pleasant place for your sons, even if
it be at great hazards. It will all come out right. Give the children
some comforts before you take big chances on a short-horn herd. Rig up a
bath-room, a swing, a sort of gymnasium. Buy games of recreation, such
as your taste approves. Buy above all things good books and plenty of
them. Remember some book in your own old childhood-home! What a
gigantic influence that book has exercised on your whole life! It does
not seem to you that your sons will pay so much attention to the books
in _your_ house, but they will. Some one book will furnish a key to a
life--will sway its reader while young, while old, until he goes over
the bounds of its dominion into the next life. You and Society both
desire your young people to


STAY OUT OF THE CITIES.

The safety of our Great Republic entirely depends upon the existence of
a conservative class of independent individuals, unable to become
crazed, through laziness, over some miserable idea unconnected with the
business of living. When any great wrong is to be righted by absolute
force it is necessary that the body exercising that force should be
amenable to a sense of practical justice. If it shall be necessary to
take the railroads away from their owners, or to close the boards of
trade, or to go the other way and farm out the post-office and machinery
of the government to get rid of the crime of office-hunting,--why then,
the action of independent men is necessary--the doings of wage-workers
are not satisfactory, and are almost always fatal to the order of things
which was to be renovated. If this Republic have any vitality not
enjoyed formerly by the democracies now buried in the yellow pages of
history, it is the tremendous scope of her quarter-section farms. Not
many years ago one of the largest business houses in Chicago put up a
placard, just before election, stating that the proprietor considered
his interests justly the interests of his clerks, and it was decidedly
to his interests to have the Honorable Barnacle Bigbug re-elected. All
employes were requested to note well. You see the crime of this
dry-goods "prince" (how we all run to idiotic titles!) lay in
subordinating the good of the State to the good of his particular
millions. He totally forgot that the good of each clerk was as much to
be looked after by the Government as the good of his own ambitious flesh
and blood. He drowned every principle of democracy in the monarchical
desire to "get it all and then give some away." The desire to give away
is where the theory gives away. Now this can never happen on the farm.

The plutocrats must always tremble before the man with hay-seed in his
hair. They cannot reach him. They cannot tempt or debauch him. Teach
this to your sons. Teach it with horses, buggies, churches, picnics,
schools, books, rest, and travel. Take the boys to the rank-smelling
cities; show them the factories, the store-gangs, and the street gangs.
Then they will go home with joy in their hearts, and when Old Brindle
moos and Old Sorrel whinnies in recognition at their gate you may be
sure that the greedy city will never swallow up your sturdy sons, the
pride of your declining years. I have been somewhat earnest in this
because my life on a farm was harder than circumstances make imperative
nowadays. Clearing is heavy work. The culture of an Indiana opening
among stumps that make a field look like a drag turned wrong-side-up
leaves little chance for gymnasium or bath-room. But all that is gone
by. I have been earnest, again, because


THE FOREIGNERS

are all getting our farms, while our own folk seem to think that a
precarious existence as a rich man's slave in the city, is a more
sensible thing than to take advantage of opportunities for which the
people of other worlds tear out their heart-strings, leave native
climate, language, habits, government, everything, and hurry hitherward.
For shame upon ourselves!

     My lord rides through his palace gate;
     My lady sweeps along in state;
     The sage thinks long on many a thing
     And the maiden muses on marrying;
     The minstrel harpeth merrily,
     The sailor plows the foaming sea,
     The huntsman kills the good red deer,
     And the soldier wars without a fear;
         _Nevertheless, whate'er befall_,
         _The farmer he must feed them all_.


[Illustration]




TEMPERANCE

     O thou invisible spirit of wine; if thou hast no name to be known
     by, let us call thee--devil.--Shakspeare.


Society has much to attend to. The whole wonderful
mechanism by which those citizens who now do measurably right, can have
blessings far beyond the totals of luxuries enjoyed by Kings a few
centuries ago--this whole mechanism, I think, has been perfected by one
law, the self-interest of the class wielding the force necessary to
compel the change desired. To-day, among the evils which we suffer,--not
as results of the new civilization, but as vestiges of the old
barbarism,--is the abuse of stimulants. The effects of this abuse are,
perhaps, next to atrocious crime, the most discouraging which menace the
march of progress, and


EVEN THE ANNALS OF ATROCIOUS CRIME

so closely link the curse of strong drink with deeds of violence as to
totally extinguish the mark of difference in the minds of many good men.
Society as to-day organized, commits the keeping of a woman to the hands
of a man, who in turn, is legally free to condemn her to the horrors of
companionship with a man (that man being himself) bereft periodically or
continuously of his moral motives of conduct. He is entitled by law to
return to his wretched home with murder in his heart, and to vent upon a
woman from whom he fears no defense, the anger which


IT WOULD BE UNSAFE TO MANIFEST

toward the person who may have originally inspired the passion. The
point at which this cruelty becomes practically illegal is that limit
which the wife puts to her own endurance, which in turn, is generally
gauged not by her own powers, but by the personal safety of her
children. So long as her own life seems to be alone in jeopardy, she
waits to be killed--as in the notable case at Minneapolis, Minn.,--and
Society permits itself to be called in simply to attend the funeral of
the murdered woman, who, however, is often buried as a victim of some
hypothetical disease, invented to take the blame off the prevailing
order of things. Now while this is


ENTIRELY HORRIBLE IN THE ABSTRACT,

the abstract is notoriously a false way of getting the general drift of
things. The abstract philosopher, the moment he is charged with the
practical conduct of an affair, as a general rule, fails ignominiously,
even in his own opinion. With regard to drunkenness, for instance, let
us ask ourselves: "Is drunkenness less prevalent now than in olden
times?" Yes. "Is the condition of the woman better, in addition to the
improved habits of the man?" Yes. Therefore, it is evident Society,


THE GRAND MACHINE

(let us never say "Society" when we mean spike-tailed coats), has an
eye on the scourge of Rum, and will eventually stamp it out. "But why,"
asks the Impracticable, "does not Society stamp it out at once?" "Why
does not the sun shine twenty-four hours in America on the Fourth of
July?" Simply because America is not the whole world. Neither is the
subject of the murder of wives and the degradation of offspring the
whole affair with which Society deals.


THE FIRST GREAT DUTY OF SOCIETY

is to feed and clothe her individuals. This burden is just beginning to
sit on her shoulders without galling weight. The next effort is to
protect the more industrious against the forays of the wicked and the
mistakes of the unwise. This is the problem with which the past century
has had most to deal. It is an immeasurably greater question than is
that of drunkenness, and it is immeasurably far from solution. For
instance, a foolish statesman can to-day plunge fifty millions of people
into


WAR

--a thing represented among words by three letters, but which among
events entirely fails to find complete expression, from the lack of any
other misfortune worthy of comparison. An angry statesman, acting like a
boy, may stop, not a game of marbles, but ten thousand grain-laden
ships. But, notwithstanding, as an attendant in the betterment of her
condition, Society is advancing rightly toward the rum-bottle. She does
not hearken always to the voice of


THE PROFESSIONAL TEMPERANCE "WORKER"

because a betterment in Society is naturally and rightly the result of
self-interest. The man who spends his time altogether in the bettering
of others does not establish reforms on the surest basis. Society
usually has to do his work after him, with considerable delay and
additional cost. He is all right in the abstract, but he delays matters.
What I would illustrate is this: The place for the reformer to deal with
drink on a fair battle field is in the city. The place where the
professional reformer finds it profitable to go is in the country, where
the youth wear


THE BADGE OF TEMPERANCE

in their cheeks--not in the button-hole of their coats. In the country,
surrounded by circles of persons as free from stimulants or the need of
them as is their snow from the smut of soft-coal, they swear eternal
"conversion" to the views of a man--usually a former victim of
intoxication,--often a subsequent wallower in his same old gutters.
Society sometimes looks upon this Peter the Hermit with little pleasure.
The excitements, the passions and the commotions which he sometimes
foments are pitiable from the very fact that


NO RUM CAN BE BLAMED

as having fired the unhappy brains that rush into the vortex of public
confusion, like ships into the whirlpool. All the practical laws would
be passed (and at a date earlier than that at which the public finally
accept them in reality) without the sacrifices of the man who proudly
calls himself a "horrible example" of the power of strong drink. How
does Society do it? I am sure I do not know. All I know is this:


ON THE REAL BATTLE-GROUND,

in the city, where stimulant is often needed--whisky, iron, quinine,
coffee, tobacco, opium, or tea--the men who waste the most nerve-tissue
are more rigidly required to abstain from the abuse of stimulants than
was the case fifteen years ago. To put it plainer, fifteen years ago, a
smart man would be employed on a newspaper to "write" or "report". If he
were brilliant, he was entitled almost by custom to "go on the war-path"
once a week--that is, to be drunk that often, and to be totally unable
or unwilling to do the current day's work.


NOW-A-DAYS,

if a man in the same position were to get drunk once a year he would be
superseded. No matter how brilliant he may be, the drunkard at once
sinks to the bottom. The "fat jobs" are filled by men as steady as
clock-work. How has Society done this wonderful thing? Hard to tell. She
has constantly tempted the steady man. In fact, she inclines to treat
him a shade the better if he can drink some stimulant each day without
unbalancing himself--some alcohol, some coffee or some tea--but


WOE TO HIM

if he transgress her limits. In the country it is asked "Does he drink?"
In the city it is asked "Does he get drunk?" The two methods are
essentially the results of two conditions. The mistake of the one
locality is to apply its own preliminary to the other. Now, again, to
this frightful question of woman-torture: Society knows all about woman.
It knows that the wife must be the arbiter of her own sufferings. Her
brother, being less wise than Society, separates the wife from


THE OCCASIONAL BRUTE

who married her, takes her ills and her children to his house, kicks the
brute on the street, and, for all his pains, is eventually either
assassinated by the wretch or anathematized by the wife. Having made
matters much worse (by unanimous opinion), he abandons his reform, and
then, with his valuable experience, joins Society and becomes a wave in
the tide of events, instead of a presumptuous pebble rolling in small
opposition on the beach of time. How will Society approach the
wife-beater? Nobody knows. Probably she will exterminate the breed. The
woman, like the newspaper proprietor, will at last awake. The man who
gets drunk will not gain her affections--above all, he will not keep
them. The "old soak" will be wifeless. Monsters will cease to propagate
their species. When once the strong hand of Bread-and-Butter gets hold
of Whisky, then whisky will be as useful for good as it now is powerful
in evil. Society however deals with the affections cautiously, and
wisely, because her experience is inconceivably great.


TRY PLAYING ON HEARTSTRINGS YOURSELF

to hear the music you make! Let us then pray for the day when the "drop
too much" with the bottle will be as nefarious as a cut too much with
the razor or a blaze too much with the torch.

[Illustration]




A GOOD NAME.

     Virtue maketh men on the earth famous, in their graves illustrious,
     in the heavens immortal.--Chilo.


Perhaps there is no man so well known and yet so little
thought about in any one community as he who, in the universal opinion,
bears a good name. Upon his brow he wears the modern laurel, the highest
emblem of his worth, yet the simplest tribute of his fellow citizens.

There are certain exigencies in the histories of all groups of people
when the ordinary machinery of life will not operate. The citizens
require the utmost letter of the bond; they look with suspicion on all
who have usually given satisfaction by their services. A great man is
needed. It is then that the people, with one voice, cry out for succor
from him of of whom, in days of greater prosperity, they had no
imploring need; and it is then astonishing to what a degree the voice
of the people at once becomes the voice of God.

A bank which, owing to its high-sounding title, had attracted the
savings of the people, fell into the hands of a clique of scoundrels and
was compelled to suddenly suspend, the President flying to a distant
land to escape the penalties of his crimes. When thirteen thousand
depositors were thus confronted with total or partial ruin, there was
but one man in a great city whom they would trust to enter the
desecrated temple of their hopes and set to rights the treasure yet
unstolen. This man came


LIKE CINCINNATUS FROM HIS FARM--

like a father to his children--and from the hearts of plundered widows
and orphans there breathed relief in every sigh. In peaceful times this
great man was seldom heard of; rogues could be elected over him to
places of usual trust; but, in a crisis, his whole biography seemed
embossed upon the people's hearts, rising forth like muscles in an
agony.

Again a city--itself an exhalation, rising like Milton's hall of
Pandemonium--perished in a night. Where, in one week, there had been
one hundred "leading candidates" for Mayor, in the next week there was
none so rash as to offer himself. A stricken city--the pity of a
Christlike world--cast its eyes upon one citizen; and he, as an act of
supreme duty, took the perilous post of helmsman through a storm that
unsettled the deeps of credit and prosperity all over the earth.

In each of these illustrations party politics played no part. Tall masts
were needed for the great ships, and these two men, like red wood
patriarchs, touched hard against the zenith of the people's vision.
Admirable tributes! Magnificent rewards of life-times of virtue and high
character!


THE SILENT GROWTH OF REPUTATION.

How does a man become so great that malice and envy and utter hatred
cannot by their constant stings infect his blood? How can a man silently
amass a capital of virtuous renown which, when the clear vision of
adversity is given to the people, will show with unerring certainty his
assets and liabilities of character? It is hard to say. Accidents and
circumstances so surround us all that we are the clay, baked either in
fair moulds or foul. When the mould is made we have the least judgment;
yet when the clay is baked we must abide.

Josh Billings has said that, "after the age of forty, a man cannot form
new habits; the best he can do is to learn to steer the old ones." Yoke,
therefore, the ox you call Firmness with the one you call Contentment.
When you come to drive them down the road the neighbors may laugh at the
hawing and jeeing, and jee-hawing, but keep on until you break your oxen
in. No man ever got so he could handle that team but had


A HIGH STANDING ON THE ROAD OF LIFE.

Never discuss other folks' affairs except with the common-sense view of
doing the folks good. Never start out to do a thing which is impossible
of execution. Never start back after you have started out. Never pay the
slightest attention to the criticism of persons who are trying to do
what you are trying to do. When he who has ever done you a kindness gets
angry and addresses you angrily, ponder on every word he says. Pearls
then drop from his mouth. Live in no great regard of the passing
fashion; it may be a very foolish one, and people who are foolish have
a surprising power of perception in pointing to folly in others. Owe no
man other than your good office. Have no pride above your fellow mortal;
he is essentially like you.


THE BAG OF THINGS

in which ye are alike (if each thing were a grain of wheat) would
freight a ship; the things in which you are better than he could be put
into your vest-pocket. Gold does not tarnish, and good names do not soil
easily, though herein custom has something to do with the affair. "The
soul's calm sunshine" however, should spread abroad. It often reflects
hidden beauty in other faces. "Be just, and fear not." You may stand
apparently without honor when you have it most. If you are the man of
good name in your community, you are on the high hill where your people
will gather in time of need, as did the ancients to the rocky acropolis.




WORSHIP.

     Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
     He wales a portion with judicious care;
     And "Let us worship God," he says, with solemn air.--Burns.


The good and holy custom of family prayers is, I fear,
dropping into disuse. Our lives are so full of business that a season of
God's service in the morning and in the evening is almost thought to be
an excuse of sloth. But what a sad effect do we see on our youth! They
have quick eyes for cant and hypocrisy. They follow us to church on
Sunday less and less willingly, until finally there is rebellion in
their hearts and irreligion in their souls. Family worship is a fount of
piety pure enough for even the young, who are pure themselves. Into its
depths they look and see only a chastity of spirit reflected. The
machinery and the ambition that adulterate the true faith at the church
have not had their birth at the fireside of a good man. At that
fireside the child grows up religious, because he loves religion. It is
kind and good to him. His shrine is at home. And where can we ever build


SO HOLY AN ALTAR

as at that sweet spot where life has come in upon us, and love been
wrapped around us! Burns sees the humble cotter finish his family
service in the presence of his little ones, and then, to show a further
duteous regard for the souls intrusted to his care, kneel again with the
wife:

     The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
       And proffer up to Heaven the warm request,
     That he who stills the raven's clamorous nest,
       And decks the lily fair in flowery pride.
     Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
       For them and for their little ones provide;
     But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside.

"From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs," sings the sweet
poet, and this very poem has touched a chord in the hearts of all
humanity, in every clime, and nearly every tongue, that has almost
doubled that Scotia's fame. "A house without family worship," says
Mason, "has neither foundation nor covering." "Measure not men by
Sundays," says Fuller, "without regarding what they do all the week
after." "Educate men without religion," said the Duke of Wellington,
"and you make them but clever devils."


THE IRON DUKE

was forced to fight one of the cleverest of this kind, and his victory
was earned so hardly that he remembered it. "The dullest observer must
be sensible," says Washington Irving, "of the order and serenity
prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a
beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the key-note
to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony." "It
is for the sake of man, not of God," says Blair, "that worship and
prayers are required; not that God may be rendered more glorious, but
that men may be made better--that he may acquire those pious and
virtuous dispositions in which his highest improvement consists." How
can religion bear fruit so well as by daily instruction from God? How
can the family bear its burdens more easily than with God's help?


HOW CAN THE BROOD BE GATHERED TOGETHER

at night so surely as when there is an engagement with the Creator at
the hearth where life began? In all views, from all sides, this holy
custom is seen to be founded in divine wisdom--and divine wisdom
includes human wisdom "as the sea her waves."

I have prefaced this subject of worship with the matter of family
services, on account of its vital importance. Without the reading of the
Bible and the praise of God at home, worship appears to the young like
the grinding of the corn, the shoeing of the horses, or the aid of the
physician--a matter to be paid for rather than to be done by one's self.


SOME OF THE HAPPIEST AND BEST FAMILIES,

who have turned out into the world the strongest, bravest men, have not
limited their worship to stated hours, even, but upon occasions of
unusual peril or unusual gladness have poured out to God their prayers
or their gratitude. Charnock, in his "Attributes," says: "As to private
worship, let us lay hold of the most melting opportunities and frames.
When we find our hearts in a more than ordinary spiritual frame, let us
look upon it as a call from God to attend Him; such impressions and
notions are God's voice, inviting us into communion with Him in some
particular act of worship, and promising us some success in it. When
the Psalmist had a secret notion


'TO SEEK GOD'S FACE'

and complied with it, the issue is the encouragement of his heart, which
breaks out into an exhortation to others to be of good courage, and wait
on the Lord: 'Wait on the Lord and be of good courage, and He shall
strengthen thy heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.' One blow will do more
on the iron when it is hot, than a hundred when it is cold; melted
metals may be stamped with any impression; but once hardened, will, with
difficulty, be brought into the figure we intend."


THE WISEST AND THE BEST.

We have in religion the experience of the wisest and the best minds
before us. Their guarantee in all else is of the very highest human
standing and degree. We must, therefore, in reason, profit by their
knowledge. In this, also, we are aided by our own development. Behold
the truth of this from the mouth of Colton: "Philosophy is a bully that
talks very loud when the danger is at a distance, but the moment she is
hard pressed by the enemy she is not to be found at her post, but
leaves the brunt of the battle to be borne by her humbler but steadier
comrade Religion, whom, on most other occasions, she effects to
despise." There died in Paris, not long ago, a man named Emile Littre,
as well known in France for his infidelity as is Colonel Ingersoll in
this country. Over there


THEY CALL ATHEISM POSITIVISM,

which is a good name. It signifies that a man is positive he knows more
about the future state than God! Upon his death-bed this Monsieur
Littre,--although he had been the means of sending thousands of other
souls before their Maker, rebellious and unredeemed--this same Monsieur
Littre dared not to meet God with his Positivism on his soul, and
embraced the offices of the Church with great relief. Men, before
entering upon a course which flings away the only hope a man has,


SHOULD LOOK WELL TO IT

that they know what they are doing. I wandered in the terror-stricken
streets of burned Chicago. The multitudes--nearly two hundred
thousand--were eating in gratitude; the mothers with babes were under
shelter. Was the unburned temple of the atheist open? Oh, no! He had
none. Who was cutting the meats and breaking the bread? The wives and
daughters of the parishes which had been spared from the hot flames. It
was a solemn lesson. I said: "I will not, Colonel Ingersoll, throw away
the hope I have." By their works shall ye know them! 'Tis as true upon
the field of blood as in the track of fire, but we must pass on. "When I
was young," said


THE GREAT NEWTON,

the ornament of his race, "I was sure of many things; there are only two
things of which I am sure now: one is that I am a miserable sinner; and
the other, that Jesus Christ is an all-sufficient savior." The closing
pages of Dr. Johnson's works are filled with simple little prayers to
his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. "I have lived long enough to know
what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in
happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion." This is the
language of La Place, the author of "La Mecanique Celeste," one of the
greatest books of the world. He spoke from real experience. He had seen
religion "abolished by law." He had seen the "worship of Reason"
established with the decapitation of seven thousand innocent citizens of
France. He had heard one of the apostles of Reason arise in the
Constituent Assembly and demand two hundred and ninety thousand corpses
instead of seven thousand. Then this man who had grasped the machinery
of the heavens, who had shown the absolute accuracy of Newton's great
discovery, wrote, in the same spirit of absolute knowledge: "I have
lived long enough to know what I did not once believe." Magnificent
testimony! Almost as valuable as the teachings of our own hearts! The
same statement comes from


THE ROCK OF ST. HELENA.

Victor Hugo, with a mind like that of Shakspeare, says: "I believe in
the sublimity of prayer." "If we traverse the world," says Plutarch, "it
is possible to find cities without walls, without letters, without
Kings, without wealth, without coin, without schools, without theatres;
but a city without a temple, or that practiceth not worship, prayers,
and the like, no one ever saw." "Wonderful!" cries Montesquieu, "that
the Christian religion, which seems to have no other object than the
felicity of another life, should also constitute the happiness of this!"


SAYS GEORGE WASHINGTON:

"Religion is as necessary to reason as reason is to religion." "Religion
is a necessary, an indispensable element in any great human character,"
says Daniel Webster. "Nothing," says Gladstone, "can be hostile to
religion which is agreeable to justice." "It is the property of the
religious spirit," admits Emerson, "to be the most refining of all
influences. The writers against religion," says Edmund Burke, "whilst
they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of
their own." "I fear God," says Saadi, "and next to God, I chiefly fear
him who fears him not." "Space is the statue of God," cries Joubert.
"Truth is his body and light his shadow," says Plato.

There is almost a revelation of God in the cries upward to Him, of some
of his human souls. Says Wordsworth:

                   Thou who didst wrap the cloud
     Of infancy around us, that Thyself,
     Therein with our simplicity awhile
     Mightst hold on earth communion undisturbed;
     Who from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,
     Or from its deathlike void, with punctual care,
     And touch as gentle as the morning light,
     Restor'st us daily--
                             Thou, Thou alone.
     Art everlasting!

The poet Young, driven by sorrow to God's foot-stool, addresses his
Creator in the same nobility of language:

               Thou, who didst put to flight
     Primeval silence, when the morning stars,
     Exulting, shouted o'er the rising ball;
     O Thou! whose word from solid darkness struck
     That spark the sun, strike wisdom from my soul;
     My soul which flies to Thee, her trust, her treasure,
     As misers to their gold, while others rest.

"Come unto me, ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you
rest." Therefore, accept this boon. Take your own child by the hand, and
pray, and pray:

     The way is long, my Father! and my soul
       Longs for the rest and quiet of the goal;
     While yet I journey through this weary land,
       Keep me from wandering, Father, take my hand.




THE ATHEIST

     Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place,
     (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
     Sailing on obscene wings, athwart the noon,
     Drops his blue-fringed lids and holds them close,
     And hooting at the glorious Sun in heaven,
     Cries out: "Where is it?"--Coleridge.


The laugh of the foolish infidel and the sneer of the
solemn atheist are abroad in the land. The awful draught they hold to
the lips of humanity is well honeyed with some of the adjuncts of
religion itself, else the perilous cup would be rejected. Let us see how
the atheist secures his victim, for he is never content to enjoy alone
the extravagances of his folly. I have noticed that when a Democratic
editor receives dispatches containing news of a Republican victory, he
is frequently expert enough in the guile pertaining to his profession to
put a displayed heading on those same dispatches which clearly saves
the day for the Democrats--or _vice versa_. And I have also noticed that
it takes true mental pluck to rightly scan, first, that rooster of
roosters (invented during the last few years), then the ten lines of
Democratic Io Paians which follow, and lastly, the small type containing
the real facts.


MAN IS SO MUCH LIKE A FISH

that certain bait is sure to catch him. The morning after the election
the most astute Republican or Democrat in the country trembles before
the terrors of a ten-line Democratic or Republican displayed heading, as
the case may be. Now the crafty atheist has a way of laying down
fallacies which often terrifies one into involuntarily believing that
those fallacies are facts, until one stops to think that the atheist is
but a man, after all, and that there is an appeal from his findings. It
is, therefore, in the defense of humanity that I advance against him,


HOPING TO HIT HIM BECAUSE HE IS SO BIG,

and to escape his blows because I am so small. "What though the day be
lost, all is not lost!" Though man have glaring faults, he is still a
problem far beyond the fiat of any atheist. He still has a destiny. The
atheist lays down dogma after dogma. In this changing world, where even
the little balance-wheel of a watch must be "compensated," it is clearly
as impossible for any atheist to lay down an undeviating dogma as it was
for the Cretan to truly say that all Cretans were liars! "Broadly, an
unselfish deed is impossible. There never was a human thought that
reached beyond the human body." Let us capture those two atheistic
dogmas and take off their displayed headings.


AWAY BACK ON THE PLAINS OF CHALDÆA,

in the youth of the world, there lived men who watched their flocks by
day and the hosts of heaven by night. Their study of the heavens lifted
them out of themselves, in my belief, and their observations of
celestial phenomena led them to the discovery of the fact that eclipses
of the great heavenly lights happened in a regular rotation of eighteen
years and ten days. This discovery has been very useful in purging the
idolatry from eclipses--as, had it not been for the Chaldæans, perhaps
the mother of the atheist might have offered him as an oblation in


THE FIRST TOTAL ECLIPSE

after his birth! Again, Proctor and Airy have been for ten years mapping
stars for the use of humanity 25,868 years after the map is done--that
is, that period will furnish the first opportunity for the utilization
of a truly laborious task. There is no glory in it. The difference
between glory and hard work in astronomy is just the difference between
Ptolemy and Hipparchus. The one made a great noise in the world and got
up an atheistic solar system which put science back a thousand years,
while the other stayed on his island and mapped stars to the best of his
ability, rendering possible some of


THE GODLIKE DEDUCTIONS

of Kepler, Halley, and Newton. The affairs of this world are managed in
the light of history. It is technically called precedent. There is yet
no history of astronomy. In the desired actual placing of the present
positions of the stars there would be a record which, 25,868 years
hence, would enable the observer of those times to accurately measure
movements of the earth now beyond mortal ken for lack of history. By
the character of those movements, the force, speed, heat, and


OTHER QUALITIES OF GRAVITATION

might possibly be determined. Now I cannot connect the idea of
selfishness with this view of the aspirations of humanity. Proctor and
Airy absolutely know that they will be forgotten so far out in on-coming
time, but still they drudge away, in the belief that man can only
acquire knowledge of God's works as the coral reef attains continental
proportions--that is, by the infinitesimal contributions of countless
unselfish individualities. They are desirous that man should some day
know the truth. Is there any unselfishness in the aspiration?


THE ATHEIST

says: "First and last of all, we have no idea of anything beyond, above,
or superior to these curious bodies of ours. The highest flight of
genius in art, religion, or invention has never reached beyond the body
of man." These statements are false. They should not be accepted by
anybody as true, for they tend to a lower grade of existence. They lead
the pardoned convict back to his hatching-house of crime. Philosophy of
this kind forgets the "still small voice."


THE NOBLE "IT BEHOOVETH ME!"

rings in every intelligent mind. "I have not done that which I ought to
have done; I therefore am disturbed and in unrest." Where does this
thought come from? Why do I sit in judgment on myself? The atheist says
it is selfishness. A peculiar selfishness is that voice of duty which
cries to those whom we rightly call good to go forth to the bedside of
the distressed, is it not? At the corner of Lake and Paulina streets, in
Chicago, a man, his wife, and his child were nearly burned to death. The
child died, and perhaps they all died. They were taken to the hospital.
The next day a thrifty landlord tumbled their goods down-stairs to the
sidewalk.


WHAT WAS IT IN MY SOUL

which, when I saw the young barbarians all at play tearing and
destroying those meagre comforts, cried out so sharply: "O, ignoble! you
do not lift your finger to succor this poor man! Have shame upon you!"
Why is it that that voice still sounds in my ears? Surely it is not
selfishness. Listen to a short colloquy:

Immanuel Kant--Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond
insinuation, nor flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up
thy naked law to the soul, and so extorting for thyself always
reverence, if not obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however
secretly they rebel; whence thy original?

The Atheist--I am glad to inform you that selfishness is the original
you seek!


FURTHER FALLACIES.

In the interest of an advancing Christian humanity, I call attention to
still further fallacies as I hear them in the mouth of atheism: "While
we cannot quite hold that the idea expressed by the modern word
'selfishness' is new to mankind, we can safely say that it is only
recently that selfishness came to be held a very sin. In the day of
lance, and fort, and mailed right hand, the Knight took what he could,
and held what he could, and there were no mealy-mouthed words about the
rights of others, and a broad Christian charity, either. To-day, all of
society has the precise motive of the old Robber-Barons."


LET US LOOK DOWN BROADWAY

some Saturday forenoon. Myriads of vehicles confuse the common mind with
their din and their movement. A horse comes along, walking on a hoof
that is no longer a hoof. What stops every team within two blocks for
twenty minutes? Why, an officer has rushed into that torrent of traffic,
has grasped that poor beast by the bridle, and has sent a bullet on a
mission of mercy through its brain. How is it that the frightful
objurgations of the high-charioted host fall so lightly on that officer?
Why does he not get killed himself? Because he is in the second largest
aggregation of human beings in the world, where the voice of religion is
strongest, and where that voice cries in unmistakable tones,


"WELL DONE!"

It could not be done in Leadville! It could not be done even in Chicago!
Not enough religious education; not enough development; not enough of
the voice of duty! Let not the atheist say that there is a child in the
back alley dying. So there is, but society will get there in time. Let
not the atheist criticise society; it is too big an affair. Inside of a
thousand years it will be a necessity of society as well as it now is of
religion, to be kind to humanity as well as to the brute creation.
Society will then attend to it. When a victim fell before Achilles or
Diomedes, that victim begged for mercy. The spear then went through his
bowels. The times demanded it. They knew no mercy. There is no mercy in
the Iliad. The Barons, also, were a crowd of thugs. To-day, in New York,
or London, or Paris, they would each get twenty years on general
principles. We have no sluggers who are not their superiors. The atheist
should know it, and does. The world moves.


THERE MUST BE THOUGHTS

which reach beyond the human body. I remember well a day of serious
mental depression which I once suffered. But out of my sadness came
peace. Points in our memory lose their coloring rapidly, of course, yet
the feelings of that day and night still cause a thrill of pleasure in
my mind. I had been for days convinced that there were no real joys in
life. As my peace came, I began laboriously to pick out some chords on
a piano from the opera of "Lucretia Borgia"--the finale of the second
act. My labor was rewarded by the most pleasing sounds I had ever made
with my own fingers, and there was a general ebullition of pleasure and
expectation of future harmonies through my whole body for many hours
afterward. That night I went to hear a great scientist lecture on
astronomy.


THE SUBLIMITY OF HIS SUBJECT,

the idea of a universe of stars as yet unbounded, the higher idea of an
infinitude of such universes, each but a handful of mist in the greatest
telescope, raised me to a point of feeling which made life an ineffable
delight. I went to my bed, and thanked a Creator out of a boundless
thankfulness. I have thought that the twenty-third Psalm (beginning,
"The Lord is my shepherd)" is a hymn of thanksgiving inspired with the
same high quality of satisfaction. Surely,


MAN IS NOT THE VICIOUS LUMP OF CLAY

which the atheist would have him when he is able to command that picture
of Faith which Wordsworth wrote:

                                    I have seen
     A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
     Of inland ground, applying to his ear
     The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
     To which in silence hushed, his very soul
     Listened intensely, and his countenance soon
     Brightened with joy,--for murmurings from within
     Were heard, sonorous cadences! whereby,
     To his belief the monitor expressed
     Mysterious union with its native sea.
     Even such a shell the universe itself
     Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times
     I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
     Authentic tidings of invisible things.

No! No! To found the problem or the actions of man on any one agent, and
to cut him off from God, is peurile! The reason of man necessitated the
discovery of gravitation, and it is to-day the best-established physical
fact before our view. The reason of man also demands a Creator, to endow
us with motives above our own development, and that reason, in the soul
of every man, atheist and Christian alike, must and will, secretly or
openly, have divine satisfaction.

The atheist, in these days, is the champion and the leader of a scrubby
lot of social and religious ideas. He should not "march them through
Coventry that's flat."




THE BIBLE.

                                   Those holy fields
     Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
     Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nailed
     For our advantage on the bitter cross.--Shakspeare.


Your little child, on Christmas day, may give you a
beautiful copy of the history of "those holy fields." But a few hundred
years ago, it might have cost a throne. To-day we may have either
Testament printed in our daily newspaper and put upon our table before
breakfast. So free is the word of God that only the mere wish to have it
is necessary to secure at once the greatest of spiritual boons and the
most perfect piece of writing in our language, or in any other tongue.
The beauties of the Bible have charmed the critical of all ages. The
young have departed from its simplicity of speech only to return in
riper years for rapt tuition. The wise have lingered over its perfect
sentences, striving to catch the art which was showered upon those
unassuming translators who gave its pages to the English-speaking world.
One of the brightest wits of his time was Sidney Smith. His love of the
Bible, not only as his guide and his strength, but as the greatest of
all literary works, was passionate. He once impressed a circle of
friends very deeply with this noble veneration: "What," said he, "is so
beautiful as


THE STYLE OF THE BIBLE?

what poetry in its language and ideas!" and taking it down from the
book-case he read, with his clear, manly voice, and in his most
affecting manner, several of his favorite passages; among others: "Thou
shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of an old man;"
and part of that most beautiful of Psalms, the 139th: "O Lord, thou hast
searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine
uprising; thou understandest my thoughts afar off. Thou compassest my
path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Whither
shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell,
behold thou art there; if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in
the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me and
thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover
me, even the night shall be light about me; yea, the darkness hideth not
from thee; but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light
are both alike unto thee." And thus he would charm his hearers, visiting
their ears, perhaps, with the first true knowledge of Biblical beauty
which had ever sounded upon them. Listen to


THE MERITED EULOGY

of a Roman Catholic, in the Dublin _Review_, of June, 1853: "Who will
say that the uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the Protestant
Bible is not one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives
on the ear like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of
church-bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its
felicities often seem to be things rather than mere words. It is part of
the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is
worshiped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross
fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of
letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it The
potent traditions of childhood are


STEREOTYPED IN ITS PHRASES.

The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath the
words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there
has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and
good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred
thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. It
has been to him all along as the silent, but oh! how intelligible voice
of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there
is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose
spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."


WHAT A PANEGYRIC

from an avowed opponent of this translation! And to whom are we
principally indebted for this lovely poem of God? To William Tyndale.
Says Froude, the historian: "The peculiar genius, if such a word may be
permitted, which breathes through the Bible, the mingled tenderness and
majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur unequaled,
unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars--all are
here, and bear the impress of one man, and that man William Tyndale."


AND WHO WAS WILLIAM TYNDALE?

He was a gentle clergyman of great piety and learning. He was born in
Gloucestershire, England, in 1477. He endured great persecution and was
forced to quit England. He visited Luther in Germany. He printed his New
Testament at Antwerp. Its beauties were at once recognized in England,
although to read it was illegal and punishable with death. Cardinal
Wolsely did his best to entice the translator to England, to destroy
him. An assistant in the work, named John Frith, was lured back and
burned to death. Finally Henry the Eighth of England procured Tyndale's
arrest at Antwerp. He was given a "trial," at Vilvoorden, near Antwerp,
and pronounced guilty. In September, 1536,


THEY STRANGLED THIS INSPIRED SERVANT

of God, and then burned his body. At the stake he cried: "Lord, open the
King of England's eyes!" Upon Tyndale's version of the Bible the King
James translation is solidly based. "It is astonishing," says Dr.
Geddes, a profound scholar, "how little obsolete the language of it is,
even at this day; and, in point of perspicuity and noble simplicity,
propriety of idiom, and purity of style, no English version has yet
surpassed it." Of course our language has changed greatly in 400 years.
Yet


THE LORD'S PRAYER

does not contain, in Tyndale's exact language, one unrecognizable word.
It ran as follows: "Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy
name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as
hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve vs
oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them which treaspas vs. Leede vs not
into temptacion, but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen."


THE MARKED POETICAL SUPERIORITY

of the Protestant over the Catholic Bible may be shown in the
twenty-third Psalm, and elsewhere. The first says: "The Lord is my
shepherd; I shall not want;" the second: "The Lord ruleth me; and I
shall want nothing." The first says: "He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul;"
the second: "He hath set me in a place of pasture; he hath brought me up
on the water of refreshment; he hath converted my soul" (thus completely
losing the original metaphor of the shepherd). The first says: "Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no
evil;" the second: "For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow
of death, I will fear no evils." In Job v. 7, the first says: "Yet man
is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward;" the second: "Man is
born to labor, and the bird to fly." In Job xiv. 1, the first says: "Man
that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble;" the
second: "Man born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with
many miseries." These examples will suffice to show the differences
which pervade the two translations.


"INTENSE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

will keep any one from being vulgar in point of style," says Coleridge.
"There are no songs," says Milton, "comparable to the songs of Zion, no
orations equal to those of the prophets, and no politics like those
which the scriptures teach." "The pure and noble, the graceful and
dignified simplicity of language," says Pope, "is nowhere in such
perfection as in the Scriptures. The whole book of Job, with regard both
to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison,
the most noble parts of Homer." "I use the Scriptures," says Boyle, "not
as an arsenal to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as


A MATCHLESS TEMPLE,

where I delight to contemplate the beauty, the symmetry, and the
magnificence of the structure, and to increase my awe and excite my
devotion to the Deity there preached and adored." "There never was
found, in any age of the world," says Bacon, "either religion or law
that did so highly exalt the public good as the Bible." "It is the
window in this prison of hope," says Dwight, "through which we look into
eternity." "How admirable and beautiful," says Racine, "is the
simplicity of the Evangelists! They never speak injuriously of the
enemies of Jesus Christ, of his judges, nor of his executioners. They
speak the facts without a single reflection. They comment neither on
their Master's mildness, nor on his constancy in the hour of his
ignominious death, which they thus describe: 'And they crucified
Jesus.'" "Men cannot be well educated without the Bible," says Dr. Nott.
"It ought, therefore, to hold a chief place in every situation of
learning throughout Christendom." "I am of the opinion," says Sir
William Jones, "that the Bible contains more true sublimity, more
exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer
strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other
books, in whatever age or language they have been written." "I will
answer for it," says Romaine,


"THE LONGER YOU READ THE BIBLE

the more you will like it; it will grow sweeter and sweeter; and the
more you get into the spirit of it, the more you will get into the
spirit of Christ." "The greatest pleasures the imagination can be
entertained with," says Sir Richard Steele, "are to be found in the
Bible; and even the style of the Scriptures is more than human."


THE BIBLE IS AUTHENTIC.

It is old. It is beautiful. It is the only hope we have. If we cast it
away we become as the brutes of the field, both in spirit and in body.
The strong take from the weak and perish into nothing--this is all that
is offered us by those who reject and revile the Bible. Such have
exceeding deep ignorance, exceeding ill manners, exceeding bad taste,
and exceeding great folly. "I find more sure marks of the authenticity
of the Bible," says Sir Isaac Newton, "than in any profane history
whatever." We use the word "secular" nowadays where "profane" was
formerly written. "Profane" meant "before" or "outside" the "fane," or
"temple."


THE BOOK OF JOB

is older than any other writing on earth. It antedates the Chinese
Empire. It is lost in the mist of years. The histories of Moses are as
old as the pyramids, and the pyramids and obelisks proclaim the
integrity of the Hebrew leader and chronicler. So let us prize this
greatest gift of God to man. Let us humbly thank Him for the liberties
and comforts it has brought us--for even the Atheist himself refrains
from robbing us of our property through the influence of the Christian
religion. Let us thank God for the schools, and the hospitals, and the
charities which have


THE BIBLE AT THEIR FOUNDATION,

and which, without it, it is fair to say, would not be in existence
to-day. Those who are the best are guided by its precepts. Those who are
the wisest have implicit confidence in it. Those who are the most
eloquent have studied it intensely. Those who are powerful in narration
of events have imitated its divine simplicity. Have it at your bedside.
Your mind will broaden faster under its influence than under that of the
daily newspaper. If you have not time to read both, sacrifice the paper.
The paper is trash. The Bible is solid gold. If you fill your mind with
grand thoughts, your mind will be noble. You will have principle.


WHERE CAN YOU FIND AS GRAND LANGUAGE

in any politician's speech?--"The voice of the Lord is upon the waters;
the God of glory thundereth; deep calleth unto deep; the voice of the
Lord shaketh the wilderness." Where can you find as graceful
speech?--"He shall come down as rain upon the mown grass; mercy and
truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each
other." The day is now dawning in this Western world when taste and
poetic feeling are to flourish. We have got the dollars. We must now get
something for the dollars. Now will the Bible, as ever at such epochs in
the past, shine out anew, the criterion, not only of the soul, but of
the sentiments--the book that is first under the scholar's lamp and
alone in his bedchamber.

[Illustration]




THE EVENING OF LIFE.

     Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
       Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh
     A melancholy slave;
       But an old age serene and bright,
     And lovely as a Lapland night,
       Shall lead thee to thy grave.--Wordsworth.


Age is the outer shore against which dashes an eternity.
The mysterious ocean is either tempestuous or tranquil, just as we view
it. If we look hard down the cliff of death we are appalled with the
force of the waves; we are frightened by the din and shock of collision.
But if we gaze afar off we see no great disturbance. All is moving with
the true poetry of motion, in the fitness of God's plan, even as viewed
by one of His works. "The more we sink into the infirmities of age,"
says Jeremy Collier, "the nearer we are to immortal youth. All people
are young in the other world. That state is an eternal spring, ever
fresh and flourishing. Now, to pass from midnight into noon on the
sudden; to be decrepit one minute and all spirit and activity the next,
must be a desirable change. To call this dying is an abuse of language."
Death to the aged is natural, therefore as pleasant and easy as any
other natural office of the body. Indeed, it is far easier than the
operation by which we even get our teeth in youth. If we, then, are able
to forget that greatest shock of pain so quickly as we do, why shall we
dread a little sinking of the breath, and the unwilling battle of a body
that is tired and


LITERALLY WILLING AT HEART

to surrender? "In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace
this life," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet in my best meditations do I
often desire death. For a pagan there may be some motive to be in love
with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he
can escape this dilemma--that he is too sensible of this life, or
hopeless of the life to come." We are now of the earth; but all the high
reason which has taught us to master fire, and water, and the
thunderbolts themselves, has also instructed us that we are only
sojourners on this little planet.

[Illustration: THE EVENING OF LIFE]


OUR MINDS ARE AS BROAD

as the range of stellar systems. We are not as large as a horse or an
elephant. Are we, therefore, inferior? We are inhabiting bodies which
thrive but a few years, on a planet remarkable for its smallness. But we
stretch our knowledge over mighty distances; we construct triangles
which have for one side the whole sweep of the earth, over 180 millions
of miles; we measure the distance of other worlds by this side of a
triangle, and the nearest star is thus found to be 103,000 of our
measures away from us--103,000 times 180,000,000 miles! Young has well
said that


THE UNDEVOUT ASTRONOMER IS MAD.

So did Napoleon die. Was he not the mightiest man of his time? Did not
the whole world sigh with relief when the final end came? Yet he was on
a tiny rock in the great ocean? On a map of the world that rock has no
title even to a dot. Yet it would be foolish to say he belonged simply
to that rock. No. He had come from other human worlds. He was as broad
as the earth. We, too, have come from other worlds. We are as broad as
the universe. Even our minds, clad in clay, betray the high character of
our souls.


DOES THE BEAST PEER INTO THE STARS?

Do the birds that pass so easily into the air go on voyages of discovery
past Sirius? And yet the air refuses to bear us, and wafts them gently
on its lightest zephyrs! We have sublime faculties--the fit companions
of a soul. It is not our self-conceit. The Milky Way is not our conceit.
The eclipses are not our conceit. The awful sweep of our whole family of
planets, moons, and sun, onward in celestial space, is not a conceit.
Therefore we possess our souls, flashing within caskets which have not
been altogether unworthy of their priceless treasures.


AS THE CASKET DULLS

and grows to its decay, we cannot weep greatly over its loss, for will
it not reveal the splendors all within?

"It is worthy the observing," says Lord Bacon, "wisest of men," "that
there is no passion in the mind of men so weak, but it mates and masters
the fear of death; and, therefore, death is no such terrible enemy when
a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat from
him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it;
grief flieth to it; fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the
Emperor had slain himself,


PITY (WHICH IS THE TENDEREST OF AFFECTIONS)

provoked many to die out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and as
the truest sort of followers. A man would die, though he were neither
valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft
over and over again." We all must die, sooner or later. It is easier to
die than to live again our stormy and tempestuous lives. Few would
re-embark at the cradle, suffer the pains of childhood, the hurts which
the feelings of youth get, the pangs of love, the shock of loneliness
coming from the departure of those we cling to, the vicissitudes of
fortune, the stings of penury, the journeys into the lands of strangers,
the flight of summer friends, the alienation of children, and the
fevers and the wounds which human nature crosses on its way to the kind
haven of a good old age. Jesus stands near. When death comes, his voice
will sound, just at the brink: "It is I; be not afraid." "When I look at
the tombs of the great," said Joseph Addison, on


HIS VISIT TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY,

"every motion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the
beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief
of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see
the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving
for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see Kings lying by those
who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the
holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I
reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions,
factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the
tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I
consider that great judgment day when we shall all of us be
contemporaries, and make our appearance together."


THE AGED MAN

who has "walked with God" is always ready for the Master's call. His
loins are girded about and his lights burning. He "lies down with the
Kings of the earth," and that leveling process which is thus intimated
and begun in death he feels is the order of a higher plane of life to
come, when all the abuses and incongruities of human government will be
swept away, and the light of omniscient wisdom will shine on all alike.
There will he meet the little child who strayed from the fold into the
snows of death early in the married life, and there will he sit beside
that fond old heart who heard his first piteous wail in this cold world,
and nestled him to her bosom all warm with a mother's love.


IT IS THE ONE POSSIBLE CHANCE

of happiness, and only death stands in the way. Nature carries the soul
gently over the river, where those who have gone before stand waiting in
glad expectation. Shall we doubt either the goodness of God or the
perfection of nature? Shall we hesitate to weave the silk of death
around our bodies when we know that we may thence issue a being worthy
of a celestial sphere of action?


APOSTROPHE.

Venerable sir, thou hast borne the burdens of the world to the last
mile-post. Thy companions have fallen by the wayside, and even some of
them may have gone unbidden to their Judge. But thou, having in view the
dignity of the human mind and the will of God, hast labored while the
light was given thee, and hast journeyed while thy strength remained.
Thy destiny is now but opening to thy sight. Thou lookest through the
inner doors and seest that infinite cathedral which openeth beyond the
vestibule of death.

     "The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
     Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
     But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
     Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
     The wreck of matter and the crush of worlds."

THE FUTURE LIFE.

     Whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
     This longing after immortality?
     Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
     Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
     Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
     'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
     'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
     And intimates eternity to man.
     Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!--Addison.


"Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it
shall be opened unto you." So spake the Savior. "We know," says Paul,
"that all things work together for good to them that love God. In a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet
shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be
changed. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and
this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to
pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O
death, where is my sting? O grave, where is thy victory? For I am now
ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have
fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:
henceforth there is laid up for me


A CROWN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS,

which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not
to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." "These
things saith He that holdeth the Seven Stars in his right hand: Be thou
faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." These are a
few of the bright promises held out to us in the Book of Life. Are we
not blest? "The joys of heaven," says Bishop Norris, "are without
example, above experience, and beyond imagination, for which the whole
creation wants a comparison; we an apprehension; and even the Word of
God a revelation." "Heaven," says Shakspeare, "is the treasury of
everlasting joy." "By heaven we understand a state of happiness," says
Franklin, "infinite in degree, and endless in duration." With man's
finite mind man solaces himself with


PICTURES OF PARADISE

mortal in their scope. He is not to be blamed for this, for it is God's
will to let him grope in darkness a few short years. But man's
imagination in all earthly things conjures up that which is far beyond
the earthly reality, leaving him a prey to dissatisfaction. How good to
believe that our imagination finds in heaven a field where all our most
beautiful ideas, collated, joined and woven together into a whole, fail
to approach the true glories of the home in the far skies which our kind
Father, taking us in His arms, will open before us. "How should we
rejoice," says Sir Robert Hall, "in the prospect,


THE CERTAINTY, RATHER,

of spending a blissful eternity with those whom we loved on earth; of
seeing them emerge from the ruins of the tomb and the deeper ruins of
the fall, not only uninjured, but refined and perfected, 'with every
tear wiped from their eyes,' standing before the throne of God and the
Lamb, 'in white robes and palms in their hands, crying with a loud
voice, Salvation to God that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb,
for ever and ever!'


WHAT DELIGHT WILL IT AFFORD

to renew the sweet counsel we have taken together, to recount the toils
of combat and the labor of the way, and to approach, not the house, but
the throne of God in company, in order to join in the symphonies of
heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amid the splendor and fruition of
the beatific vision!" Dr. Dick supposes that the soul may find endless
employment in beholding "those magnificent displays which will be
exhibited of the extent, the magnitude, the motions, the mechanism, the
scenery, the inhabitants, and the general constitution of other systems,
and the general arrangement and order of the universal system
comprehended under the government of the Almighty."


THIS IS ENTIRELY IN REASON.

So far as we are able to judge, there is absolutely no limit to the
universe of stars. We are as sure of the law of gravity as we are of the
existence of heaven. We build larger telescopes each year only to behold
additional millions of stars, each star, possibly, the larger on account
of our being able to see it at all. We absolutely know that one star is
larger than our sun by 324 times. The moon is about nine times around
the earth away from us. The sun is larger than the track of the moon
around the earth by 167,000 miles in every direction. If you had a ball
which would just fit in the track of the moon, and stuck it all full of
pins 167,000 miles long, you would have the size of the sun.


SIRIUS, THE STAR,

is 324 times as large as the sun, and so are many other stars. Now, the
most distant star in the largest telescope cannot be at the edge of the
universe. Why? It must be in the middle. It must be balanced by exactly
as much attraction on one side as another. There must be, above, below,
beyond that star, the same stupendous array of worlds, and each
relatively outer star, aye, even the star on the farther side of that
outer star, must in its turn, be held in the same magnificent and awful
suspension. So forever. We actually have Infinity forced on our reason.
Eternity is the correlative and co-existent necessity of infinity.
Infinity, Eternity, Immortality, become the solemn Trinity confronting
the physical as well as the spiritual world! God has even ordained that,
when you move your hand, you affect the farthest of His worlds. Can you
not grasp the idea that, in reason, the universe is boundless? Why,
then, in reason, shall it not be our infinite pleasure to study God's
plans forever? I know of no greater pleasure which I could conceive.
Those who ask for evidences,


AS THEY ASK FOR BREAD AND CHEESE,

expecting these great truths to be clear to their clotted minds, cannot
even be brought to believe a house-fly has 25,000 eyes, constructed each
on the plan of our own? They will hardly believe an unseen force flows
through the magnetic needle, turning it to the north. If they had
refused, with the same logic, to believe that A was A when they had to
so believe in order to learn at all, they would now be groping in that
stupid illiteracy, which, by a parity of reasoning, they so richly
deserve.


SHALL GOD WEIGH OUT ARCTURUS FOR US,

to exhibit His power or its magnitude? Shall He speak to us, and not
only kill us with his softer syllables, but send our nicely-balanced
earth whirling in toward the sun, and all because some fool hath said in
his heart there is no God? No. Our reason and our Oldest Record both
point to Eternity as our proper life, the ripening of our soul, our
comprehension of the infinite, and our better worthiness to praise God's
holy name.


CONCLUSION.

No author of a work calculated to elevate the mind and ennoble the
ambitions of mankind could aspire to a higher climax; no writer of a
series of admonitions, in escaping "a lame and impotent conclusion,"
could rest more calmly than he who, having built his tower upon the
solid duties of to-day, peers out with the great lenses of Religion,
into the hopes of the future--

     "Past flaming bounds of place and time,
     The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
     Where angels tremble while they gaze."

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