and courage ooze out; we become halfhearted and success is impossible.

Scott was called the great blockhead while in Edinburgh College. Grant's mother called the future General and President, 'Useless Grant," because he was SO

unhandy and dull.

Erskine had at length found his place as a lawyer; he carried everything before him at the bar. Had he remained in the navy he would probably never have been heard from.

When elected to Parliament, his lofty spirit was chilled by the cold sarcasm and contemptuous indifference of Pitt, whom he was expected by his friends to annihilate. But he was again out of his place; he was shorn of his magic power and his eloquent tongue faltered from a consciousness of being out of his place.

Gould failed as a storekeeper, tänner and surveyor and civil engineer, before he got into a railroad office where he "struck his gait."

When extracts from James Russell Lowell's poem at Harvard were shown his father at Rome, instead of being pleased the latter said, "James promised me when I left home, that he would give up poetry and stick to books. I had hoped that he had become less flighty." The world is full of people at war with their positions.

Man only grows when he is developing along the lines of his own individuality,

and not when he is trying to be somebody else. All attempts to imitate another man, when there is no one like you in all creation, as the pattern was broken when you were born, is not only to ruin your own pattern, but to make only an echo of the one imitated. There is no strength off the lines of our own individuality.

Anywhere else we are dwarfs, weaklings, echoes, and the echo even of a great man is a sorry contrast to even the smallest human being who is himself.

CHAPTER V.

WHAT SHALL I DO?

No man ever made an ill-figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them. -SWIFT.

Blesssed is he who has found his work,-let him ask no other blessing.-CARLYLE.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.-SYDNEY SMITH.

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.-BEECHER.

I am glad to think

I am not bound to make the world go round;
But only to discover and to do,

-

With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints. - JEAN INGELOW. "Do that which is assigned you," says Emerson, "and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these."

"I felt that I was in the world to do something, and thought I must," said Whittier, thus giving the secret of his great power. It is the man who must enter law, Îiterature, medicine, the ministry, or any

other of the overstocked professions, who will succeed. His certain call—that is, his love for it, and his fidelity to it—are the imperious factors of his career. If a man enters a profession simply because his grandfather made a great name in it, or his mother wants him to, with no love or adaptability for it, it were far better for him to be a day laborer. In the humbler work, his intelligence may make him a leader; in the other career he might do as much harm as a boulder rolled from its place upon a railroad track, a menace to the next express.

Lowell said: "It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not, that has strewn history with so many broken purposes, and lives left in the rough."

"The age has no aversion to preaching as such," said Phillips Brooks, "it may not listen to your preaching." But though it may not listen to your preaching, it will wear your boots, or buy your flour, or see stars through your telescope. It has a use for every person, and it is his business to find out what that use is.

The following advertisement appeared several times in a paper without bringing a letter:

"Wanted.—Situation by a Practical Printer, who is competent to take charge of any department in a printing and publishing house. Would accept a professorship in any of the academies.

Has no objection to teach ornamental painting and penmanship, geometry, trigonometry, and many other sciences. Has had some experience as a lay preacher. Would have no objection to form a small class of young ladies and gentlemen to instruct them in the higher branches. To a dentist or chiropodist he would be invaluable; or he would cheerfully accept a position as bass or tenor singer in a choir."

At length there appeared this addition to the notice :

"P. S. Will accept an offer to saw and split wood at less than the usual rates."

This secured a situation at once, and the advertisement was seen no more.

Don't wait for a higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill it as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow-workmen. Study your business. devise new modes of operation, be able to give your employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not in simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a larger salary.

He that hath a trade," says Franklin, "hath an estate; and he that hath a calling hath a place of profit and honor. A ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees."