ll find whole regiments of young fellows who
drag along, scamping their work and slighting those opportunities which
are right at hand. They are saving up their energies to do something
splendidly effective week after next. But week after next never comes
to such men. It is always to-day, and to-day in their eyes seems ever
small.

If those men were already on the quarterdeck as captains of great ocean
liners; if they were already bank presidents sitting in handsome
offices of their own; if they were already journalists of the first
rank writing editorials for metropolitan dailies, they would do what
their hands and their minds found to do with their might. But in this
day of small things they feel that fidelity and skill would be thrown
away. They have mixed up the words of the promise--they think it
reads, "You have been unfaithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over everything." When a man is going up-stairs he must put his
foot first on the step which is at the bottom and then take the other
steps in order. The same rule holds in the great business of living a
man's life and doing a man's work in the world.

The young man who was to become king showed courage and high resolve in
the face of danger. There came a day when the Israelites and the
Philistines were lined up in battle array on the opposite sides of a
valley. The Philistines had their champion fighter in the person of a
huge fellow named Goliath. His armour weighed one hundred and fifty
pounds. His spear was like a weaver's beam. He stood roaring out his
defiance against the armies of Israel, "Choose you a man! Let him come
down to me and fight. If he kills me, we will be your servants. If I
prevail against him then ye shall be our servants."

After the manner of the Iliad he stood ready to let the issue of the
campaign turn upon the result of a solitary combat between himself and
any Israelite they might put up against him. Saul, the king of Israel,
had offered to enrich with great wealth the man who would fight that
huge Philistine. He had promised to give him the hand of his own
daughter, the fair young princess, in marriage, and to make his
father's house forever free in Israel. But no Israelite had dared to
fight the terrible Goliath.

Then David appeared upon the scene. He had been sent down by his
father with ten loaves of fresh bread, with ten cheeses and a supply of
parched corn for his brothers who were at the fro