d its increase by at once giving careful
consideration to the causes, and dropping them. Keep your life quietly
to the form of its usual action, as far as you wisely can. If you have
gained even a little appreciation of equilibrium, you will not easily
mistake and overdo.

When you find yourself becoming bound to the dismal thought of your
test and its terrors, free yourself from it every time, by
concentrating upon the weight of your body, or the slowness of the
slowest breaths you can draw. Keep yourself truly free, and these
feelings of discouragement and all other mental distortions will
steadily lose power, until for you they are no more. If they last
longer than you think they should, persist in every endeavor, knowing
that the after-result, in increased capacity to help yourself and
others, will be in exact ratio to your power of persistency without
succumbing.

The only way to keep truly free, and therefore ready to profit by the
help Nature always has at hand, is to avoid thought of your form of
illness as far as possible. The man with indigestion gives the stomach
the first place in his mind; he is a mass of detailed and subdued
activity, revolving about a monstrous stomach,--his brain, heart,
lungs, and other organs, however orderly they may be, are of no
consideration, and are slowly made the degraded slaves of himself and
his stomach.

The man who does not sleep, worships sleep until all life seems
_sleep,_ and no life any importance without it. He fixes his mind on
not sleeping, rushes for his watch with feverish intensity if a nap
does come, to gloat over its brevity or duration, and then wonders that
each night brings him no more sleep.

There is nothing more contracting to mind and body than such
idol-worship. Neither blood nor nervous fluid can flow as it should.

Let us be sincere in our work, and having gained even one step toward a
true equilibrium, hold fast to it, never minding how severely we are
tempted.

We see the work of quiet and economy, the lack of strain and of false
purpose, in fine old Nature herself; let us constantly try to do our
part to make the picture as evident, as clear and distinct, in God's
greater creation,--Human Nature.

XVII

THE RATIONAL CARE OF SELF

A WOMAN who had had some weeks of especially difficult work for mind
and body, and who had finished it feeling fresh and well, when a friend
expressed surprise at her freedom from fatigue, said, with a s