honorable places in after years; but they let the days pass with their
opportunities. By and by they hear the school door shut. Then, all
through their years they move with halting step, with dwarfed life,
with powers undeveloped, unable to accept the higher places that might
have been theirs if they had been prepared for them, failing often in
duties and responsibilities--all because in youth they wasted their
school-days and did not seize the opportunities that then came to them
for preparation. Napoleon, when visiting his old school, said to the
pupils, "Boys, remember that every hour wasted at school means a chance
of misfortune in future life." Thousands of failures along the years
of manhood and womanhood attest the truth of this monition.

Friendship is another opportunity that offers great blessing. Before
every young person stand two kinds of friends, ever reaching out a
beckoning hand. The one class whisper of pleasures that lead to sin
and debasement. They offer the young man the wine-glass, the
gambling-table, the gratification of lust and passion. They offer the
young woman flattery, gay dress, the dance, pleasures that will tarnish
her womanly purity. We all know the end of such friendship.

But there is another class of friends who stand before young people,
wooing them to noble things. They may be plain, perhaps homely, almost
stern in their earnestness of purpose and in the seriousness with which
they talk of life. They call to toil, to diligence, to self-denial, to
heroic qualities of character, to purity, to usefulness, to "whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are
honorable, whatsoever things are lovely." It is impossible to
overstate the value of the blessings that true, wise, and worthy
friendship offers to the young. It seeks to incite and stimulate them
to their best in character and achievement. It would lift them up to
lofty attainment, to splendid victoriousness. The young people to whom
comes the offer of such friendship are most highly favored.

But how often do we see the blessing rejected for the solicitation of
mere idle pleasures that bring no true good, that entangle the life in
all manner of complications, that lead into the ways of temptation, and
that too often end in disaster and sorrow.

There is a time for the choosing of friends, and when that time is
passed and the choice has been made, the door is shut. Then it is too
late