ing
near a town clock, and always amusing himself by counting the hour of
the day whenever the clock struck, continued to strike and count the
hour correctly without its aid, when at one time it happened to be
injured by an accident.

Dr. Johnson had acquired the habit of touching every post he passed in
the street; and, if he missed one, he was uneasy, irritable, and
nervous till he went back and touched the neglected post.

"Even thought is but a habit."

Heredity is a man's habit transmitted to his offspring.

A special study of hereditary drunkenness has been made by Professor
Pellman of Bonn University, Germany. He thus traced the careers of
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in all parts of the
present German Empire, until he was able to present tabulated
biographies of the hundreds descended from some original drunkard.
Notable among the persons described by Professor Pellman is Frau Ada
Jurke, who was born in 1740, and was a drunkard, a thief, and a tramp
for the last forty years of her life, which ended in 1800. Her
descendants numbered 834, of whom 709 were traced in local records from
youth to death. One hundred and six of the 709 were born out of
wedlock. There were 144 beggars, and 62 more who lived from charity.
Of the women, 181 led disreputable lives. There were in the family 76
convicts, 7 of whom were sentenced for murder. In a period of some
seventy-five years, this one family rolled up a bill of costs in
almshouses, prisons, and correctional institutions amounting to at
least 5,000,000 marks, or about $1,250,000.

Isaac Watts had a habit of rhyming. His father grew weary of it, and
set out to punish him, which made the boy cry out:--

"Pray, father, on me mercy take,
And I will no more verses make."

A minister had a bad habit of exaggeration, which seriously impaired
his usefulness. His brethren came to expostulate. With extreme
humiliation over this fault as they set it forth, he said, "Brethren, I
have long mourned over this fault, and I have shed _barrels of tears_
because of it." They gave him up as incorrigible.

Men carelessly or playfully get into habits of speech or act which
become so natural that they speak or act as they do not intend, to
their discomfiture. Professor Phelps told of some Andover students,
who, for sport, interchanged the initial consonants of adjacent words.
"But," said he, "retribution overtook them. On a certain morning, when
o