ne of them was leading the devotions, he prayed the Lord to 'have
mercy on us, feak and weeble sinners.'" The habit had come to possess
him.

Many speakers have undesirable habits of utterance or gesture. Some
are continually applying the hand to some part of the face, the chin,
the whiskers; some give the nose a peck with thumb and forefinger;
others have the habit characterized as,--

"Washing the hands with invisible soap
In a bowl of invisible water."

"We are continually denying that we have habits which we have been
practising all our lives," says Beecher. "Here is a man who has lived
forty or fifty years; and a chance shot sentence or word lances him,
and reveals to him a trait which he has always possessed, but which,
until now, he had not the remotest idea that he possessed. For forty
or fifty years he has been fooling himself about a matter as plain as
the nose on his face."

Had the angels been consulted, whether to create man, with this
principle introduced, that, _if a man did a thing once, if would be
easier the second time, and at length would be done without effort_,
they would have said, "Create!"

Remember that habit is an arrangement, a principle of human nature,
which we must use to increase the efficiency and ease of our work in
life.

"Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence
a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the course of
nature in the child, or in the adult, as the most atrocious crimes are
to any of us."

Out of hundreds of replies from successful men as to the probable cause
of failure, "bad habits" was in almost every one.

How easy it is to be nobody; it is the simplest thing in the world to
drift down the stream, into bad company, into the saloon; just a little
beer, just a little gambling, just a little bad company, just a little
killing of time, and the work is done.

New Orleans is from five to fifteen feet below high water in the
Mississippi River. The only protection to the city from the river is
the levee. In May, 1883, a small break was observed in the levee, and
the water was running through. A few bags of sand or loads of dirt
would have stopped the water at first; but it was neglected for a few
hours, and the current became so strong that all efforts to stop it
were fruitless. A reward of five hundred thousand dollars was offered
to any man who would stop it; but it was too late--it could not be done.