chief cashier in
the large store, but an eminent accountant.

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a
divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, any more than you can
see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle
of that young life so it will point to the star of its own destiny; and
though you may pull it around by artificial advice and unnatural
education, and compel it to point to the star which presides over
poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is until
you have wasted years of a precious life, yet, when once free, the
needle flies back to its own star.

"Rue it as he may, repent it as he often does," says Robert Waters,
"the man of genius is drawn by an irresistible impulse to the
occupation for which he was created. No matter by what difficulties
surrounded, no matter how unpromising the prospect, this occupation is
the only one which he will pursue with interest and pleasure. When his
efforts fail to procure means of subsistence, and he finds himself poor
and neglected, he may, like Burns, often look back with a sigh and
think how much better off he would be had he pursued some other
occupation, but he will stick to his favorite pursuit nevertheless."

Civilization will mark its highest tide when every man has chosen his
proper work. No man can be ideally successful until he has found his
place. Like a locomotive, he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere
else. "Like a boat on a river," says Emerson, "every boy runs against
obstructions on every side but one. On that side all obstruction is
taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an
infinite sea."

Only a Dickens can write the history of "Boy Slavery," of boys whose
aspirations and longings have been silenced forever by ignorant
parents; of boys persecuted as lazy, stupid, or fickle, simply because
they were out of their places; of square boys forced into round holes,
and oppressed because they did not fit; of boys compelled to pore over
dry theological books when the voice within continually cried "Law,"
"Medicine," "Art," "Science," or "Business"; of boys tortured because
they were not enthusiastic in employments which they loathed, and
against which every fiber of their being was uttering perpetual protest.

It is often a narrow selfishness in a father which leads him to wish
his son a reproduction of himself. "You are trying to make that