and became a teacher, before he
drifted into his proper calling as a merchant, through the accident of
having lent money to a friend. The latter, with failure imminent,
insisted that his creditor should take the shop as the only means of
securing the money.

"Jonathan," said Mr. Chase, when his son told of having nearly fitted
himself for college, "thou shalt go down to the machine-shop on Monday
morning." It was many years before Jonathan escaped from the shop, to
work his way up to the position of a man of great influence as a United
States Senator from Rhode Island.

It has been well said that if God should commission two angels, one to
sweep a street crossing, and the other to rule an empire, they could
not be induced to exchange callings. Not less true is it that he who
feels that God has given him a particular work to do can be happy only
when earnestly engaged in its performance. Happy the youth who finds
the place which his dreams have pictured! If he does not fill that
place, he will not fill any to the satisfaction of himself or others.
Nature never lets a man rest until he has found his place. She haunts
him and drives him until all his faculties give their consent and he
falls into his proper niche. A parent might just as well decide that
the magnetic needle will point to Venus or Jupiter without trying it,
as to decide what profession his son shall adopt.

What a ridiculous exhibition a great truck-horse would make on the
race-track; yet this is no more incongruous than the popular idea that
law, medicine, and theology are the only desirable professions. How
ridiculous, too, for fifty-two per cent. of our American college
graduates to study law! How many young men become poor clergymen by
trying to imitate their fathers who were good ones; of poor doctors and
lawyers for the same reason! The country is full of men who are out of
place, "disappointed, soured, ruined, out of office, out of money, out
of credit, out of courage, out at elbows, out in the cold." The fact
is, nearly every college graduate who succeeds in the true sense of the
word, prepares himself in school, but makes himself after he is
graduated. The best thing his teachers have taught him is _how_ to
study. The moment he is beyond the college walls he ceases to use
books and helps which do not feed him, and seizes upon those that do.

[Illustration: Ulysses S. Grant]

We must not jump to the conclusion that because a man ha