o be overcome to enable mental exertion in study, we may well marvel
at the giants of scholarship those days of hardship produced. And when
we add to educational limitations, physical disabilities, blindness,
deformity, ill-health, hunger and cold, we may feel shame as we
contemplate the fulness of modern opportunity and the helps and
incentives to study and self-development which are so lavishly provided
for our use and inspiration, and of which we make so little use.

Self-improvement implies one essential feeling: the desire for
improvement. If the desire exists, then improvement is usually
accomplished only by the conquest of self--the material self, which
seeks pleasure and amusement. The novel, the game of cards, the
billiard cue, idle whittling and story-telling will have to be
eschewed, and every available moment of leisure turned to account. For
all who seek self-improvement "there is a lion in the way," the lion of
self-indulgence, and it is only by the conquest of this enemy that
progress is assured.

Show me how a youth spends his evenings, his odd bits of time, and I
will forecast his future. Does he look upon this leisure as precious,
rich in possibilities, as containing golden material for his future
life structure? Or does he look upon it as an opportunity for
self-indulgence, for a light, flippant good time?

The way he spends his leisure will give the keynote of his life, will
tell whether he is dead in earnest, or whether he looks upon it as a
huge joke.

He may not be conscious of the terrible effects, the gradual
deterioration of character which comes from a frivolous wasting of his
evenings and half-holidays, but the character is being undermined just
the same.

Young men are often surprised to find themselves dropping behind their
competitors, but if they will examine themselves, they will find that
they have stopped growing, because they have ceased their effort to
keep abreast of the times, to be widely read, to enrich life with
self-culture.

It is the right use of spare moments in reading and study which qualify
men for leadership. And in many historic cases the "spare" moments
utilized for study were not spare in the sense of being the spare time
of leisure. They were rather _spared_ moments, moments spared from
sleep, from meal times, from recreation.

Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the world than
Elihu Burritt, apprenticed at sixteen to a blacksmith,