endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits. They must
have a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health. It
is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life and
beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in mere animal
existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding pulse
throughout his body; who feels life in every limb, as dogs do when
scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of ice.

Dispense with the doctor by being temperate; the lawyer by keeping out
of debt; the demagogue, by voting for honest men; and poverty, by being
industrious.

"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, to a Guinea slave
trader, who entered the room where his uncle was talking with Alexander
Pope, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world."
"I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man, as he
looked contemptuously upon their diminutive physical proportions, "but I
don't like your looks; I have often bought a much better man than either
of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas."

A man is never so happy as when he suffices to himself, and can walk
without crutches or a guide. Said Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as
much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should
require more."

"The body of an athlete and the soul of a sage," wrote Voltaire to
Helvetius; "these are what we require to be happy."

Although millions are out of employment in the United States, how
difficult it is to find a thorough, reliable, self-dependent,
industrious man or woman, young or old, for any position, whether as a
domestic servant, an office boy, a teacher, a brakeman, a conductor, an
engineer, a clerk, a bookkeeper, or whatever we may want. It is almost
impossible to find a really _competent_ person in any department, and
oftentimes we have to make many trials before we can get a position
fairly well filled.

It is a superficial age; very few prepare for their work. Of thousands
of young women trying to get a living at typewriting, many are so
ignorant, so deficient in the common rudiments even, that they spell
badly, use bad grammar, and know scarcely anything of punctuation. In
fact, they murder the English language. They can copy, "parrot like,"
and that is about all.

The same superficiality is found in nearly all kinds of busine