the powers of manhood. We
can't cheat nature out of her aim; if she has set all the currents of
your life toward medicine or law, you will only be a botch at anything
else. Will-power and application cannot make a farmer of a born painter
any more than a lumbering draught horse can be changed into a race
horse. When the powers are not used along the line of their strength
they become demoralized, weakened, deteriorated. Self-respect,
enthusiasm and courage ooze out; we become half-hearted and success is
impossible.

Scott was called the great blockhead while in Edinburgh College. Grant's
mother called the future General and President, "Useless Grant," because
he was so unhandy and dull.

Erskine had at length found his place as a lawyer; he carried everything
before him at the bar. Had he remained in the navy he would probably
never have been heard from. When elected to Parliament, his lofty spirit
was chilled by the cold sarcasm and contemptuous indifference of Pitt,
whom he was expected by his friends to annihilate. But he was again out
of his place; he was shorn of his magic power and his eloquent tongue
faltered from a consciousness of being out of his place.

Gould failed as a storekeeper, tanner and surveyor and civil engineer,
before he got into a railroad office where he "struck his gait."

When extracts from James Russell Lowell's poem at Harvard were shown his
father at Rome, instead of being pleased the latter said, "James
promised me when I left home, that he would give up poetry and stick to
books. I had hoped that he had become less flighty." The world is full
of people at war with their positions.

Man only grows when he is developing along the lines of his own
individuality, and not when he is trying to be somebody else. All
attempts to imitate another man, when there is no one like you in all
creation, as the pattern was broken when you were born, is not only to
ruin your own pattern, but to make only an echo of the one imitated.
There is no strength off the lines of our own individuality.

Anywhere else we are dwarfs, weaklings, echoes, and the echo even of a
great man is a sorry contrast to even the smallest human being who is
himself.

CHAPTER V.

WHAT SHALL I DO?

No man ever made an ill-figure who understood his own talents,
nor a good one who mistook them.
--SWIFT.

Blessed is he who has found his work,--let him ask no other
blessing.
--CARLYLE.