g that as sole
inducement, and gave one call, when the horse went out to meet her, and
under a hand, not half as strong as ours, gripping the mane, the refractory
beast was led to the manger.

Standing with our feet in the damp grass and our new clothes wet to a sop,
we learned then and there how much depends on the way you do a thing. The
proposition we made to the bay mare was far better than that offered by our
companion; but ours failed and hers succeeded. Not the first nor the last
time that a wash-basin has beaten a pail. So some of us go all through life
clumsily coaxing and awkwardly pursuing things which we want to halter and
control. We strain every nerve, only to find ourselves befooled and left
far behind, while some Christian man or woman comes into the field, and by
easy art captures that which evaded us.

We heard a good sermon that day, but it was no more impressive than the
besweated lesson of the pasture-field, which taught us that no more depends
upon the thing you do than upon the way you do it. The difference between
the clean swath of that harvester in front of our house and the ragged work
of his neighbor is in the way he swings the scythe, and not in the scythe
itself. There are ten men with one talent apiece who do more good than the
one man with ten talents. A basin properly lifted may accomplish more than
a pail unskillfully swung. A minister for an hour in his sermon attempts to
chase down those brutish in their habits, attempting to fetch them under
the harness of Christian restraint, and perhaps miserably fails, when some
gentle hand of sisterly or motherly affection laid upon the wayward one
brings him safely in.

There is a knack in doing things. If all those who plough in State and
Church had known how to hold the handles, and turn a straight furrow, and
stop the team at the end of the tiled, the world would long ago have been
ploughed into an Eden. What many people want is gumption--a word as yet
undefined; but if you do not know what it means, it is very certain you do
not possess the quality it describes. We all need to study Christian tact.
The boys in the Baskinridge school-house laughed at William L. Dayton's
impediment of speech, but that did not hinder him from afterward making
court-room and senate-chamber thrill under the spell of his words.

In our early home there was a vicious cat that would invade the milk-pans,
and we, the boys, chased her with hoes and rakes, always hit