r
decisions? A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home
forever depends on the chances or the passions of the hour! A youth
thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity
of a moment! A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a
foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a foundation
of life or death! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than
now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly
thoughtless, his deathbed. Nothing should ever be left to be done
there."

The Duke of Wellington became so discouraged because he did not advance
in the army that he applied for a much inferior position in the customs
department, but was refused. Napoleon had applied for every vacant
position for seven years before he was recognized, but meanwhile he
studied with all his might, supplementing what was considered a
thorough military education by researches and reflections which in
later years enabled him easily to teach the art of war to veterans who
had never dreamed of his novel combinations.

Reserves which carry us through great emergencies are the result of
long working and long waiting. Collyer declares that reserves mean to
a man also achievement,--"the power to do the grandest thing possible
to your nature when you feel you must, or some precious thing will be
lost,--to do well always, but best in the crisis on which all things
turn; to stand the strain of a long fight, and still find you have
something left, and so to never know you are beaten, because you never
are beaten." Every defeat is a Waterloo to him who has no reserves.

He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in
preparation and self-culture. "Not for school, but for life, we
learn;" and our habits--of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness,
or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality--are the things
acquired most readily and longest retained.

"One who reads the chronicles of discoveries is struck with the
prominent part that accident has played in such annals. For some of
the most useful processes and machinery the world is indebted to
apparently chance occurrences. Inventors in search of one object have
failed in their quest, but have stumbled on something more valuable
than that for which they were looking. Saul is not the only man who
has gone in search of asses and found a kingdom. Astrologers sought to
read from the heavens the