etly--first
take long gentle breaths and let them get shorter and shorter until
they are a good natural length, then forget your breathing altogether
and sit still as if you never had moved, you never were going to move,
and you never wanted to move.

This emphasizes the good natural quiet in your brain and so makes you
more sensitive to unquiet.

Gradually you will get the habit of catching yourself in states of
unnecessary excitement; at such times you cannot go off by yourself and
go through the exercises. You cannot even stop where you are and go
through them, but you can recall the impression made on your brain at
the time you did them and in that way rule out your excitement and gain
the real power that should be in its place.

So little by little the state of excitement becomes as unpleasant as a
cloud of dust on a windy day and the quiet is as pleasant as under the
trees on top of a hill in the best kind of a June day.

The trouble is so many of us live in a cloud of dust that we do not
suspect even the existence of the June day, but if we are fortunate
enough once or twice even to get to sneezing from the dust, and so to
recognize its unpleasantness, then we want to look carefully to see if
there is not a way out of it.

It is then that we can get the beginning of the real quiet which is the
normal atmosphere of every human being.

But we must persist for a long time before we can feel established in
the quiet itself. What is worth having is worth working for--and the
more it is worth having, the harder work is required to get it.

Nerves form habits, and our nerves not only get the habit of living in
the dust, but the nerves of all about us have the same habit. So that
when at first we begin to get into clear air, we may almost dislike it,
and rush back into the dust again, because we and our friends are
accustomed to it.

All that bad habit has to be fought, and conquered, and there are many
difficulties in the way of persistence, but the reward is worth it all,
as I hope to show in later articles.

I remember once walking in a crowded street where the people were
hurrying and rushing, where every one's face was drawn and knotted, and
nobody seemed to be having a good time. Suddenly and unexpectedly I saw
a man coming toward me with a face so quiet that it showed out like a
little bit of calm in a tornado. He looked like a common, every-day man
of the world, so far as his dress and general bearing