cause his death. He would take a bottle of
cold tea to the office, that by its use he might aid his will to work
when nature said, "Stop!" For a long time his only sleep--and it was
sadly broken sleep--was on a lounge in the office, from two to six or
seven in the morning. Then he would set to work again. "By his unceasing
mental activity he wore himself out," the comment was made on his
career. "For the last twenty years of his life his nerves and stomach
were in chronic rebellion. Heavy clouds of dyspepsia, sciatica,
sleeplessness, exhaustion, came often and staid long."

The intemperate worker knew what he was doing. Once he wrote to a
friend, "You can't burn the candle at both ends, and make anything by it
in the long run; and it is the long pull that you are to rely on, and
whereby you are to gain glory." Persistent headaches, "nature's sharp
signal that the engine had been overdriven," added to the warning. At
last, when he was thirty-seven, he wrote: "My will has carried me for
years beyond my mental and physical power; that has been the offending
rock. And now, beyond that desirable in keeping my temper, and forcing
me up to proper exercise and cheerfulness through light occupation, I
mean to call upon it not at all, if I can help it, and to do only what
comes freely and spontaneously from the overflow of power and life. This
will make me a light reader, a small worker."

Well for him if he had kept his resolution. Still he drove himself to
work beyond what his body and brain could stand. Then came paralysis.
"Nothing is the matter with me but thirty-five years of hard work," he
said. At the time of his death he was not fifty-one years old.

His friends could not but admire him for strength of will, for
achievement in the face of ill health, for triumph, by sheer will-power,
over every obstacle except the will that drove him to his death. He
accomplished much, but how much more he might have accomplished if he
had been temperate in his use of the wonderful powers of mind and body
which God had given him!

In connection with this glimpse of the life of one who illustrates the
disaster brought by the will to be intemperate, it is helpful to think
of the life of another American man of letters whose will to be
temperate in his treatment of a body weak and frail prolonged life and
usefulness.

Francis Parkman, the historian, was never a well man after his trip
that resulted in the writing of _The Oregon Trail_.