e results of the new venture were more
satisfactory than ever. The courageous action of both publisher and
author had been amply vindicated by results.

II

FORMING CHARACTER

The best time to learn the courage that proves so effective in the
struggle of life is in youth. More than fifty years ago two boys in
Scotland were hunting rabbits. Tiring of the comparatively easy hunting
on the ground, they looked longingly at a cliff of hard clay several
hundred feet high, in whose precipitous side were many rabbit burrows.
They managed to climb the cliff. At length they were making their way
along an almost perpendicular parapet, cutting their way with their
knives. Then one of the boys fell, with a scream, to the bottom of the
cliff. There was a moment of terror. This was succeeded by a grim
determination to go forward, the only way of escape. Driving his knife
deep in the clay, he rested on this for a moment. That moment, it has
always since seemed to him, marked the first momentous period in his
life, the time when his personality first emerged into consciousness. He
says: "I whispered to myself one word, 'Courage!' Then I went on with my
work." At length he reached the ground.

The lesson learned at such fearful cost told emphatically on the boy's
character. From that day he showed that there was in him the making of a
man who would not be balked by unfavorable circumstances. He did not
understand how or why, but he felt that new will-power had come to him
with the appeal to himself to take courage in the face of death.

A few years later he went to Brazil. A Spaniard told him that moral
deterioration within six months was all but certain to come to every
young man who began life there. But he was determined not to give way to
bad habits. When he reached Santos, his companions urged him to give
himself up to all kinds of vice; they told him that it was either this
or death, or perhaps something worse than death. They emphasized their
words by pointing to a young man who had determined to keep straight,
and had been left to himself until he was demented. But the boy who had
learned courage on the precipice made up his mind that he must live as
God wished him to live, and he turned a deaf ear to all entreaties.

Another book of biography tells of a boy who delighted in playing cards
with his father and mother. But when he united with the Church and
became President of the Christian Endeavor Society he began to wonde