to put
duty before the pleasure of finding out what it is all about. In this
way he becomes overstocked with a lot of unrelated duties, for which
there is no home consumption, and which he endeavors to dump on the
foreign market. This makes him unpopular.

I am not one of those who insist that everybody should mind his own
business; that is too harsh a doctrine. One of the rights and privileges
of a good neighbor is to give neighborly advice. But there is a
corresponding right on the part of the advisee, and that is to take no
more of the advice than he thinks is good for him. There is one thing
that a man knows about his own business better than any outsider, and
that is how hard it is for him to do it. The adviser is always telling
him how to do it in the finest possible way, while he, poor fellow,
knows that the paramount issue is whether he can do it at all. It
requires some grace on the part of a person who is doing the best he can
under extremely difficult circumstances to accept cheerfully the
remarks of the intelligent critic.

Persons who write about the wild animals they have known are likely to
be contradicted by persons who have been acquainted with other wild
animals, or with the same wild animals under other circumstances. How
much more difficult is it to give an exhaustive and correct account of
that wonderfully complex creature, man.

One whose business requires him to meet large numbers of persons who are
all in the same predicament, is in danger of generalizing from a too
narrow experience. The teacher, the charity-worker, the preacher, the
physician, the man of business, each has his method of professional
classification. Each is tempted to forget that he is not in a position
from which he can survey human nature in its entirety. He only sees one
phase endlessly repeated. The dentist, for example, has special
advantages for character study, but he should remember that the least
heroic of his patients has moments when he is more blithe and debonair
than he has ever seen him.

It takes an unusually philosophical mind to make the necessary
allowances for its own limitations. If you were to earn your daily bread
at the Brooklyn Bridge, and your sole duty was to exhort your fellow men
to "step lively," you would doubtless soon come to divide mankind into
three classes, namely: those who step lively, those who do not step
lively, and those who step too lively. If Aristotle himself were to
cross the br