e shade on the bottom branches, and we do not even
get invited. We often become discouraged as we look at the
top-branchers, and we say, "O, if I only had his chance! If I were only
up there I might amount to something. But I am too low down."

We can grow. Everybody can grow.

And afterwhile we are all in the barrel of life, shaken and bumped
about. There the real people do not often ask us, "On what branch of
that tree did you grow?" But they often inquire, "Are you big enough to
fill this place?"

The Fatal Rattle!

Now life is mainly routine. You and I and everybody must go on doing
pretty much the same things over and over. Every day we appear to have
about the same round of duties.

But if we let life become routine, we are shaking down. The very
routine of life must every day flash a new attractiveness. We must be
learning new things and discovering new joys in our daily routine or we
become unhappy. If we go on doing just the same things in the same way
day after day, thinking the same thoughts, our eyes glued to
precedents--just turning round and round in our places and not growing
any, pretty soon we become mere machines. We wear smaller. The joy and
juice go out of our lives. We shrivel and rattle.

The success, joy and glory of life are in learning, growing, going
forward and upward. That is the only way to hold our place.

The farmer must be learning new things about farming to hold his place
this progressive age as a farmer. The merchant must be growing into a
greater, wiser merchant to hold his place among his competitors. The
minister must be getting larger visions of the ministry as he goes back
into the same old pulpit to keep on filling it. The teacher must be
seeing new possibilities in the same old schoolroom. The mother must be
getting a larger horizon in her homemaking.

We only live as we grow and learn. When anybody stays in the same place
year after year and fills it, he does not rattle.

Unless the place is a grave!

I shiver as I see the pages of school advertisements in the journals
labeled "Finishing Schools," and "A Place to Finish Your Child." I know
the schools generally mean all right, but I fear the students will get
the idea they are being finished, which finishes them. We never finish
while we live. A school finishing is a commencement, not an end-ment.

I am sorry for the one who says, "I know all there is to know about
that. You can't tell me anything about tha