ose that you are allowed a holiday.
You return to your home and find a command to appear at your place of
business. A delay in finding you has happened. You can reach your
employer just at the end of business hours. You say "I will not mind
this; there is not time enough." Alas! You have done yourself

A CRUEL WRONG.

You have given an entrance to a wedge that will rend you in pieces. On
the other hand, you do not stop to look twice at the dial. You go. Good!
You have strengthened your character. You can depend on yourself. You
admire yourself. "I received your directions at 5.30. I have obeyed
orders." Drill of this sort will soon hew your mind down to the solid
heart of oak. You will know what you mean when you say a thing. "I will
get up at 6 o'clock." When 6 o'clock arrives, and you are aroused, your
mind is not

A MESS OF PULP,

ready to take the impression of the first lazy wish that comes over you.
No, your brain says resolutely, "I will arise," and lo! a victory!--and
no small one either. In this way, true firmness is made. It is a growth.
Beware of the insects which beset the lordly tree, withering its leaves
and driving its sap into the earth.

"Let us put a cable under the ocean," says Cyrus Field. "Tarry a while,"
says Slow. "Let us put the cities within actual speaking distance!" say
Bell, and Gray and Edison. "Tarry a while," says Slow. "Let us print
thirty thousand newspapers in an hour, and give them out of the press
folded, and pasted, and cut!" say Potter, and Hoe, and Kahler. "Tarry a
while" says Slow. And yet, in spite of Slow and Sleepyhead, wonders have
accumulated upon wonders, until the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's
Travels are only the creations of a poor fancy, while the intimations
which the future affords us stagger the understanding and make us almost
idolatrous in our admiration of the quiet, keen-acting men who have
dared out into fairy-land and returned laden like the spies coming from
Canaan.

Our whole history is one of discipline. And what has it made of us? A
nation that has sung

THE DEATH-KNELL OF THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.

I think a good deal of these lines of James Russell Lowell:

This land o' ourn, I tell ye's gut to be
A better country than man ever see;
I feel my sperit swellin with a cry
That seems to say: "Break forth and prophesy."
O strange New World, that yet wast never young,
Whose youth from thee by gripin' want was wrung,