noble, useful life, and that is success, and is as much within the reach of the humblest toiler as it is of the king on his throne.

Neither high office nor great wealth create virtue (though, alas, they often destroy it), and when we come to the end of life's narrow lane, virtue constitutes the only monument which will not crumble with our departure. We should early in life select some honest occupation, one that will help develop the nobler faculties of our being,-any occupation that is virtuous is honorable, however humble it may be. On the other hand, a business, whatever of eminence it may bring, or whatever remuneration it may offer, if it can be carried on only at the expense of one's better nature, can never be other than infamous.

Occasionally, early in life, a strong bias of mind toward some particular pursuit is manifested. It is nature's indication of a calling, and should be followed. Some notable instances are on record. The Rev. Isaac Watts, D. D., father of our modern hymnology, whose verses are sung in all lands where the gospel is known, and will be sung down to the end of time, and perchance in eternity, was born to poetry. His father, disgusted with the child's constant rhyming, is said to have tried, on a memorable occasion, to expel it from him by a whipping, an exercise that was, however, brought to an abrupt close by the little fellow wailing out amid his sobs, "Dear father, do some pity take, and I will no more verses make." The proceeding seems at this day strangely incongruous and out of place, inasmuch as the father himself was given to making "verses." And, when one time the father lay in prison for conscience' sake, the mother, too, had sat on the stones of the prison door with her child in her arms, consoling herself, as was her wont, with the words of Israel's immortal bard; and later she had stimulated the lad by offering in her boarding school a prize to the pupil who should compose the best "poem "; a prize the child once carried off by a somewhat saucy couplet when but seven years of age. So that by mere force of his pre-natal inheritance, as well as early example, Watts was born to be a poet. Likewise, Benjamin West, when a child, robbing the tail of

his cat of hairs to make his brushes for painting, and with remarkable skill sketching with a bit of charcoal the sleeping face of his baby sister, to the delight of his mother, showed what nature designed him for.

Smeaton, while yet in bibs, making his little windmill and tacking it to the roof of his father's barn, foreshadowed the eminent engineer he was afterward to become. Indeed, the law of heredity indicated almost wholly for each of these their future. We are the product of our ancestors, and when once parents begin to pay heed to the great laws of nature governing the reproduction of the human race, there will be better and greater men begotten than in any age of the past.

Vast multitudes are now born into the world with a curse on them in the shape of inherited tempers, passions, tendencies, that make life a constant, and, at times, a fearful struggle. If, then, you have been well-born and well-bred, thank God. To you success ought to be easy. It will be an everlasting and unutterable disgrace if you fail. But we are not all blessed with a right and noble pre-natal inheritance, and to many success must come, not as the beautiful unfolding of a natural genius for it, but as the result of sustained, patient, commonplace, everyday effort against unfavorable influences. The question, therefore, "What shall I do?" is a very important one, and demands much careful consideration. Multitudes inherit their occupation as they do their disposition, from their parents, and so the child follows the business of the father simply because the father was in it before him.

While this course has very many advantages, it is not always the best. You may perhaps be able to do better things. If so, why should you do only what your forefathers have done? Life is full of opportunities. They are fairly hurled upon us. Look about you. This is an age of specialties,-in agriculture, in mechanics, in science, in art, in literature. You cannot do all, but you can do one thing well. You can surely find, then, the place and work for which you are adapted, and, having found it, stick. Life is far too short to be spent in roaming.

Value of Decision.

PROF. J. N. HUMPHREY, A.B., State Normal School, Whitewater, Wis.

HE decision of a single individual has more than once changed the current of the world's history; and that,

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too, not for an hour, but for centuries. Men now speak of such periods as epochs in the annals of time; they call their actors men of destiny. But they who lived in those periods did not know that the clock of the heavens had struck for a change on earth, nor did the actors realize that the centuries were to turn on them. The revolutions on earth, like those of the heavens, swing on unknown centers, and it is only when the periods are complete that men recognize the extent of the change.

Who of those who lived in the days of that poor Genoese wool-carder, Domenico Colombo, ever dreamed that the world's history and progress depended so much on that man's son, and would be so greatly changed by his seemingly wild decision to explore an unknown sea? Nor did that homeless and penniless sailor, as he wandered from place to place, begging now of grandees and anon of kings for the means to test his notion of a water route to the East Indies, and determine the possible existence of other lands on the way thither, ever for one moment suspect the momentous issues that depended upon his keeping that decision. But how much of the world's wealth, how very much of the world's progress toward better things, hung on that decision!

Who can yet tell how much the world has been influenced, commercially, politically, socially, religiously, by the existence and example of the United States? How much has humanity

gained by our free institutions, and our system of national gov. ernment? What would be the condition of the world to-day without them? If Columbus had abandoned his decision, would another have soon made the journey? Or, would the world yet be in the depths of the superstitions and darkness of his time? Vain questions, perhaps, yet they give a faint glimpse of what was involved in that one man's decision, persistently maintained, to undertake an enterprise universally condemned and scoffed at by the men of his day.

Neither did that Wittenberg friar, Martin Luther, who in 1517 decided to publish his ninety-five propositions against the indulgence act just issued by Pope Leo X., have the faintest notion that he was then beginning the most memorable religious revolution of a thousand years. Nor did John Adams, two hundred and fifty years later, understand to what his decision to oppose the Stamp Act of 1765 would lead him and others. But nine years after that decision, it had brought him to write upon the eve of the assembling of the first Continental Congress, "The die is now cast; I have passed the Rubicon. Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish with my country, is my unalterable determination." And then, two years later, with his indorsement, was passed that immortal resolution that "these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." At the birth of this new nation of the West, the world entered upon a new political era, and a new civilization, with the people as ruler.

History, as men know it, is almost wholly a record of the doings of such men of decision. It is they who rule the world. Difficulties and dangers are to them but new incentives to action. Defeats do not discourage them, but rather give them new wisdom wherewith to circumvent and conquer opposing forces. While others are lamenting that circumstances prevent their success, these men make of circumstances a ladder with which to reach success. They climb and conquer with them or over them. How grandly they tower above difficulties and glory over them!

See yonder stuttering, shrugging youth attempting to address the populace of Athens in the bema. What a miserable failure he makes of it! How the crowd jeer at him! Surely for an orator. He is weak of body, He is subject to fits of despondency He is also excessively poor; for his

nature did not design him and insignificant in form. that verge on madness. guardians have defrauded him of his inheritance and turned him out on the world. Reason enough, surely, why he should fail. But the indomitable will within him asserts itself. The mocking crowd shall yet listen to him. See him now down at the seashore shouting at the roaring waves in order to accustom himself to hear unmoved the angry roar of his fellow citizens' voices in their oft turbulent assemblies. Hour after hour he gesticulates, with sword points at his shoulders to prevent that awkward habit of shrugging. Day after day he speaks with pebbles in his mouth to cure his stammering. His fellow men must hear him. And they did, for ere long, in his mighty philippics that "shook the arsenal and fulminated over Greece," he moved them as does the wind the forest's leaves, and they rapturously crowned him with the palm as the king of orators, -a title that twenty-two centuries have not yet taken from Demosthenes of Athens.

One hundred and sixty years ago, an English lad, scarce seven years of age, stood on a slight knoll looking out over one of England's many lovely landscapes. Daylesford Manor was spread out before him. The picturesque village with its thatched cottages, the old stone church with its coat of ivy, the magnificent park of ancient oaks and elms with its great herd of deer, the vast pastures with their fine herds of cattle, and the broad fields of waving grain, successively attracted his gaze. The lad's parents were dead. The grandfather with whom he lived was old and poor, and that grandfather had told him that there had been a time when all that magnificence had been the possession of his ancestors. No wonder the boy, as he looked. abroad over that great estate, was sad. No wonder that the hot tears came.