them? How could they help them, as mothers want to help their children, if they saw in their boy the scoundrel, the criminal, or the brute, as others sometimes see him! She cannot see the faults in her children because she is looking through a mother's eyes, a mother's glasses. Her boy may be in the penitentiary, but she cannot see him as a criminal. She sees her boy, a good citizen, a good son.

Ah! wonderful things, these mother's eyes! Through them is seen the ideal man, the one that is there to come out, the man the Creator intended to be developed. We do not blame the mother for the extravagant things she sees in her boy and expects of him. We do not blame her for the dreams of power, of purity, of influence that she hopes will be his, and which are backed all through life by her prayers. These dreams and hopes and expectations never quite forsake her, even when she sees her beloved son behind prison bars, and has evidence that what she has expected and dreamed of concerning him will never quite be realized.

It is this great mother faith in her child, her belief in him, even after he has failed or fallen, the fact that she expects great and good things of him still that tends to strengthen and hold him a little nearer his ideal, to make him struggle a little harder to measure up to it, under discouragements, so as not to disappoint her. Oftentimes when everything else has failed to bring a youth to his senses, and when he has been very near the bottom of the toboggan, this thought of what his mother believed of him and expected of him, this mother vision of her boy, has been his salvation, the turning-point in the youth's career, the very magnet that has brought the prodigal back to his own.

If we always measured up to our mother's ideal of us, and always kept that as a model to work by, what a glorious success we might make of our lives!

"May I be as great as my mother thinks me." What a beautiful motto! Paste it in your pocketbook, hang it in your room, in your office. "I will try to be as great as my mother thinks me."

Don't Be "Half and Half”

To form the habit of half doing things is to form the

fatal habit of inferiority. When we get used to accepting our second best for our best, when we become familiar with poor work and with half-finished jobs, we lose our love of excellence, and after awhile we accept without protest the poor for the good, the inferior for the best. Only an ambition for superiority, for excellence, can keep us from sinking to the low level of inferiority.

It is comparatively easy to demoralize our ambition and to befuddle and cloud our ideals, and then our vision becomes less and less clean-cut, and we settle down to comparative satisfaction, with half-done work. We become so familiar with our inferiority that we finally accept it without protest, and this is fatal to all excellence. It is only by being enamored of excellence, of the best, that we will attract the best to us.

Every letter you write, without careful thought, without clearness and nicety of expression, every

feriority in which you indulge in your thought or your work, every bit of carelessness or indifference you show, will count mightily in your life-work, because all these things mar your ideal, and your ideal is everything.

The demoralizing effect of a sloppy way of doing things, of slovenly methods, of lack of system and order, is great. It tends to make us lose our power. We have no inclination to do things well after we have botched our jobs for awhile. We tend to deteriorate, to run down. Our ideals become dimmed, and we lose the inclination to do things right.

Everything which causes the ambition to sag is fatal to all excellence and superiority, and the trade-mark of superiority should be the aim of every aspiring soul. He who does not aspire will look down; it is the upward look, the upward climb in life that counts.

HOW

A Balanced Diet

few people get or enjoy, for any length of time, a balanced diet, a diet which amply nourishes but does not overnourish, a diet which does not leave a lot of excess food material for the body to get rid of! There are fifteen or more different kinds of tissues in the body to be fed, and a score of elements are needed to keep all of these tissues in a healthful and wholesome condition.

How important it is then that we should consider our diet, know what we are eating, of what our meal is composed, and why we should eat different things! Some people, it is true, go to extremes and become faddists on the subject, but thousands of others take no interest whatever in it. Many of us, just because of our ignorance of food values and the laws of nutrition, go through life less than half the men and women we might be; weaklings, inferior beings, when we have the natural endowment to be something infinitely higher and grander.

but

A refined and apparently intelligent woman, one who proved truly ignorant of the great food question, went to a physician in New York and said, "Please inform me where those calories you talk about so much in the papers can be bought, because I am sure my boy needs them."

"Lengthening of life," said Francis Bacon, "requireth observation of diets." A well-balanced diet adds infinitely to our wellbeing, to our mental and physical activity. There are multitudes of people doing mental work who are eating the same kind of food as others doing physical work. This, of course, is all wrong. The kind and amount of food required by different people depend a great deal on the degree of rapidity with which the cell life of any particular tissue or organ is broken down by its activity. The manual laborer will digest his food much more rapidly than the man who is leading a quiet, sedentary life.

No common diet could be prescribed for everybody. Our diet should be chosen according to our individual needs, as determined by our age, our temperament, and our vocation. It should be planned to enable us to express the maximum of our ability, our efficiency, in whatever line of endeavor we are engaged, whether it

He Called to Wind the Clock

FRANK A. VANDERLIP, the financier, was Lyman

J. Gage's private secretary before being appointed to an assistant secretaryship in the United States Treasury. During his first few years of service in the former capacity, when he was not acquainted with many people, he paid scant attention to callers he did not personally know. One day a cabinet member went in to see Mr. Gage, and, being completely ignored, found it necessary to enter the secretary's private room unannounced. He complained to President McKinley, the president spoke of the matter to Secretary Gage, and Mr. Vanderlip was reprimanded.

The private secretary thereupon turned over a new leaf and was excessively polite to everybody. Less than a week after the call of the cabinet member who brought about the change, there entered the office a distinguished-looking man with a flowing beard and an air of great importance. Vanderlip showed him the utmost consideration, furnished him with a chair, and then, seating himself opposite the caller, smiled engagingly, and said, "And now, what can I do for you, sir?"

"For me?" was the surprised rejoinder. "Oh, nothing. I'm one of the messengers, and I just came in to wind the clocks."

He Was Done-but Did Not Stop A LONG-WINDED member of the Massachusetts

Legislature was delivering an address in the Town Hall of a village near Boston. An old Scotchman, after listening for some time, arose and left the hall. One of his countrymen, who was waiting at the door with a hack to drive the speaker to the station, asked: "Is he done yet, Sandy?" "Ay," Sandy replied, "he's done lang ago, but he will na stop."

One of the great faults of Americans is that they talk too much and think too little. Many people fear that if they do not talk they will be thought foolish or illmannered, so they keep jabbering away whether they say anything or not.

Bret

Harte's Works

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MOTHER had been reproving her small boy for telling stories. She said he exaggerated things. Johnny looked out of the window and saw a dog that had been sheared all but its neck and head. "Mamma," he said, "see that lion."

His mother looked out of the window and saw only a dog. She reprimanded him and sent him upstairs to pray God to forgive him. Pretty soon Johnny came downstairs again. His mother said, "Johnny, did God forgive you?"

"Yes," said Johnny, "but He said He didn't blame me much, for the dog had fooled Him two or three times."

"TO what do you attribute your wonderful cure,”

asked a man of his friend who said he had had a very remarkable cure. "I don't exactly know yet," he said. "There are several patent medicine concerns I have not yet heard from."

A MAN who had quite a number of unmarried

daughters was telling a young man how he had made his will so as to induce his daughters to marry. He said he had willed a thousand dollars to Mary, who

HE precocious infant had just returned from his first day at school, registering intense ennui. The anxious family gathered around.

"Donald," asked his mother, "what did you learn today?"