its rocks. Meeting Mr. Whipple early in the morning, Mr. Webster by dinner-time had threaded all the avenues and crosspaths of the labyrinth, and gave an opinion so clear and comprehensive that Mr. Whipple was constrained to ask him what had been his system of mental culture. In reply Mr. Webster observed, that it is a law of our natures that the body or the mind that labors constantly must necessarily labor moderately. He instanced the race-horse, which, by occasional efforts in which all its power is exerted, followed by periods of entire rest, would in time add very largely to its speed; and the great walkers or runners of our race, who, from small beginnings, when fifteen miles a day fatigued them, would in the end walk off fifty miles at the rate of five or six miles an hour. He also mentioned the London porter, who, at first staggering under the load of one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds, would in time walk off with six or eight hundred pounds with apparent ease. The same law governs the mind. When employed at all, its powers should be exerted to the utmost. fatigue should be followed by its entire rest. Mr. Webster added that, whatever mental occupation employed him, he put forth all his power, and when his mental vision began to be obscure, he ceased entirely, and resorted to some amusement or light business as a relaxation.

Its

The last hint we would give to him who would increase his reserved power is, get plenty of sleep. The harder we work during the day, the more sleep do we require to repair the waste of nervous energy. Americans not only work too hard, but sleep too little. The rapid development of the country, its intense industrial activities, the fiery ambition of the people, our dry, electric atmosphere, and our sunny climate, all tend to make us preternaturally wakeful. American students, we fear, sit up too late and get up too early. A great many are killed by alarm-clocks. The best wakeners are sunlight and the twittering of birds. The anecdotes told of Brougham, Napoleon, and others, who are said to have slept but four or five hours out of the twenty four, but who, we sus

pect, took a good many cat-naps in the daytime, have done much harm. The time taken out of eight hours' daily sleep is

not time gained, but time worse than wasted. We may cheat ourselves, but we cannot cheat Nature. Because she lets us overdraw our accounts for many years, we fancy the accounts are not kept. But, depend upon it, she is a jealous creditor, who is sure in the end to exact with compound interest every loan she makes to us; and if we continue borrowing for work the hours that are due to sleep, though we may postpone a settlement for years, the final and inevitable result will be physical and mental bankruptcy.

CHAPTER XVII.

ECONOMY OF TIME.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. - FRANKLIN.

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;

Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,

And trifles, life. — YOUNG.

Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beyond your darkest reckonings.-W. E. GLADSTONE.

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.HORACE MANN.

NE of the most important lessons to be learned by every man who would get on in his calling is the art of economizing his time. A celebrated Italian was wont to call his time his estate; and it is true of this as of other estates of which the young come into possession, that it is rarely prized till it is nearly squandered; and then, when life is fast waning, they begin to think of spending the hours wisely, and even of husbanding the moments. Unfortunately, habits of indolence, listlessness, and procrastination, once firmly fixed, cannot be suddenly thrown off, and the man who has wasted the precious hours of life's seed-time finds that he cannot reap a harvest in life's autumn. It is a truism which cannot be too often repeated, that lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

In the long catalogue of stereotyped excuses for the neglect of duty, there is none which drops oftener from men's lips, or which is founded on more of self-delusion, than the want of

leisure. Persons are always cheating themselves with the idea that they would like to do this or that desirable thing, "if they only had time." Hundreds of young men burn with an intense desire to cultivate their minds; they realize how essential, in this age of intelligence, are mental training and knowledge to success; they see the superficial, half-instructed men everywhere distanced in the race of life; but, alas! every moment of their waking hours is taken up by the pressing calls of business, and they have no leisure for reading or study. Hundreds there are who feel the profoundest sympathy for the poor, and who would out-Howard Howard in “carrying broth and blankets to beggars," and in distributing the bread of life in the form of Bibles and tracts; but their own affairs usurp all their time and attention, and they can do nothing for their fellow-men.

Such are the pleas by which the lazy and the selfish excuse themselves from a thousand things which conscience dictates to be done. Now, the truth is, there is no condition in which the chance of doing any good is less than in that of leisure. Life, it has been truly said, is composed of an elastic material, and wherever a solid piece of business is removed, there the surrounding atmosphere of trifles rushes in as certainly as the air into a bottle when you pour out its contents. If you would exhaust the air from a given spot, you must enclose it in a vessel of texture as firm and as carefully secured as would be required to protect the most precious and delicate substance; and so an hour's leisure, if one would not have it frittered away on "trifles light as air," needs to be guarded by barriers. of resolution and precaution as strong as are needed for hours of study and business. Go hunt out the men in any community who have done the most for their own and the general good, and you will find they are who? Wealthy, leisurely

people, with extensive stomachs and highly polished shoes, who have oceans of time to themselves, and nothing to do but to eat, sleep, and vegetate? No; they are almost uniformly the overworked class, the toil-and-moil, almost-driven-to-death

men, who seem wellnigh swamped with cares, and are in a ceaseless paroxysm of activity from January to December. It is these men who find time to preside at philanthropic meetings, to serve on Tract or Missionary Society committees, to visit the poor, to attend noon prayer-meetings, and to attend to selfculture by reading not only the best old books, but the pick of the ever-multiplying new publications of the day; while a busy male trifler, who spends his time in laboriously doing nothing, or a lady who lies upon her sofa, and has no creature dependent upon her, will tell you that he or she has waited week after week for leisure to answer a note. Persons of the former class, however crowded with business, are always found capable of doing a little more, and you may rely upon them in their busiest seasons with ten times more assurance than upon the idle man.

ner.

It is common in every community to run with business to lawyers and doctors who are already fully employed. This is not wholly from a senseless veneration for a name; it is because there is an instinct that tells us that the man who does much is most likely to do more, and to do it in the best manThe reason is, that to do increases the power of doing; and it is far easier for one who is always exerting himself to exert himself a little more for an extra purpose, than for him who does nothing to "get up steam" preparatory to the same end. Give a busy man ten minutes to write a letter, and he will dash it off at once; give an idle man a day, and he will postpone it till to-morrow or next week. There is a momentum in the active man which of itself almost carries him to the mark, just as a very light stroke will keep a hoop agoing, when a smart one was required to set it in motion. While others are yawning and stretching themselves to overcome the vis inertiae, he has his eyes wide open, his faculties keyed up for action, and is thoroughly alive in every fibre. He walks through the world with his hands unmuffled and ready by his side, and so can sometimes do more by a single touch in passing than a vacant man is likely to do by strenuous effort.