plans. Life is in the present but for the future. Shape the ideal out of the actual. Condition does not change only as the accomplishment of the purpose changes it. It is the small and passing word, and act, and thought, which are the threads of gold in the pattern of life, and in the perfect fabric. Each day has its proportion, or the development is neither harmonious nor stable. What we will do is prophesied in what we do. The victory for the ideal depends upon the blood which enters into the real. To-morrow is indissolubly connected with today. Living up to the fulness of to-day's possibilities is the only road to the king's palace. Dreams can be made realities; air-castles changed into fortresses; and life's ideals certain of attainment by a living resolution to make the most of the present moment. It is an easy task to make declaration concerning what we will do or what we would do after every "if." The indicative mood is better in the sentence of life. It is a weakness itself to continually say "If I were." It is monarch-like to say "I am," "I do." You may never have a million dollars, but one-millionth part of that vast sum carries with it the same tremendous possibility and responsibility. What a man does with the dollar

he will do with the million. What he does with one moment of time he will do with a year. What he does with one book he will do with a library. What he does with small opportunity he will do with the larger. What he does in ordinary life, he will do in the moment when he declared he would reveal startling courage and heroism. Our safety is only in having high purpose and clear vision and incessant toil toward their realization. Every man, necessarily, and by a law as rigid as the law of gravitation, goes toward his ideal and in proportion to his activity and energy. The golden steps in the stairway to every throne are made out of the pure metal of earnestness, and energy, and grit, and determination, and conquered failures. Highest elevations are reached by treading upon the dead past. Victory has often been won out of the very jaws of defeat. Mistakes should be only teachers in life's school to spur us on.

When Beecher was an under-graduate he went out to a neighborhood schoolhouse to conduct a prayer service. When he attempted to speak his thoughts took wings and deserted him, and his speaking was a failure. This aroused him, he determined to overcome his embarrassment, and won. The first ap

pearance of Disraeli as a speaker in the House of Commons was a dismal failure. Loud laughter greeted every sentence. But his closing word was a prophecy: "I have begun several times many things; and have succeeded in them at last. I shall sit down now, but the time will come when you shall hear me." And it soon appeared.

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'When you get into a tight place," says Harriet Beecher Stowe, " and everything goes against you, till it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

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A phrenologist, examining the head of the Duke of Wellington, said: "Your grace has not the organ of animal courage fully developed." 'You are right," replied the great man: "and, but for my sense of duty, I should have retreated in my first fight." The Duke of Wellington saw a soldier turn pale as he marched up to a battery. "That is a brave man," said he; "he knows his danger, and faces it." That is grit as I understand it.

After the defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his beaten army depended on the character of Massena, to whom the emperor dispatched a messenger, telling him to

keep his position for two hours longer at Aspen. This order, couched in the form of a request, required almost an impossibility. But Napoleon knew the indomitable tenacity of the man to whom he gave it. The messenger found Messena seated on a heap of rubbish, his eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by his unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, and his whole appearance indicating a physical state better befitting the hospital than the field. But that steadfast soul seemed altogether unaffected by bodily prostration. Half dead as he was with fatigue, he rose painfully and said: "Tell the Emperor that I will hold out for two hours." And he kept his word. "Never despair," says Burke, "but if you do, work on in despair."

You see John Knox preaching the coronation sermon of James VI., and arraigning Queen Mary and Lord Darnley in a public discourse at Edinburgh, and telling the French ambassador to go home and call his king a murderer; John Knox making all Christendom feel his moral power, and at his burial the Earl of Morton saying: "Here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man." Where did John Knox get much of his

schooling for such resounding and everlasting achievement? He got it while in chains pulling at the boat's oar in French captivity. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest in the scientific world, did not begin by lecturing in the university. He began by washing bottles in the experimentingroom of Humphrey Davy. "Hohenlinden," the immortal poem of Thomas Campbell, was first rejected by a newspaper editor, and in the notes to correspondents appeared the words: "To T. C.

The lines commencing, ' On Linden when the sun was low,' are not up to our standard. Poetry is not T. C.'s forte."

Frederick Douglass made a visit to his birthplace in Talbot County, Md., for the purpose of purchasing a beautiful villa, and in a talk to a colored school said: "I once knew a little colored boy whose mother and father died when he was but six years old. He was a slave, and no one to care for for him. He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel, and in cold weather would crawl into a meal-bag head foremost and leave his feet in the ashes to keep him Often he would roast an ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs,

warm.