uld be to put
the mind through its paces. You look after your body, inside and out;
you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole
army of individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you
to bribe your stomach into decent behaviour. Why not devote a little
attention to the far more delicate machinery of the mind, especially as
you will require no extraneous aid? It is for this portion of the art
and craft of living that I have reserved the time from the moment of
quitting your door to the moment of arriving at your office.

"What? I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the platform, in
the train, and in the crowded street again?" Precisely. Nothing
simpler! No tools required! Not even a book. Nevertheless, the affair
is not easy.

When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no
matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before
your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round
the corner with another subject.

Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the
station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not
despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by any
chance fail if you persevere. It is idle to pretend that your mind is
incapable of concentration. Do you not remember that morning when you
received a disquieting letter which demanded a very carefully-worded
answer? How you kept your mind steadily on the subject of the answer,
without a second's intermission, until you reached your office;
whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the answer? That was a case
in which _you_ were roused by circumstances to such a degree of
vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant. You
would have no trifling. You insisted that its work should be done, and
its work was done.

By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no
secret--save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over your
mind (which is not the highest part of _you_) every hour of the day,
and in no matter what place. The exercise is a very convenient one.
If you got into your morning train with a pair of dumb-bells for your
muscles or an encyclopaedia in ten volumes for your learning, you would
probably excite remark. But as you walk in the street, or sit in the
corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or "strap-hang" on the
Subterranean, who is to know that