ch of our trade." On what is called
the practical side of life, the first duty of a young man is to be
efficient in whatever honest thing he is doing to earn his bread; and
at the same time be preparing himself for whatever surprise or
opportunity the future may have in store for him. A few hours in the
week given seriously to the latter, will leave an ample margin of time
for recreation and amusement; and who knows what he may need, until the
need is there to test what he knows? To be great on sport, and a
"stick" at one's business; to be an authority on amusements, and an
ignoramus about almost everything else that is anything, is the
surrender of manhood, and that in a day which has no need comparable
with its need of capable men.

And such surrender has consequences that lie nearer than those which
make themselves manifest in old age. Your next step is into middle
life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it
is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put
little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he
will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous
insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human
ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but
waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of
what sort it is.

But when a man begins to sight the middle years, he learns to know
himself as never before or after. This is the stage where increase of
knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow
of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance,
often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be
saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab
reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his
possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is
about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he
knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain--a cipher, merely
giving value to the men who do represent the numerals. When the youth,
who used to talk about having the "ball at his feet," seems to have
become very much the ball itself, to be kicked hither and thither as
circumstances may determine, what then? Will he show that kicked he
may be, but ball he is not? That circumstances may use him, but they
shall not make him? The answer to