h, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may
almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by
living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the
young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have
been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must
believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that
experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived
some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first
syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have
told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.
Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does
not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I
think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing
about.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with
vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite
of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some
circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries
merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
thee what thou hast left undone?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as,