rfully accept a position as
bass or tenor singer in a choir."

At length there appeared this addition to the notice:--

"P. S. Will accept an offer to saw and split wood at less than the
usual rates." This secured a situation at once, and the advertisement
was seen no more.

Your talent is your _call_. Your legitimate destiny speaks in your
character. If you have found your place, your occupation has the
consent of every faculty of your being.

If possible, choose that occupation which focuses the largest amount of
your experience and tastes. You will then not only have a congenial
vocation, but also will utilize largely your skill and business
knowledge, which is your true capital.

_Follow your bent_. You cannot long fight successfully against your
aspirations. Parents, friends, or misfortune may stifle and suppress
the longings of the heart, by compelling you to perform unwelcome
tasks; but, like a volcano, the inner fire will burst the crusts which
confine it and will pour forth its pent-up genius in eloquence, in
song, in art, or in some favorite industry. Beware of "a talent which
you cannot hope to practice in perfection." Nature hates all botched
and half-finished work, and will pronounce her curse upon it.

Better be the Napoleon of bootblacks, or the Alexander of
chimney-sweeps, let us say with Matthew Arnold, than a shallow-brained
attorney who, like necessity, knows no law.

Half the world seems to have found uncongenial occupation, as though
the human race had been shaken up together and exchanged places in the
operation. A servant girl is trying to teach, and a natural teacher is
tending store. Good farmers are murdering the law, while Choates and
Websters are running down farms, each tortured by the consciousness of
unfulfilled destiny. Boys are pining in factories who should be
wrestling with Greek and Latin, and hundreds are chafing beneath
unnatural loads in college who should be on the farm or before the
mast. Artists are spreading "daubs" on canvas who should be
whitewashing board fences. Behind counters stand clerks who hate the
yard-stick and neglect their work to dream of other occupations. A
good shoemaker writes a few verses for the village paper, his friends
call him a poet, and the last, with which he is familiar, is abandoned
for the pen, which he uses awkwardly. Other shoemakers are cobbling in
Congress, while statesmen are pounding shoe-lasts. Laymen are
murdering s