ts with rotten stone, or contractors to construct
buildings with imperfect materials, we are forcing our Michael Angelos
to carve in snow."

Ruskin says that the tendency of the age is to expend its genius in
perishable art, _as if it were a triumph to burn its thoughts away in
bonfires_. Is the work you compel others to do useful to yourself and
to society? If you employ a seamstress to make four or five or six
beautiful flounces for your ball dress, flounces which will only clothe
yourself, and which you will wear at only one ball, you are employing
your money selfishly. Do not confuse covetousness with benevolence,
nor cheat yourself into thinking that all the finery you can wear is so
much put into the hungry mouths of those beneath you. It is what those
who stand shivering on the street, forming a line to see you step out
of your carriage, know it to be. These fine dresses do not mean that
so much has been put into their mouths, but _that so much has been
taken out of their mouths_.

Select a clean, useful, honorable occupation. If there is any doubt on
this point, abandon it at once, for _familiarity with a bad business
will make it seem good_. Choose a business that has expansiveness in
it. Some kinds of business not even a J. Pierpont Morgan could make
respectable. Choose an occupation which will develop you; which will
elevate you; which will give you a chance for self-improvement and
promotion. You may not make quite so much money, but you will be more
of a man, and _manhood is above all riches, overtops all titles_, and
_character is greater than any career_. If possible avoid occupations
which compel you to work in a cramped position, or where you must work
at night and on Sundays. Don't try to justify yourself on the ground
that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself,
take the responsibility. Aside from the right and wrong of the thing,
it is injurious to the health to work seven days in the week, to work
at night when Nature intended you to sleep, or to sleep in the daytime
when she intended you to work.

Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his
aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow
occupation just because there was money in it.

"Study yourself," says Longfellow, "and most of all, note well wherein
kind nature meant you to excel."

Dr. Matthews says that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life
s