om them afterward. They will be
dissipated, lost in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the
slough of indolence."

Cobbett said he owed his success to being "always ready" more than to
all his natural abilities combined.

"To this quality I owed my extraordinary promotion in the army," said
he. "If I had to mount guard at ten, I was ready at nine; never did
any man or anything wait one minute for me."

"How," asked a man of Sir Walter Raleigh, "do you accomplish so much,
and in so short a time?" "When I have anything to do, I go and do it,"
was the reply. The man who always acts promptly, even if he makes
occasional mistakes, will succeed when a procrastinator, even if he
have the better judgment, will fail.

When asked how he managed to accomplish so much work, and at the same
time attend to his social duties, a French statesman replied, "I do it
simply by never postponing till to-morrow what should be done to-day."
It was said of an unsuccessful public man that he used to reverse this
process, his favorite maxim being "never to do to-day what might be
postponed till to-morrow." How many men have dawdled away their
success and allowed companions and relatives to steal it away five
minutes at a time!

"To-morrow, didst thou say?" asked Cotton. "Go to--I will not hear of
it. To-morrow! 'tis a sharper who stakes his penury against thy
plenty--who takes thy ready cash and pays thee naught but wishes,
hopes, and promises, the currency of idiots. _To-morrow_! it is a
period nowhere to be found in all the hoary registers of time, unless
perchance in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disclaims the word, nor holds
society with those that own it. 'Tis fancy's child, and folly is its
father; wrought of such stuffs as dreams are; and baseless as the
fantastic visions of the evening." Oh, how many a wreck on the road to
success could say: "I have spent all my life in pursuit of to-morrow,
being assured that to-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store
for me."

"But his resolutions remained unshaken," Charles Reade continues in his
story of Noah Skinner, the defaulting clerk, who had been overcome by a
sleepy languor after deciding to make restitution; "by and by, waking
up from a sort of heavy doze, he took, as it were, a last look at the
receipts, and murmured, 'My head, how heavy it feels!' But presently
he roused himself, full of his penitent resolutions, and murmured
again, brokenly, 'I'll take it