eel
in their hearts what the poet so severely satirized when he said:

"Folks are so awkward, things so impolite,
They're elegantly pained from morning until night."

Through that gate of indolence how many men and women have marched,
useless on earth, to a destroyed eternity! Spinola said to Sir Horace
Vere: "Of what did your brother die?" "Of having nothing to do," was
the answer. "Ah!" said Spinola, "that's enough to kill any general of
us." Oh! can it be possible in this world, where there is so much
suffering to be alleviated, so much darkness to be enlightened, and so
many burdens to be carried, that there is any person who cannot find
anything to do?

Madame de Stael did a world of work in her time; and one day, while
she was seated amid instruments of music, all of which she had
mastered, and amid manuscript books which she had written, some one
said to her: "How do you find time to attend to all these things?"
"Oh," she replied, "these are not the things I am proud of. My chief
boast is in the fact that I have seventeen trades, by any one of which
I could make a livelihood if necessary." And if in secular spheres
there is so much to be done, in spiritual work how vast the field! How
many dying all around about us without one word of comfort! We want
more Abigails, more Hannahs, more Rebeccas, more Marys, more Deborahs
consecrated--body, mind, soul--to the Lord who bought them.

VI. Once more I learn from my subject the value of gleaning.

Ruth going into that harvest-field might have said: "There is a straw,
and there is a straw, but what is a straw? I can't get any barley for
myself or my mother-in-law out of these separate straws." Not so said
beautiful Ruth. She gathered two straws, and she put them together,
and more straws, until she got enough to make a sheaf. Putting that
down, she went and gathered more straws, until she had another sheaf,
and another, and another, and another, and then she brought them all
together, and she threshed them out, and she had an ephah of barley,
nigh a bushel. Oh, that we might all be gleaners!

Elihu Burritt learned many things while toiling in a blacksmith's
shop. Abercrombie, the world-renowned philosopher, was a philosopher
in Scotland, and he got his philosophy, or the chief part of it,
while, as a physician, he was waiting for the door of the sick-room to
open. Yet how many there are in this day who say they are so busy they
have no time for mental or s