lities. The farmer respects his
savings bank book not unnaturally, for it declares with all the
solemnity of a sealed and stamped document that for a certain length of
time he rose at six o'clock each morning to oversee his labors, that he
patiently waited upon seasonable weather, that he understood buying and
selling. To the medical man, his fee serves as a medal to indicate that
he was brave enough to face small pox and other infectious diseases, and
his self-respect is fostered thereby.

The barrister's brief is marked with the price of his legal knowledge,
of his eloquence, or of his brave endurance during a period of
hope-deferred brieflessness.

A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little thing for his album.
Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs. "But it took you only
five minutes," objected the rich man. "Yes, but it took me thirty years
to learn how to do it in five minutes."

"I prepared that sermon," said a young sprig of divinity, "in half an
hour, and preached it at once, and thought nothing of it." "In that,"
said an older minister, "your hearers are at one with you, for they also
thought nothing of it."

Virgil seems to have accomplished about four lines a week; but then they
have lasted eighteen hundred years and will last eighteen hundred more.

Seven years Virgil is said to have expended in the composition of the
Georgics, and they could all be printed in about seven columns of an
ordinary newspaper. Tradition reports that he was in the habit of
composing a few lines in the morning and spending the rest of the day in
polishing them. Campbell used to say that if a poet made one good line a
week, he did very well indeed; but Moore thought that if a poet did his
duty, he could get a line done every day.

What an army of young men enters the success-contest every year as raw
recruits! Many of them are country youths flocking to the cities to buy
success. Their young ambitions have been excited by some book, or fired
by the story of some signal success, and they dream of becoming Astors
or Girards, Stewarts or Wanamakers, Vanderbilts or Goulds, Lincolns or
Garfields, until their innate energy impels them to try their own
fortune in the magic metropolis. But what are you willing to pay for
"success," as you call it, young man? Do you realize what that word
means in a great city in the nineteenth century, where men grow gray at
thirty and die of old age at forty,--where the race of life has