credits, and
who in an emergency has no money in the bank upon which to draw. A heavy
deposit, subject to a sight-draft, is the only position of strength. And
he only is intellectually strong, who has made heavy deposits in the
bank of memory, and can draw upon his faculties at any time, according
to the necessities of the case."

They say that more life, if not more labor, was spent on the piles
beneath the St. Petersburg church of St. Isaac's, to get a foundation,
than on all the magnificent marbles and malachite which have since been
lodged in it.

Fifty feet of Bunker Hill Monument is under ground, unseen, and
unappreciated by the thousands who tread about that historic shaft. The
rivers of India run under ground, unseen, unheard, by the millions who
tramp above, but are they therefore lost? Ask the golden harvest waving
above them if it feels the water flowing beneath? The superstructure of
a lifetime cannot stand upon the foundation of a day.

C. H. Parkhurst says that in manhood, as much as in house-building, the
foundation keeps asserting itself all the way from the first floor to
the roof. The stones laid in the underpinning may be coarse and
inelegant, but, even so, each such stone perpetuates itself in silent
echo clear up through to the finial. The body is in that respect like an
old Stradivarius violin, the ineffable sweetness of whose music is
outcome and quotation from the coarse fibre of the case upon which its
strings are strung. It is a very pleasant delusion that what we call the
higher qualities and energies of a person maintain that self-centered
kind of existence that enables them to discard and contemn all
dependence upon what is lower and less refined than themselves, but it
is a delusion that always wilts in an atmosphere of fact. Climb high as
we like our ladder will still require to rest on the ground; and it is
probable that the keenest intellectual intuition, and the most delicate
throb of passion would, if analysis could be carried so far, be
discovered to have its connections with the rather material affair that
we know as the body.

Lincoln took the postmastership for the sake of reading all the papers
that came to town. He read everything he could lay his hands on; the
Bible, Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Life of Washington and Life of
Franklin, Life of Henry Clay, AEsop's Fables; he read them over and over
again until he could almost repeat them by heart; but he never read a
nov