to useless trifling of any kind, but puts
in as many strokes of faithful work as possible toward the attainment of
some definite good.

CHAPTER XI.

AT ONCE.

Note the sublime precision that leads the earth over a circuit
of 500,000,000 miles back to the solstice at the appointed
moment without the loss of one second--no, not the millionth
part of a second--for ages and ages of which it traveled that
imperial road.
--EDWARD EVERETT.

Despatch is the soul of business.
--CHESTERFIELD.

Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of
clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as
his time.
--HORACE MANN.

By the street of by-and-by one arrives at the house of never.
--CERVANTES.

The greatest thief this world has ever produced is
procrastination, and he is still at large.
--H. W. SHAW.

"Oh, how I do appreciate a boy who is always on time!" says H. C. Bowen.
"How quickly you learn to depend on him, and how soon you find yourself
intrusting him with weightier matters! The boy who has acquired a
reputation for punctuality has made the first contribution to the
capital that in after years makes his success a certainty!"

"Nothing commends a young man so much to his employers," says John
Stuart Blackie, "as accuracy and punctuality in the conduct of his
business. And no wonder. On each man's exactitude depends the
comfortable and easy going of his machine. If the clock goes fitfully
nobody knows the time of day; and, if your task is a link in the chain
of another man's work, you are his clock, and he ought to be able to
rely on you."

"The whole period of youth," said Ruskin, "is one essentially of
formation, edification, instruction. There is not an hour of it but is
trembling with destinies--not a moment of which, once passed, the
appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on
the cold iron."

"To-morrow, didst thou say?" asked Cotton. "Go to--I will not hear of
it. To-morrow! 't is 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 fath