his clerk. "Only
don't put me away, sir, don't put me away. Try me at something besides
selling. I cannot sell; I know I cannot sell." "I know that, too," said
the principal; "that is what is wrong." "But I can make myself useful
somehow," persisted the young man; "I know I can." He was placed in the
counting-house, where his aptitude for figures soon showed itself, and
in a few years he became not only chief cashier in the large store, but
an eminent accountant.

"Out of an art," says Bulwer, "a man may be so trivial you would mistake
him for an imbecile--at best, a grown infant. Put him into his art, and
how high he soars above you! How quietly he enters into a heaven of
which he has become a denizen, and unlocking the gates with his golden
key, admits you to follow, an humble reverent visitor."

A man out of place is like a fish out of water. Its fins mean nothing,
they are only a hindrance. The fish can do nothing but flounder out of
its element. But as soon as the fins feel the water, they mean
something. Fifty-two per cent of our college graduates studied law, not
because, in many cases, they have the slightest natural aptitude for it,
but because it is put down as the proper road to promotion.

A man never grows in personal power and moral stamina when out of his
place. If he grows at all, it is a narrow, one-sided, stunted growth,
not a manly growth. Nature abhors the slightest perversion of natural
aptitude or deviation from the sealed orders which accompany every soul
into this world.

A man out of place is not half a man. He feels unmanned, unsexed. He
cannot respect himself, hence he cannot be respected.

You can enter all kinds of horses for a race, but only those which have
natural adaptation for speed will make records; the others will only
make themselves ridiculous by their lumbering, unnatural exertions to
win. How many truck and family-horse lawyers make themselves ridiculous
by trying to speed on the law track, where courts and juries only laugh
at them. The effort to redeem themselves from scorn may enable them by
unnatural exertions to become fairly passable, but the same efforts
along the line of their strength or adaptation would make them kings in
their line.

"Jonathan," said Mr. Chace, when his son told of having nearly fitted
himself for college, "thou shalt go down to the machine-shop on Monday
morning." It was many years before Jonathan escaped from the shop to
work his way up to the