engineer. Yes. "Then I will run it reckless of consequences." Can I be a
merchant, and the president of a bank, and a director in a life insurance
company, and a school commissioner, and help edit a paper, and supervise
the politics of our ward, and run for Congress? "I can!" the man says to
himself. The store drives him; the school drives him; politics drive him.
He takes all the scoldings and frets and exasperations of each position.
Some day at the height of the business season he does not come to the
store; from the most important meetings of the bank directors he is absent.
In the excitements of the political canvass he fails to be at the place
appointed. What is the matter? His health has broken down. The train halts
long before it gets to the station. A hot axle!

Literary men have great opportunities opening in this day. If they take all
that open, they are dead men, or worse, living men who ought to be dead.
The pen runs so easy when you have good ink, and smooth paper, and an easy
desk to write on, and the consciousness of an audience of one, two or three
hundred thousand readers. There are the religious newspapers through which
you preach, and the musical journals through which you may sing, and the
agricultural periodicals through which you can plough, and family
newspapers in which you may romp with the whole household around the
evening stand. There are critiques to be written, and reviews to be
indulged in, and poems to be chimed, and novels to be constructed. When out
of a man's pen he can shake recreation, and friendship, and usefulness,
and bread, he is apt to keep it shaking. So great are the invitations to
literary work that the professional men of the day are overcome. They sit
faint and fagged out on the verge of newspapers and books. Each one does
the work of three, and these men sit up late nights, and choke down chunks
of meat without mastication, and scold their wives through irritability,
and maul innocent authors, and run the physical machinery with a liver
miserably given out. The driving shaft has gone fifty times a second. They
stop at no station. The steam-chest is hot and swollen. The brain and the
digestion begin to smoke. Stop, ye flying quills! "Down brakes!" A hot
axle!

Some of the worst tempered people of the day are religious people, from the
fact that they have no rest. Added to the necessary work of the world, they
superintend two Sunday-schools, listen to two sermons, and every