sh it you
must give up for some time reading anything entertaining or instructive;
you must give up arithmetic and history.'

"'And the "Stream of Time" and the lists?' said Mary.

"'Everything,' said his father, 'to the one object of making an
orrery,--and when made as well as you possibly could with my assistance
make it, observe that it will only be what others have repeatedly made
before.... Master Frank will grow older, and when or why or how he made
this orrery few will know or care, but all will see whether he has the
knowledge which is necessary for a man and a gentleman to possess. Now
choose, Frank.'"

Frank seized the orrery. "'Mary, bring your work basket, my dear,' said
he.

"And he pulled off one by one, deliberately, the worsted sun, moon,
earth, and stars, and threw them into the work basket which Mary held.
Mary sighed, but Frank did not sigh. He was proud to give his father a
proof of his resolution, and when he looked around he saw tears, but
they were tears of pleasure, in his mother's eyes.

"'Are you sure yet that I can keep to my good resolution?'

"'I am not quite sure, but this is a good beginning,' said his father."

The aim of all this discipline was to make Frank just like his father.
Now I am not saying anything against Frank's father. He was a truly good
man, and well-to-do. Still, there have always been so many just like him
that it would not have done much harm if Frank had been allowed to be a
little different.

I cannot help thinking how different was a contemporary of his, Michael
Faraday. Faraday had not any one to look after him in his youth, and to
keep him from making unnecessary experiments. When he felt like making
an experiment he did so. There was no one to tell him how it would come
out, so he had to wait to see how it did come out. In this way he wasted
a good deal of time that might have been spent in learning the things
that every educated Englishman was expected to know, and he found out a
good many things that the educated Englishman did not know,--this caused
him to be always a little out of the fashion.

He let curiosity get the better of him, and when he was quite well on in
years he would try to do things with pith-balls and electric currents,
just as Frank tried to do things with worsted balls before his father
showed him the folly of it. Some of his experiments turned out to be
very useful, but most of them did not. Some of them only proved that
what peop