ar 1915, you should do it on at least one morning. If you
do, you will feel so surprised with the world, and so content with
your own part in it, that you will decide to get up at seven every
morning for the rest of your life. But do not be rash. Getting up
early, if you do it seldom enough, is an intoxicating experience. But
before long the intoxication fades, and only the habit is left. It was
not the elder brother with his habits, but the prodigal with his
occasional recurrence into virtue, for whom the fatted calf was
killed. Even for the prodigal, when once he had settled down to
orderly habits, the supply of the fatted calves from his father's farm
was bound before long to come to an end.

There are, however, other good resolutions in which it is not so easy
to experiment for a single morning. If you resolved to learn German,
for instance, there would be very little intoxication to be got out
of a single sitting face to face with a German grammar. Similarly, the
inventors of systems of exercise for keeping the townsman in condition
all stress the fact that, in order to attain health, one must go on
toiling morning after morning at their wretched punchings and
twistings and kickings till the end of time. This is an unfair
advantage to take of the ordinary maker of good resolutions. He is
enticed into the adventure of trying a new thing only to discover that
he cannot be said to have tried it until he has tried it on a thousand
occasions. Most of us, it may be said at once, are not to be enticed
into such matters higher than our knees. We may go so far as to buy
the latest book on health or the latest mechanical apparatus to hang
on the wall. But soon they become little more than decorations for our
rooms. That pair of immense dumb-bells which we got in our boyhood,
when we believed that the heavier the dumb-bell the more magnificently
would our biceps swell--who would think of taking them from their
dusty corner now? Then there was that pair of wooden dumb-bells light
as wind, which we tried for a while on hearing that heavy dumb-bells
were a snare and only hardened the muscles without strengthening them.
They lie now where the woodlouse may eat them if it has so lowly an
appetite. But our good resolutions did really array themselves in
colours when the first of the exercisers was invented. There was a
thrill in those first mornings when we rose a little earlier than
usual and expected to find an inch added to our