of this Assembly district is Mr. C. C. Church,
of Potsdam, from whom I received a certificate based upon the
recommendation of Commissioner Allen Wight of the first district. The
School Trustees are E. L. Beardsley, Hiram Harris, and Jeptha Clark. The
present term will be my first experience in the profession I have
adopted. I do hope it will prove a useful one, for I am of opinion that
a teacher's first experience is apt to give color to his whole future
career." The day after this entry he adds that "only a small attendance
greeted me upon opening my school," and after consoling himself with the
reflection that this will leave him plenty of time for study, he adopted
a single rule--"Do right;" and an additional motto, "A time and place
for everything and everything in its time and place."

It will thus be seen that he had already acquired a clear idea of the
importance of order in every pursuit, and knew that method gives to an
ordinary mortal Briaerean arms with which to accomplish whatever he may
desire to do. How few attain to this knowledge until it is too late!

As a writer, whose words we think worthy of remembrance, has said:

"This is an era of doing things scientifically. People make scientific
calculations of the weather, and the average number of murders for the
next year. They measure the stars and they measure the affections, both
scientifically. The only thing they fail to do scientifically is, to
manage themselves. As a rule, they _drift_, and then find fault with
fate and Providence because they don't drift into the right port. They
drift _into_ life with a multiplicity of vague dreams, which are
somehow to be realized; but they have a very dim idea of ways and means.
They drift _through_ it, carelessly, with an inadequate knowledge of
their own resources, and a still more inadequate notion of using them to
the best advantage; they drift _out_ of it with a melancholy sense of
failure, both absolutely as to themselves and relatively as to the
world. Of all their splendid possibilities, none are realized. Nothing
is completed. They start wrong or they make one fatal step, and
everything goes wrong all the way through. It seems as if most lives
were only experiments. Now and then one is turned out which fits in its
niche and is tolerably symmetrical. The rest are all awry, unfinished,
misplaced, and merely faint suggestions of what might have been. Much of
this is doubtless beyond mortal control, but a f