ltogether. If you be on a journey you must wait the
pleasure of the servants at the inn before you can dress and set out in
the morning; the pleasant time for travelling is gone before you can
move from the spot; instead of being at the end of your day's journey in
good time, you are benighted, and have to endure all the great
inconveniences attendant on tardy movements. And, all this, from the
apparently insignificant affair of shaving! How many a piece of
important business has failed from a short delay! And how many thousand
of such delays daily proceed from this unworthy cause! '_Toujours pret_'
was the motto of a famous French general; and pray let it be yours: be
'_always ready_;' and never, during your whole life, have to say, '_I
cannot go till I be shaved and dressed_.' Do the whole at once for the
day, whatever may be your state of life; and then you have a day
unbroken by those indispensable performances. Begin thus, in the days of
your youth, and, having felt the superiority which this practice will
give you over those in all other respects your equals, the practice will
stick by you to the end of your life. Till you be shaved and dressed for
the day, you cannot set steadily about any business; you know that you
must presently quit your labour to return to the dressing affair; you,
therefore, put it off until that be over; the interval, the precious
interval, is spent in lounging about; and, by the time that you are
ready for business, the best part of the day is gone.

39. Trifling as this matter appears upon _naming_ it, it is, in fact,
one of the great concerns of life; and, for my part, I can truly say,
that I owe more of my great labours to my strict adherence to the
precepts that I have here given you, than to all the natural abilities
with which I have been endowed; for these, whatever may have been their
amount, would have been of comparatively little use, even aided by great
sobriety and abstinence, if I had not, in early life, contracted the
blessed habit of husbanding well my time. To this, more than to any
other thing, I owed my very extraordinary promotion in the army. I was
_always ready_: if I had to mount guard at _ten_, I was ready at _nine_:
never did any man, or any thing, wait one moment for me. Being, at an
age _under twenty years_, raised from Corporal to Serjeant Major _at
once_, over the heads of thirty Serjeants, I naturally should have been
an object of envy and hatred; but this habi