tty good hammer by this time." "No,
sir," was the answer, "I _never_ made a pretty good hammer. I make
the best hammer made in the United States." Daniel Morell, once
president of the Cambria Railworks in Pittsburgh, which employed
seven thousand men, was an artist, and trained artists. "What is
the secret of such a development of business as this?" asked the
visitor. "We have no secret," was the answer; "we always try to
beat our last batch of rails. That's all the secret we have, and we
don't care who knows it." The Paris bookbinder was an artist, who,
when the rare volume of Corneille, discovered in a book-stall, was
brought to him, and he was asked how long it would take him to bind
it, answered, "Oh, sir, you must give me a year, at least; _this_
needs all my care." Our Ben Franklin showed the artist when he
began his own epitaph, "Benjamin Franklin, printer." And Professor
Agassiz, when he told the interviewer that he had "no time to make
money"; and when he began his will, "I, Louis Agassiz, teacher."

In one of Murillo's pictures in the Louvre he shows us the interior
of a convent kitchen; but doing the work there are, not mortals in
old dresses, but beautiful white-winged angels. One serenely puts
the kettle on the fire to boil, and one is lifting up a pail of
water with heavenly grace, and one is at the kitchen dresser
reaching up for plates; and I believe there is a little cherub
running about and getting in the way, trying to help. What the old
monkish legend that it represented is, I hardly know. But, as the
painter puts it to you on his canvas, all are so busy, and working
with such a will, and so refining the work as they do it, that
somehow you forget that pans are pans and pots pots, and only think
of the angels, and how very natural and beautiful kitchen-work
is,--just what the angels would do, of course.

It is the angel-aim and standard in an act that consecrates it. He
who aims for perfectness in a trifle is trying to do that trifle
holily. The _trier_ wears the halo, and therefore, the halo grows
as quickly round the brows of peasant as of king. This aspiration
to do perfectly,--is it not religion practicalized? If we use the
name of God, is this not God's presence becoming actor in us? No
need, then, of being "great" to share