IT WILL NEVER DO TO BE IDLE.

It is the odds and ends of our time, its orts and offals laid up, as they usually are, in corners to rot and stink there, instead of being used out as they should be—these, I say, are the occasions of our moral unsoundness and corruption. A dead fly, little thing as it is, will spoil a whole box of the most precious ointment; and idleness, if it be once suffered, though but for a brief while, is sure, by the communication of its listless quality, to clog and cumber the clockwork of the whole day. It is the ancient enemy-the old man of the Arabian tales. Once take him upon your shoulders, and he is not shaken off so easily.

I had a notion of these truths, and I framed my plan after their rules. I resolved that every minute should be occupied by thought, word, or act, or, if by none of these, by intention; vacancy was my only outcast, the scapegoat of my proscription. For this, my purpose, I required a certain energy of will, as indeed this same energy is requisite for every other good thing of every sort or kind; without it we are as powerless as grubs, noisome as ditch water, vague, loose, and unpredestinate as the clouds above our heads. However, I had sufficient of this energy to serve me for that turn; I felt the excellence of the practice; I was penetrated with it through all my being; I clung to it; I cherished it ; I made a point of every thing; I was active, brisk, and animated (oh, how true is that word!) in all things that I did, even to the picking up of a glove or asking the time of day. If I ever felt the approach, the first approach, of the insidious languor, I said once within myself in the next quarter of an hour, I will do such a thing, and, presto, it was done, and much more than that into the bargain; my mind was set in motion, my spirits stirred and quickened, and, raised to their proper height. I watched the cloud and dissipated it at its first gathering, as well knowing that, if it could grow but to the largeness of a man's hand, it would spread out every where, and darken my whole horizon. Oh, that this example might be as profitable to others as the practice has

been to myself! How rich would be the reward of this book, if its readers would but take it to heart in this one article; if the simple truths that it here speaks could prompt them to take their happiness into their own hands, and learn the value of industry, not from what they may have heard of it, but because they have themselves tried it and felt it! In the first place, its direct and immediate value, inasmuch as it quickens and cheers and gladdens every moment that it occupies, and keeps off the evil one by repelling him at the outposts, instead of admitting him to a doubtful, perhaps a deadly, struggle in the citadel; and again its more remote, but no less certain value, as the mother of many virtues, when it has once grown into the temper of the mind; and the nursing-mother of many more. And if we gain so much by its entertainment, how much more must we not lose by its neglect? Our vexations are annoying to us, the disappointments of life are grievous, its calamities deplorable, its indulgences and lusts sinful; but our idleness is worse than all these, and more painful, and more hateful, and, in the amount of its consequences, if not in its very essence, more sinful than even sin itself-just as the stock is more fruitful than any branch that springs from it. In fine, do what you will, only do something, and that actively and energetically. Read, converse, sport, think, or study—the whole range is open to you, only let your mind be full, and then you will want little or nothing to fulfil your happiness.

WHAT IS LUCK!

THERE is a great deal which passes for luck which is not such. Generally speaking, your "lucky fellows," when one searches closely into their history, turn out to be your fellows that know what they are doing, and how to do it in the right way. Their luck comes to them because they work for it: it is luck well earned. They put themselves in the way of luck. They keep themselves wide awake. They make the best of what opportunities they possess, and always stand ready for more; and when a mechanic does this much, depend on it, it must be hard luck, indeed, if he do not get at least employers, customers, and friends. "One needs only," says an American writer, "to turn to the lives of men of mechanical genius to see how, by taking advantage of little things and facts which no one had observed, or which every one had thought unworthy of regard, they have estab lished new and important principles in the arts, and built up for themselves manufactories for the practice of their newlydiscovered processes." And yet these are the men who are called the lucky fellows, and sometimes envied as such. Who can deny that their luck is well earned; or that it was just as much in my power to " go ahead," as the Yankees say, as it was in theirs?

POLONIUS'S ADVICE TO HIS SON.

"Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance into quarrel: but, being in,

Bear it, that the opposer may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friends,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This, above all—to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

EXTRACT FROM SIR FOWELL BUXTON'S
LETTER TO HIS SON.

"You are now at that period of life in which you must make a turn to the right or the left. You must now give proofs of principle, determination, and strength of mind-or you must sink into idleness, and acquire the habits and character of a desultory, ineffective young man; and, if once you fall to that point, you will find it no easy matter to rise again.

I

"I am sure that a young man may be very much what he pleases. In my own case it was so. I left school, where I had learned little or nothing, about the age of fourteen. spent the next year at home, learning to hunt and shoot. Then it was that the prospect of going to college opened upon me, and such thoughts as I have expressed in this letter occurred to my mind. I made my resolutions, and I acted up to them I gave up all desultory reading-I never looked into a novel or a newspaper-I gave up shooting. During the five years I was in Ireland, I had the liberty of going when I pleased to a capital shooting-place. I never went but twice. In short, I considered every hour as precious, and I made every thing bend to my determination not to be behind any of my companions; and then I speedily passed from one species of character to another. I had been a boy fond of pleasure and idleness, reading only books of unprofitable entertainment. I became speedily a youth of steady habits of application, and of irresistible resolution. I soon gained the ground I had lost, and I found those things which were dif ficult, and almost impossible to my idleness, easy enough to my industry; and much of my happiness and ALL MY PROSPERITY IN LIFE have resulted from the change I made at your age. If you seriously resolve to be energetic and industrious, depend upon it you will, for your whole life, have reason to rejoice that you were wise enough to form and to act upon that determination."