holding the building than the creaking clapboard flapping in the wind.  When you get an order from your employer, school yourself to move mechanically to the action implied.  Glory in it.  Be sure, only, that you are carrying out the wishes of your superior.  Make it your pleasure.  It will become an intense delight.  Suppose that you are allowed a holiday.  You return to your home and find a command to appear at your place of business.  A delay in finding you has happened.  You can reach your employer just at the end of business hours.  You say “I will not mind this; there is not time enough.”  Alas!  You have done yourself

A CRUEL WRONG.

You have given an entrance to a wedge that will rend you in pieces.  On the other hand, you do not stop to look twice at the dial.  You go.  Good!  You have strengthened your character.  You can depend on yourself.  You admire yourself.  “I received your directions at 5.30.  I have obeyed orders.”  Drill of this sort will soon hew your mind down to the solid heart of oak.  You will know what you mean when you say a thing.  “I will get up at 6 o’clock.”  When 6 o’clock arrives, and you are aroused, your mind is not

A MESS OF PULP,

ready to take the impression of the first lazy wish that comes over you.  No, your brain says resolutely, “I will arise,” and lo! a victory!—­and no small one either.  In this way, true firmness is made.  It is a growth.  Beware of the insects which beset the lordly tree, withering its leaves and driving its sap into the earth.

“Let us put a cable under the ocean,” says Cyrus Field.  “Tarry a while,” says Slow.  “Let us put the cities within actual speaking distance!” say Bell, and Gray and Edison.  “Tarry a while,” says Slow.  “Let us print thirty thousand newspapers in an hour, and give them out of the press folded, and pasted, and cut!” say Potter, and Hoe, and Kahler.  “Tarry a while” says Slow.  And yet, in spite of Slow and Sleepyhead, wonders have accumulated upon wonders, until the Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels are only the creations of a poor fancy, while the intimations which the future affords us stagger the understanding and make us almost idolatrous in our admiration of the quiet, keen-acting men who have dared out into fairy-land and returned laden like the spies coming from Canaan.

Our whole history is one of discipline.  And what has it made of us?  A nation that has sung

THE DEATH-KNELL OF THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.

I think a good deal of these lines of James Russell Lowell: 

     This land o’ ourn, I tell ye’s gut to be
     A better country than man ever see;
     I feel my sperit swellin with a cry
     That seems to say:  “Break forth and prophesy.” 
     O strange New World, that yet wast never young,