time and eternity.  Look at the young fellows who are preparing for the hard duties of life by studying at a University.  Here is one who seems to have recognized the facts of existence; his hours are arranged as methodically as his heart beats; he knows the exact balance between physical and intellectual strength, and he overtaxes neither, but body and mind are worked up to the highest attainable pressure.  No pleasures of the destructive sort call this youngster aside; he has learned already what it is to reap the harvest of a quiet eye, and his joys are of the sober kind.  He rises early, and he has got far through his work ere noon; his quiet afternoon is devoted to harmless merriment in the cricket-field or on the friendly country roads, and his evening is spent without any vain gossip in the happy companionship of his books.  That young man loses no day; but unhappily he represents a type which is but too rare.  The steady man, economic of time, is a rarity; but the wild youth who is always going to do something to-morrow is one of a class that numbers only too many on its rolls.  To-morrow!  The young fellow passes to-day on the river, or spends it in lounging or in active dissipation.  He feels that he is doing wrong; but the gaunt spectres raised by conscience are always exorcised by the bright vision of to-morrow.  To-morrow the truant will go to his books; he will bend himself for that concentrated effort which alone secures success, and his time of carelessness and sloth shall be far left behind.  But the sinister influence of to-day saps his will and renders him infirm; each new to-day is wasted amid thoughts of visionary to-morrows which take all the power from his soul; and, when he is nerveless, powerless, tired, discontented with the very sight of the sun, he finds suddenly that his feet are on the edge of the gulf, and he knows that there will be no more to-morrows.

I am not entering a plea for hard, petrifying work.  If a man is a hand-worker or brain-worker, his fate is inevitable if he regards work as the only end of life.  The loss of which I speak is that incurred by engaging in pursuits which do not give mental strength or resource or bodily health.  The hard-worked business-man who gallops twenty miles after hounds before he settles to his long stretch of toil is not losing his day; the empty young dandy whose life for five months in the year is given up to galloping across grass country or lounging around stables is decidedly a spendthrift so far as time is concerned.

I wish—­if it be not impious so to wish—­that every young man could have one glimpse into the future.  Supposing some good genius could say, “If you proceed as you are now doing, your position in your fortieth year will be this!” what a horror would strike through many among us, and how desperately each would strive to take advantage of that kindly “If.”  But there is no uplifting of the veil; and we must all be guided by the experience