Self-improvement

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are permitting the wealth which enriches the mind to slip from us as though it were the dirt from which the gold has been sifted.

There are few whom routine work keeps busy more than ten hours in the twenty-four. Allow eight hours for sleep and two for meals, and there remain four for self-improvement. How is it possible, you ask, to live without recreation and amusement? Find them in the effort to upbuild your being, and joy and fulness of life shall be yours beyond the reach of kings. Learn to think, and you shall never lack pleasant occupation. Bring your mind into unison with the currents of thought which are found in the books of power, and you need be neither lonely nor depressed. The transfusion of thought is more quickening than the transfusion of blood. As in the midst of battle the soldier is often unconscious of his wounds, so they who have a purpose and seriously pursue it, easily become indifferent to the troubles which make weaker men wretched.

Games and other amusements doubtless have their uses, especially for the young, and for all who are feeble' in body or in mind, but when we consider that they are generally occasions for wasting time, and so, a chief obstacle to human advancement, it is difficult not to condemn the apathy, the indifference to the meaning and worth of life which makes possible their universal prevalence.

They are least harmful in the home, and even there what irreparable loss they involve! Economy of time is more indispensable than economy of money; for it is a means not only of getting money, but of getting what is vastly higher and more precious-wisdom and virtue. All else may be made good, but time misspent is lost forever. It is the element in which life exists, and to squander it is to dissipate vital force. What increases health and strength of body is good unless it diminish vigor of mind or weaken the will to devote one's self to right human ends. The passion and persistence with which athletic sports are followed in our colleges and universities undermine moral and intellectual ambition just at the time when the formation of character and the acquisition of knowledge are of the highest importance. Those whose ideal is athletic are in danger of not looking higher than the prize-ring.