pect, took a good many cat-naps in the daytime, have done much harm. The time taken out of eight hours' daily sleep is

not time gained, but time worse than wasted.

We may cheat ourselves, but we cannot cheat Nature. Because she lets us overdraw our accounts for many years, we fancy the accounts are not kept. But, depend upon it, she is a jealous creditor, who is sure in the end to exact with compound interest every loan she makes to us; and if we continue borrowing for work the hours that are due to sleep, though we may postpone a settlement for years, the final and inevitable result will be physical and mental bankruptcy.

CHAPTER XVII.

ECONOMY OF TIME.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. FRANKLIN.

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;

Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,

And trifles, life. - YOUNG.

Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beyond your darkest reckonings. W. E. GLADSTONE.

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. HORACE MANN.

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NE of the most important lessons to be learned by every man who would get on in his calling is the art of economizing his time. A celebrated Italian was wont to call his time his estate; and it is true of this as of other estates of which the young come into possession, that it is rarely prized till it is nearly squandered; and then, when life is fast waning, they begin to think of spending the hours wisely, and even of hus banding the moments. Unfortunately, habits of indolence, listlessness, and procrastination, once firmly fixed, cannot be suddenly thrown off, and the man who has wasted the precious hours of life's seed-time finds that he cannot reap a harvest in life's autumn. It is a truism which cannot be too often repeated, that lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

In the long catalogue of stereotyped excuses for the neglect of duty, there is none which drops oftener from men's lips, or which is founded on more of self-delusion, than the want of

leisure. Persons are always cheating themselves with the idea that they would like to do this or that desirable thing, "if they only had time." Hundreds of young men burn with an intense desire to cultivate their minds; they realize how essential, in this age of intelligence, are mental training and knowledge to success; they see the superficial, half-instructed men everywhere distanced in the race of life; but, alas! every moment of their waking hours is taken up by the pressing calls of business, and they have no leisure for reading or study. Hundreds there are who feel the profoundest sympathy for the poor, and who would out-Howard Howard in "carrying broth and blankets to beggars," and in distributing the bread of life in the form of Bibles and tracts; but their own affairs usurp all their time and attention, and they can do nothing for their fellow-men.

Such are the pleas by which the lazy and the selfish excuse themselves from a thousand things which conscience dictates to be done. Now, the truth is, there is no condition in which the chance of doing any good is less than in that of leisure. Life, it has been truly said, is composed of an elastic material, and wherever a solid piece of business is removed, there the surrounding atmosphere of trifles rushes in as certainly as the air into a bottle when you pour out its contents. If you would exhaust the air from a given spot, you must enclose it in a vessel of texture as firm and as carefully secured as would be required to protect the most precious and delicate substance; and so an hour's leisure, if one would not have it frittered away on "trifles light as air," needs to be guarded by barriers of resolution and precaution as strong as are needed for hours of study and business. Go hunt out the men in any community who have done the most for their own and the general good, and you will find they are who? Wealthy, leisurely people, with extensive stomachs and highly polished shoes, who have oceans of time to themselves, and nothing to do but to eat, sleep, and vegetate? No; they are almost uniformly the overworked class,

the toil-and-moil, almost-driven-to-death

men, who seem wellnigh swamped with cares, and are in a ceaseless paroxysm of activity from January to December. It is these men who find time to preside at philanthropic meetings, to serve on Tract or Missionary Society committees, to visit the poor, to attend noon prayer-meetings, and to attend to selfculture by reading not only the best old books, but the pick of the ever-multiplying new publications of the day; while a busy male trifler, who spends his time in laboriously doing nothing, or a lady who lies upon her sofa, and has no creature dependent upon her, will tell you that he or she has waited week after week for leisure to answer a note. Persons of the former class, however crowded with business, are always found capable of doing a little more, and you may rely upon them in their busiest seasons with ten times more assurance than upon the idle man.

ner.

It is common in every community to run with business to lawyers and doctors who are already fully employed. This is not wholly from a senseless veneration for a name; it is because there is an instinct that tells us that the man who does much is most likely to do more, and to do it in the best manThe reason is, that to do increases the power of doing; and it is far easier for one who is always exerting himself to exert himself a little more for an extra purpose, than for him who does nothing to "get up steam" preparatory to the same end. Give a busy man ten minutes to write a letter, and he will dash it off at once; give an idle man a day, and he will postpone it till to-morrow or next week. There is a momentum in the active man which of itself almost carries him to the mark, just as a very light stroke will keep a hoop agoing, when a smart one was required to set it in motion. While others are yawning and stretching themselves to overcome the vis inertiae, he has his eyes wide open, his faculties keyed up for action, and is thoroughly alive in every fibre. He walks through the world with his hands unmuffled and ready by his side, and so can sometimes do more by a single touch in passing than a vacant man is likely to do by strenuous effort.

The men who do the greatest things achieved on this globe do them not so much by prodigious but fitful efforts, as by steady, unremitting toil, by turning even the moments to ac¬ count. They have the genius for hard work, the most desirable kind of genius. A continual dropping wears the stone. A little done this hour and a little the next hour, day by day, and year by year, brings much to pass. The largest houses are built by laying one brick upon another. How have the men who have died millionnaires acquired their wealth? Not generally by huge windfalls, but by minute and gradual accumulations. It is not by large sums bequeathed to them one after another, or gained by gigantic schemes of speculation, but by economizing the petty sums which so many thoughtlessly squander, by saving the cents and dimes and single dollars, adding them together year after year, that they have reared their pyramid of fortune. So with self-culture, the acquisition of knowledge, and the doing of good deeds; the time men often waste in needless slumber, in lounging, or in idle visits, would enable them, were it redeemed, to execute undertakings which seem in their hurried and worried life to be impossible.

Complain not, then, reader, of your want of leisure to do anything. Rather thank God that you are not cursed with leisure; for a curse it is, in nine cases out of ten. What if, to achieve some good work which you have deeply at heart, you can never command an entire month, a week, or even a day? Shall you therefore bid it an eternal adieu, and fold your arms in despair? No; the thought should only the more keenly "prick the sides of your intent," and goad and stimulate and urge you on to do what you can do in this swiftly passing life of ours. Try what you can build up from the broken fragments of your time, rendered more precious by their brevity. It is said that in the United States Mint at Philadelphia, when the visitor reaches the gold-working room, the guide tells him that the singular floor is a network of wooden bars to catch all the falling particles of the precious metal. When the day's labor is done, the floor, which is in sections or