CHAPTER IV.

POSSIBILITIES IN SPARE MOMENTS.

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

Eternity itself cannot restore the loss struck from the minute. ANCIENT POET.

the hours perish and are laid to our charge. —

INSCRIPTION ON A DIAL AT OXFORD.

SHAKESPEARE.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Every hour in a man's life has its own special work possible for it, and for no other hour within the allotted span of years, and once gone it will not return. NOEL PATON.

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no

time.- BACON.

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 waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning. - GLADSTONE.

There is not an hour of youth but is trembling with destinies - not a moment of which, once past, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron. - RUSKIN.

Lost! 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.

Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. EMERSON.

There is no business, no avocation whatever, which will not permit a man who has an inclination, to give a little time every day to the studies of his youth. - WYTTENBACH.

And the plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously into our present use of time. - MATTHEW ARNOLD.

"WHAT is the price of that book?" at length asked a man who had been dawdling for an hour in the front store of Benjamin Franklin's newspaper establishment. "One dollar," replied the clerk. "One dollar," echoed the lounger; "can't you take less than that?" dollar is the price," was the answer.

"One

The would-be purchaser looked over the books on sale awhile longer, and then inquired: "Is Mr. Franklin in?" "Yes," said the clerk, "he is very busy in the pressroom." “Well, I want to see him," persisted the man. The proprietor was called, and the stranger asked: "What is the lowest, Mr. Franklin, that you can take for that book?" "One dollar and a quarter," was the prompt rejoinder. "One dollar and a quarter! Why, your clerk asked me only a dollar just now." "True," said Franklin, "and I could have better afforded to take a dollar than to leave my work."

"One

The man seemed surprised; but, wishing to end a parley of his own seeking, he demanded: "Well, come now, tell me your lowest price for this book." dollar and a half," replied Franklin. "A dollar and a half! Why, you offered it yourself for a dollar and a quarter." "Yes," said Franklin coolly, "and I could better have taken that price then than a dollar and a half now."

The man silently laid the money on the counter, took his book, and left the store, having received a salutary lesson from a master in the art of transmuting time, at will, into either wealth or wisdom.

Time-wasters are everywhere.

On the floor of the gold-working room in the United States Mint at Philadelphia, there is a wooden latticework which is taken up when the floor is swept, and the fine particles of gold-dust, thousands of dollars yearly, are thus saved. So every successful man has a kind of network to catch "the raspings and parings of existence, those leavings of days and wee bits of hours" which most people sweep into the waste of life. He who hoards and turns to account all odd minutes, half hours, unexpected holidays, gaps "between times," and chasms of waiting for unpunctual persons, achieves results which astonish those who have not mastered this secret.

"All that I have accomplished, or expect, or hope to accomplish," said Elihu Burritt, "has been and will be by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap-particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact. And if ever I was actuated by ambition, its highest and warmest aspiration reached no further than the hope to set before the young men of my country an example in employing those invaluable fragments of time called moments."

"I have been wondering how Ned contrived to monopolize all the talents of the family," said a brother, found in a brown study after listening to one of Burke's speeches in Parliament; "but then I remember, when we were at play, he was always at work."

The days come to us like friends in disguise, bringing priceless gifts from an unseen hand; but, if we do not use them, they are borne silently away, never to return. Each successive morning new gifts are brought, but if we failed to accept those that were brought yesterday and the day before, we become less and less able to turn them to account, until the ability to appreciate and utilize them is exhausted. Wisely was it said that lost wealth may be regained by industry and economy, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance and medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

"Oh, it's only five minutes or ten minutes till mealtime; there's no time to do anything now," is one of the commonest expressions heard in the family. But what monuments have been built up by poor boys with no chance, out of broken fragments of time which many of us throw away. The very hours you have wasted, if improved, might have insured your success.

"While the students at Andover were waiting for breakfast at the boarding-house," said a lady, "the rest of the young men would stand chaffing each other; but Joseph Cook, if there were only a half minute to spare, would turn to the big dictionary in the corner of

the room, and learn the synonyms of a word, or search out its derivation." It is a cheap thing to say that Joseph Cook has evidently swallowed the dictionary, and cheap people often make the remark; but our age has not produced many nobler geniuses nor a more magnificent specimen of true self-culture.

Marion Harland has accomplished wonders, and she has been able to do this by economizing the minutes to shape her novels and newspaper articles, when her children were in bed and whenever she could get a spare minute. Though she has done so much, yet all her life has been subject to interruptions which would have discouraged most women from attempting anything outside their regular family duties. She has glorified the commonplace as few other women have done. Harriet Beecher Stowe, too, wrote her great masterpiece, “Uncle Tom's Cabin," in the midst of pressing household cares. Beecher read Froude's "England," a little each day that he had to wait for dinner. Longfellow translated the "Inferno" by snatches of ten minutes a day, while waiting for his coffee to boil, persisting for years until the work was done.

Hugh Miller, while working hard as a stone-mason, found time to read scientific books, and write the lessons learned from the blocks of stone he handled.

Madame de Genlis, when companion of the future queen of France, composed several of her charming volumes while waiting for the princess to whom she gave her daily lessons. Burns wrote many of his most beautiful poems while working on a farm. The author of "Paradise Lost" was a teacher, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Secretary of the Lord Protector, and had to write his sublime poetry whenever he could snatch a few minutes from a busy life. John Stuart Mill did much of his best work as a writer while a clerk in the East India House. Galileo was a surgeon, yet to the improvement of his spare moments the world owes some of its greatest discoveries.

If a genius like Gladstone carries through life a little book in his pocket lest an unexpected spare moment slip from his grasp, what should we of common abilities not resort to, to save the precious moments from oblivion? What a rebuke is such a life to the thousands of young men and women who throw away whole months and even years of that which the "Grand Old Man" hoards up even to the smallest fragments. Many a great man has snatched his reputation from odd bits of time which others, who wonder at their failure to get on, throw away. In Dante's time nearly every literary man in Italy was a hard-working merchant, physician, statesman, judge, or soldier.

While Michael Faraday was employed binding books, he devoted all his leisure to experiments. At one time he wrote to a friend, "Time is all I require. Oh, that I could purchase at a cheap rate some of our modern gentleman's spare hours, - nay, days."

Oh, the power of ceaseless industry to perform miracles!

Alexander von Humboldt's days were so occupied with his business that he had to pursue his scientific labors in the night or early morning, while others were asleep.

Oh, what wonders have been performed in " a day!"

one hour

One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits, and profitably employed, would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science. One hour a day would make an ignorant man a wellinformed man in ten years. One hour a day would earn enough to pay for two daily and two weekly papers, two leading magazines, and a dozen good books. In an hour a day a boy or girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully-over seven thousand pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year. An hour a day might make all the difference between bare existence and useful, happy