busy in useful work. But where does he eat his lunch at noon? Where does he go when he leaves his boarding-house at night? What does he do after supper? Where does he spend his Sundays and holidays? The way he uses his spare moments reveals his character. The great majority of youth who go to the bad are ruined after supper. Most of those who climb upward to honor and fame devote their evenings to study or work or the society of the wise and good. For the right use of these leisure hours, what we have called the waste of life, the odd moments usually thrown away, the author would plead with every youth. Each evening is a crisis in the career of a young man. There is a deep significance in the lines of Whittier:

"This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin."

Time is money. We should not be stingy or mean with it, but we should not throw away an hour any more than we would throw away a dollar-bill. Waste of time means waste of energy, waste of vitality, waste of character in dissipation. It means bad companions, bad habits. It means the waste of opportunities which will never come back. Beware how you kill time, for all your future lives in it.

"Of memory many a poet sings; and Hope hath oft inspired the rhyme; But who the charm of music brings to celebrate the present time? Let the past guide, the future cheer, while youth and health are in their prime;

But, oh, be still thy greatest care

that awful point - the present time!"

"And it is left for each," says Edward Everett, "by the cultivation of every talent, by watching with an eagle's eye for every chance of improvement, by redeeming time, defying temptation, and scorning sensual pleas ure, to make himself useful, honored, and happy."

CHAPTER V.

ROUND BOYS IN SQUARE HOLES.

To business that we love, we rise betimes,
And go to it with delight.

SHAKESPEARE.

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness. EMERSON.

How often we find, in the history of men of genius, that they neglected the studies or the business to which they were put, and took to something more congenial to their tastes! How often we find them rebelling against the injunctions and the arrangements of parents and guardians, and making arrangements of their own!-ROBERT WATERS.

If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes in a table of different shapes, some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular; while the square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. SYDNEY SMITH.

I cannot too often repeat that no man struggles perpetually and victori ously against his own character.- SIR H. L. BULWER.

"What the child admired,

The youth endeavored, and the man acquired."

There is hardly a poet, artist, philosopher, or man of science mentioned in the history of the human intellect, whose genius was not opposed by parents, guardians, or teachers. In these cases Nature seems to have triumphed by direct interposition; to have insisted on her darlings having their rights, and encouraged disobedience, secrecy, falsehood, even flight from home and occasional vagabondism, rather than the world should ose what it cost her so much pains to produce.-E. P. WHIPPLE.

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says, I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,

Which beckons me away.

TICKELL.

"JAMES WATT, I never saw such an idle young fellow as you are," said his grandmother; "do take a book and

66 You are trying to make that boy another you; one is enough."

employ yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single word. Do you know what you have been doing all this time? Why, you have taken off and replaced, and taken off again, the teapot lid, and you have held alternately in the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon, and you have busied yourself in examining and collecting together the little drops formed by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the china and the silver. Now, are you not ashamed to waste your time in this disgraceful manner ?”

The world has certainly gained much through the old lady's failure to tell James how he could employ his time to better advantage!

ness.

"But I'm good for something," pleaded a young man whom a merchant was about to discharge for his blunt"You are good for nothing as a salesman," said his employer. "I am sure I can be useful," said the youth. "How? Tell me how." "I don't know, sir, I don't know." "Nor do I," said the merchant, laughing at the earnestness of his clerk. "Only don't put me away, sir, don't put me away. Try me at something besides selling. I cannot sell; I know I cannot sell." "I know that, too," said the principal; "that is what is wrong." "But I can make myself useful somehow," persisted the young man; "I know I can." He was placed in the counting-house, where his aptitude for figures soon showed itself, and in a few years he became not only chief cashier in the large store, but an eminent accountant.

Thomas Edward of Aberdeen, Scotland, celebrated his acquisition of the art of walking by losing himself, so that father, and mother, and neighbors were about to give up the search in despair, when some one happened to look in the pig-pen, and there lay the scamp fast asleep by the side of some little pigs, the brood of a sow so savage that no grown person dared venture into the sty. He had formed a taste for excursions into the