wide world, and almost every day he would bring home priceless treasures, such as tadpoles, beetles, frogs, crabs, mice, rats, spiders, and bugs. These pets he would liberate, and watch them run around and hide, greatly to his own delight, and the terror of everybody else. Whipping and scolding only seemed to stimulate him to greater exertions in his work of capturing living curiosities.

His mother tied him by the leg to a table; but Thomas dragged the table to the fire, burned off the rope and escaped, returning at dusk with a large collection of living creatures. She hid all his clothes, but he had a grand trip in an old petticoat, bringing back some fine specimens, and a fever which nearly killed him. As soon as he could get out again, he brought back, hid in his shirt, a nest full of wasps of the most enterprising kind. The wasps seemed on the best of terms with Thomas, but they took exceptions to every other member of the family, until peace was finally restored when his father plunged the whole nest into hot water.

Tommy had taken all the conceit out of his parents as to their ability to control him, but before giving him up altogether, they resolved to see if the schoolmaster could not reclaim him. He tried. He failed. Tommy would play truant most of the time, or turn the school into a menagerie. One morning a jackdaw poked his head out of Tommy's pocket, and began to caw during prayers, and Thomas Edward was dismissed in disgrace. He was sent to another school, until one day, a lot of horse-leeches escaped from a bottle and crawled up the legs of nearly every boy in school, drawing blood. He was again dismissed. His parents tried to reinstate him. "I would not take him back for twenty pounds," said the teacher with a shudder.

A third school was tried. A centipede was found in another boy's desk, and Thomas knew nothing about it. It was in accord with the eternal fitness of things for

him to be guilty, so the teacher whipped him severely and said: "Go home and tell your father to get you on board a man-of-war, as that is the best school for irreclaimables such as you."

He was six years old and could not write his name. He refused absolutely to go to school again, and his discouraged parents consented for him to go out and earn his living. Repression of every kind had been tried in vain upon his upspringing instincts and propensities for the study of animal life; restraint at last removed, what glorious expression they found! How hard he worked that he might gain leisure for study! He learned the trade of a shoemaker, and worked at the bench for life, rearing a family of eleven children and storing away a wonderful amount of knowledge of birds and beasts and insects. But, from the lack of ability to read and write, he could not classify and use what he learned. So, slowly and laboriously, he acquired these useful arts. In the hope of getting money to study to better advantage, he once sold six cart-loads of specimens, the result of nine years of labor, for only twenty pounds.

He often tried to get employment as a naturalist, and failed only because he could not read and write rapidly. If he had been encouraged as a child to catch and study his charming specimens, and to learn to read and write about them, who shall say that his unequaled love of investigation would not have led him to become more than an Agassiz or a Tenney? But he had been wedged so tightly into a square hole that he never got out!

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand, and wrapped up in that bit of clay, any more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star of its own destiny; and though you may pull it around by artificial advice and unnatural education, and compel it to

point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or your own pet calling, until you have wasted years of a precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star.

“Rue it as he may, repent it as he often does," says Robert Waters, "the man of genius is drawn by an irresistible impulse to the occupation for which he was created. No matter by what difficulties surrounded, no matter how unpromising the prospect, this occupation is the only one which he will pursue with interest and pleasure. When his efforts fail to procure means of subsistence, and he finds himself poor and neglected, he may, like Burns, often look back with a sigh and think how much better off he would be had he pursued some other occupation, but he will stick to his favorite pur suit, nevertheless."

Civilization will mark its highest tide when every man has chosen his proper work. No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else. "Like a boat on a river," says Emerson, 66 every boy runs against obstructions on every side but one. On that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea."

Only a Dickens can write the history of "Boy Slavery," of boys whose aspirations and longings have been silenced forever by ignorant parents; of boys persecuted as lazy, stupid, or fickle, simply because they were out of their places; of square boys forced into round holes, and oppressed because they did not fit; of boys compelled to pore over dry theological books when the voice within continually cried "Law," "Medicine,” "Science," "Art," or "Business; " of boys tortured because they were not enthusiastic in employments which they loathed, and against which every fibre of their being was uttering perpetual protest.

It is often a narrow selfishness in a father which

leads him to wish his son a reproduction of himself. "You are trying to make that boy another you. One is enough," said Emerson. John Jacob Astor's father wished his son to be his successor as a butcher, but the instinct of commercial enterprise was too strong in the future merchant.

Nature never duplicates men. She breaks the pattern at every birth. The magic combination is never used but once. Frederick the Great was terribly abused because he had a passion for art and music and did not care for military drill. His father hated the fine arts and imprisoned the boy. He even contemplated killing his son, but his own death placed Frederick on the throne at the age of twenty-eight. This boy, who was thought good for nothing, because he loved art and music, made Prussia one of the greatest nations of Europe.

The perusal of a book, the execution of a model, or the superintendency of a water-wheel of his own construction, whirling the glittering spray from some neighboring stream, absorbed all of Isaac Newton's thoughts when a boy, whilst the sheep were going astray and the cattle were devouring or treading down the neighbors' corn. This convinced his mother that her son was not made for a farmer, as she had hoped.

How stupid and clumsy is the blinking eagle at perch, but how keen his glance, how steady and true his curves, when turning his powerful wing against the clear blue sky!

Ignorant parents compelled the boy Arkwright to become a barber's apprentice, but Nature had locked up in his brain a cunning device destined to bless humanity, and do the drudgery of millions of England's poor; so he must needs say "hands off even to his parents, as Christ said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

The parents of Michael Angelo had declared that no

son of theirs should ever follow the discreditable profession of an artist, and even punished him for covering the walls and furniture with sketches. The fire burning in his breast was kindled by the Divine Artist, and would not let him rest until he had immortalized himself in the architecture of St. Peter's, in the marble of his Moses, and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Hugh Miller's parents dedicated their son to the ministry, the Scotch poor being always anxious to have at least one son 66 wag his maw in the poopit." An uncle offered to pay his way in college, but a voice within spoke louder than his parents or uncle. The stonequarry was his college, and he preferred to hammer his education from the old red sandstone.

Galileo was set apart for a physician, but when compelled to study anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes, and stealthily work out the abstruse problems. He was but eighteen when he discovered the principle of the pendulum in the lamp left swinging in the cathedral at Pisa. He invented both the microscope and telescope, enlarging knowledge of the vast and minute alike.

Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call, haunting the boy until he laid aside his grammar for Euclid.

The father of Joshua Reynolds rebuked his son for drawing pictures, and wrote on one: "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Yet this "idle boy " became one of the founders of the Royal Academy.

Turner was intended for a barber in Maiden Lane, but became the greatest landscape-painter of modern times. Claude Lorraine, the painter, was apprenticed to a pastry-cook; Molière, the author, to an upholsterer; and Guido, the famous painter of Aurora, was sent to a music school. The Quakers called a meeting to de cide what should be done with Benjamin West, as paint