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

Do you know what you
Why, you have taken

employ yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single word. have been doing all this time? 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!

"But I'm good for something," pleaded a young man whom a merchant was about to discharge for his bluntness. "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

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 speci mens, 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 30 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 arti ficial advice and unnatural education, and compel it to