CHAPTER XXV

THE ARMY OF THE RESERVE.

It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket.

-CERVANTES

'Tis good in every case, you know, To have two strings unto your bow. - CHURCHIILL

"In a word, learn taciturnity. Let that be your motto."

Though you had the wisdom of Newton, or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow

creatures. -BURNS.

The leaves and a shell of soft wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has made, but the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the air to draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years.- EMERSON.

There is no fault nor folly of my life which does not rise up against me, and take away my joy and shorten my power of

possession, of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me

now, to help me in my grasp of this an and its vision. - RUSKIN.

Providence is always on the side of the last reserve. - NAPOLEON I.

The man of grit carries in his presence a power which spares him the necessity of resenting insult. -E. P. WHIPPLE.

O, the toils of life

How small they seem when love's resistless tide

Sweeps brightly o'er them ! Like the scattered stones

Within a mountain streamlet, they but serve

To strike the hidden music from its flow,

And make its sparkle visible.

ANNA KATHERINE GREEN.

PHOEBUS challenged the gods, saying, “ Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo ? " “I will," said Zeus. Mars shook the lots, the first falling to Apollo, who stretched his bow and shot an arrow into the farthest west. With one stride Zeus cleared the whole distance covered by his rival's arrow, and asked, "Where shall I shoot ? There is no room." He was awarded the prize by the acclamation of the gods, although he had not even drawn his bow.

We feel that Jove must have performed a wonderful feat of archery had he chosen to exert his power to the utmost. We have a similar feeling when we listen to a great orator, or witness the deeds of any person of great culture or sterling character. Such people excite in us an anticipation far in advance of their perform. antes, and convince us by what they say or do that they could do or say immeasurably greater things.

Mirabeau was forty years old before he showed a sign of his vast knowledge and tact, his mighty reserve, and then suddenly became the greatest orator and statesman of his age. His public career lasted but twenty. three months, but in that time he did more work than most great men accomplish in as many years. " Had I not lived with him," said Dumont, “I should never have had any idea of what a man may do in a single day; what business may be transacted in the course of twelve hours. A day for this man was as much as a week or a month for another." "Impossible !" said he, jumping from his chair, when his secretary said that something was impossible, "never name to me again that blockhead's word."

It is the reserve corps of an army which enables the leader to strike the decisive blow when the critical moment arrives. It is the heavy balance-wheel of an engine which distributes the power equally and insures that steadiness of motion which prevents destructive shocks, overcoming resistance that would stop the piston unaided by the stored-up momentum. It is the knowledge, experience, and character, the mental and moral wealth which you have accumulated during your whole life, that measures your real power and influence today; as you will learn, to your satisfaction or char grin, when you are subjected to any severe trial. You can draw from your bank of learning or manhood just what you have stored there, not an ounce more. In any crisis you must stand or fall by your reserve power.

On a cold, rainy night in 1823, in the First Baptist Church of Boston, a young clergyman preached on the s' Moral Dignity of the Missionary Enterprise." The sermon seemed to awaken no interest in the mind of any of the fifty people in the congregation, and the discouraged preacher considered it a complete failure. But a printer in the audience published the sermon on account of its earnestness, and it at once attracted wide attention and had a large sale, even in England. Robert Hall read it with enthusiasm and predicted a great future for the preacher, then an obscure young man. Three years later he was elected President Wayland of Brown University.

In the latest addresses of Beecher was still felt the momentum gained in his great speeches at Manchester, Liverpool, and London. A life of struggle, of mingled defeat and triumph, rolled its undercurrent of tone to tinge the meaning and effect of Gough's ripened utterances. Forty years of conquest gave weight to the words of Webster, Choate, Disraeli, Gladstone, long after gray hairs had told of the approach of a time when their eyes should be dimmed and their natural force abated. Bismarck, out of office, has such a reserve power that even an attack of rheumatism in his feet startles Europe.

" O Iole, how did you know that Hercules was a god ? " "Because," said Iole, “I was content the moment my eyes fell upon him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, but Hercules did not wait for a contest: he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did."

"One day," said a noted rope-walker, "I signed an agreement to wheel a barrow along a rope on a given day. A day or two before I was seized with lumbago. I called in my medical man, and told him I must be cured by a certain day; not only because I should lose what I hoped to earn, but also forfeit a large sum.

"I got no better, and the doctor forbade my getting up. I told him, I What do I want with your advice ? you cannot cure me, of what good is your advice ?' "When I got to the place, there was the doctor protesting I was unfit for the exploit. I went on, though I felt like a frog with my back. I got ready my pole and my barrow, took hold of the handles and wheeled it along the rope as well as I ever did. When I got to the end I wheeled it back again, and when this was done I was a frog again. What made me that I could wheel the barrow ? It was my reserve-will."

"It is marvelous, Monsieur le President," said the Paris correspondent of the London "Times," to Thiers, "how you deliver long improvised speeches about which you have not had time to reflect." "You are not paying me a compliment," replied the President of the French republic; "it is criminal in a statesman to improvise speeches on public affairs. The speeches you call improvised- why, for fifty years I have been rising at five in the morning to prepare them !"

"The preparation for my reply to Hayne," said Webster, “ was made upon the occasion of Mr. Foote's resolution to sell the public lands. Some years before that, a senator from Alabama introduced a resolution into the Senate proposing to cede the public domains to the State in which they were situated. It struck me at that time as being so unfair and improper that I immediately prepared an article to resist it. My argument embraced the whole history of the public lands and the government's action in regard to them. Then there was another question involved in the Hayne debate. It was as to the right and practice of petition. Mr. Calhoun denied the right of petition on the subject of slavery. Calhoun's doctrine seemed to be accepted, and I made preparation to answer his proposition. It so happened that the debate did not take place. I had my notes tucked away in a pigeon-hole, and when Hayne made that attack upon me and upon New England, I was already posted, and only had to take down my notes, and refresh my memory. In other words, if he had tried to make a speech to fit my notes, he would not have hit it better. No man is inspired with the occasion. I never was."

“I should think, if you can't break that block in ten blows, you can't do it in a hundred," said Robert Waters to a brawny-armed quarryman who had struck forty blows with a sledge on a huge piece of granite, all apparently in vain. "Oh, yes," said the workman, "every blow tells;" and soon the granite fell asunder.

"We marvel at the skill which enables a great artist to take a little color that lies inert upon his palette - a little gray and brown and white-and presently to so I transfigure it into a living presence that our hearts throb faster only to look upon it, and there come upon the soul all those influences which one feels beneath the shadow of the Jungfrau or the Matterhorn, or amid the awful solitudes of Mont Blanc. But back of that apparent ease and skill are the years of struggle and effort and application which have conferred the envied power."

“What though the fire bursts forth at length," said Dr. Dewey, “ like volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force ? It only shows the intenser action of the elements beneath. What though it breaks like lightning from the cloud ? The electric force had been collecting in the firmament through many a silent, calm, and clear day."

You cannot blaze forth in action when an occasion is presented unless the fire has long been smouldering within you. It is with a feeling akin to awe that we gaze upon a huge iceberg towering aloft in solitary grandeur, regardless alike of storm or calms, and responsive only to the deep currents of the ocean. How majestically it sweeps along, how gently it flushes aside the bubble in its path, yet how resistlessly
it crushes the stoutest frigate, as if it were an eggshell. How it reminds us of the steady ponderous career of a great man. But remember that the iceberg is able to hold thus to its stately course only because seven eighths of its bulk is below the waves that make ineffectual tumult around it. So the weight and force of character of great men are hidden from the casual beholder.

A glass-blower will not try to teach difficult processes to any one who has not been engaged in the business from childhood. He must have the reserve which years of practice give.

"I treasure," says Robert Collyer, of New York, "a small drawing by Millais. It is the figure of a woman bound fast to a pillar far within tide-mark. The sea is curling its waves about her feet. A ship is passing in full sail, but not heeding her or her doom. Birds of prey are hovering about her; but she heeds not the birds, or the ship, or the sea. Her eyes look right on, and her feet stand firm, and you see that she is looking directly into heaven, and telling her soul how the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed. I treasure it because, when I look at it, it seems a type of a great host of women who watch and wait, tied fast to their fate, while the tide creeps up about them, but who rise as the waves rise, and on the crest of the last and the loftiest are borne into the quiet haven, and hear the ' Well done !'"

"It appears to me," said Rear-Admiral Hamilton of the British navy, referring to Farragut's prompt order for the fleet to move on in spite of the torpedoes that had just sunk the Tecumseh in Mobile Bay, "that a disastrous defeat was converted into victory by (in so unexpected a contingency) the quickness of eye and power of rapid decision Farragut possessed, which, saw at a glance the only escape from the dilemma the fleet was placed in, and which can only be acquired by
a thorough practical knowledge is the management of fleets, and for want of which no amount of theoretical knowledge, however desirable in many respects, can make up in the moment of difficulty." The knowledge and skill and character acquired in a lifetime of faithful performance of duty constituted a reserve fund upon which he drew heavily but not in vain when his opportunity came.

What star ever shone with purer light, or commanded more admiration, in the brilliant court of France, than the plain, republican, but cultivated, Benjamin Franklin ? Who ever rose to higher influence in the political circles of proud England than Cromwell, Eldon, Burke, Canning, and Brougham ? To what did they owe their vast influence but to great intellectual reserve power, developed by slow and toilsome cultivation ?

"Where did you get that story, Mr. Webster?" asked a man who had been deeply impressed by an anecdote related by the great orator. "I have had it laid up in my head for fourteen years, and never had a chance to use it until today," was the reply.

When the Franco-Prussian war was declared, it is said that Von Moltke was awakened at midnight and told of the fact. He said coolly to the official who aroused him, " Go to pigeon-hole. No. - in my safe, take a paper from it, and telegraph as there directed to the different troops of the empire." He then turned over and went to sleep, and awoke at his accustomed hour in the morning. Every one else in Berlin was much excited, but Von Moltke took his morning walk as usual, and a friend who met him said: " General, you seem to be taking it very easy. Aren't you afraid of the situation ? I should think you would be busy." "Ah," replied Von Moltke, "all of my work for this time has been done long beforehand and everything that can be done now has been done." Moltke had been diligently storing up a vast reserve for half a century, waiting for his opportunity, which did not come until his hair was gray.

When Napoleon unrolls his map, the eye is commanded by original power. When Chatham leads the debate, men may well listen, because they must listen. A man filled with the stored-up momentum acquired from years of careful preparation, is acting; and the ephemera of the moment, as they are brushed from his path, wonder at his enormous influence.

Washington, even while undergoing the tortures of Valley Forge, was persecuted and maligned. Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote Patrick Henry that the soldiers at Valley Forge had no head. "A Gates, a Lee, or a Conway," he wrote, "would in a few weeks render them an invincible body of men." Some of the contents of this letter ought to be made public, in order to awaken, enlighten, and alarm our country." But the brave Washington bore all this abuse in dignified silence. What a mighty reserve power he possessed in his great commanding character !

Napoleon said of Massena that he was never himself until ruin stared him in the face. Then the sight of the dead and the groans of the dying nerved him to almost superhuman energy, and he marshaled his mighty army of the reserve to the front with a will that sent terror to the hearts of the enemy.

At the very time that Luther and his followers were making such headway in Europe in opposing the Church of Rome, Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier, formed the order of Jesuits for the purpose of promulgating the tenets of Catholicism. No obstacle was too great to be overcome, no land too distant to be reached, no danger too appalling to be encountered. In India, China, Japan, their zealous preaching made hosts of converts; in Paraguay they proselyted 200,000 natives; and in North America they traveled from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Isthmus of Panama. The world was large
enough for both Luther and Loyola, and the reserve of character in each enabled him to do great work in his own way.

After singing, as never before sung, the sublime music of the greatest masters to an audience of twenty thousand in Castle Garden, New York, the Swedish Nightingale thought of the hills of her fatherland. In the low tones of deepest emotion she breathed the words, - "'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam," but as her voice thrilled to the souls of the listening thousands, she was suddenly silenced by a storm of applause, while tears fell like rain throughout the vast assembly.

"I intend to do well by Ben Lippincott," was a frequent remark of Stephen Girard, when speaking of a favorite clerk; so, when he was twenty-one, Ben expected to hear from the great banker. But Girard seemed to talk of everything else, so the clerk mustered courage, and said, "I suppose I am free, sir, and I thought I would say something to you as to my course ; what do you think I would better do ? " " Yes, I know you are," said the millionaire; "and my advice is that you go and learn the cooper's trade." This was like ice to Ben's budding expectation, but he said, " If you are in earnest, I will do so." “I am in earnest," was Girard's only reply. Seeking the best cooper in Spring Garden, Ben served his apprenticeship faithfully, and reported that he was ready to begin business. "Good," said Girard, " make me three of the best barrels you can turn out.” When they were delivered, the banker pronounced them first-rate, and asked the price. " One dollar," said Ben, “ is as low as I can live by." “Cheap enough-make out your bill." Girard settled that bill with a check for twenty thousand dollars, saying, "There, take that, and invest it in the best possible manner; and if you are unfortunate and lose it, you have a good trade to fall back upon, which will afford you a good living."

You wonder what is the use of this thing or that which your parents or teachers ask you to learn. Some time you may need that very thing. It may be ten years, or twenty, before you find the right place for it; but it will most likely be just what you will want, sooner or later. If you don't have it, you will be like the hunter who had no ball in his rifle when a bear met him, or like a captain who suddenly remembered on a lee shore that he had left his cable and anchor at home.

"Twenty-five years ago my teacher made me study surveying," said a man who had lost his property, "and now I am glad of it. It is just in place. I can get a good situation and a high salary."

" He who rises earlier than his competitor," said David Dudley Field, " and works more hours, within the limits of healthful endurance, will carry off the prize" The reserve time thus gained, if only an hour a day, will amount to nearly three years out of the threescore and ten vouchsafed to man.

" When I was a freshman in Williams College," said James A. Garfield, "I looked out one night and saw in the window of my only competitor for first place in mathematics a light twinkling a few minutes longer than I was wont to keep mine burning. I then and there determined to invest a little more time in preparation for the next day's recitation. I did so, and passed above my rival. I smile today at the old rivalry, but I am thankful for the way my attention was called to the value of a little margin of time, well employed. I have since learned that it is just such a margin, whether of time or attention or earnestness or power, that wins in every battle, great or small."

Garfield always had a book at table, and would ask his boys, as they sat about him in the home at Mentor how they pronounced certain words and what the definitions were. He asked them to quote from this and that great author, and in a sentence to serve up their opinions concerning eminent men and women.

Garfield was said to be only one of a very few who kept up their literary studies while in Washington. He never did so well but it seemed he could easily do better. As Trevelyan said of his Parliamentary hero, Garfield succeeded because all the world could not have kept him in the background, and because once in the front he played his part with an intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the outward symptoms of the immense reserve of energy on which it was in his power to draw.

“If I hear that my opponent has worked the wrist-machine up and down three hundred and ninety-nine times," said James J. Corbett, "I try to go A few better. If he jumps the rope half an hour steadily, I try to make it an hour." This man became the pugilistic champion of the world.

A statue of Silence, with finger on its lip, has a marvelous effect upon every visitor to a library in Cincinnati. Its power is felt as soon as the eye rests upon it. " Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; Speech is human, Silence, divine." There is often a power in silence which no speech can equal.

"Is there not something sublime," asks a newspaper, in a hydraulic crane which lifts a Titanic engine of destruction weighing a hundred tons to a considerable height with as noiseless a calm and as much absence of apparent stress or strain as if it had been a boy soldier's pop-gun ? When we further read of the hydraulic monster holding up its terrible burden motionless in mid-air until it is photographed, and then lowering it gently and quietly on a sort of extemporized cradle without the least appearance of difficulty, one can readily understand that the mental impression produced on the bystanders must have been so solemn as to manifest itself in most eloquent silence." In an English machine-shop the power of the engine is so stored in the momentum of a ponderous balance-wheel that, directed by a huge cam, it drives a punch through one, two, or three inches of steel as if it were so much wax, without perceptible hesitation or tremor. Visitors look on in speechless awe.

It is said that on the single evening Emerson spent at Craigenputtoch in 1833, Carlyle handed him a pipe, lighted one himself, and then the two sat silent until midnight, when they parted, shaking hands and congratulating each other upon the pleasant evening they had passed.

"The silent man is often worth listening to," says the Japanese proverb.

" That is my speech! That is my speech! " said the sculptor Story, each time touching his statue of George Peabody, at whose unveiling in London he was asked to make an address.

Every great orator feels but too conscious that he has never been able to express to his audience the rapture which fired his soul. He feels an immense loss in the translation of the divine sentiment which wrought ecstasy in his own soul. The author, too, sees visions which the pen refuses to copy or describe. In plucking the flower, the perfume is lost.

To one admiring his statue, the Flemish sculptor Duquesne said, pointing to his forehead, "Ah ! if you could but see the one which is here!" Voltaire said that he never wrote anything which satisfied him, there was such a discrepancy between his ideal and what he accomplished. Vergil wished to burn the Aeneid after working upon it for eleven years.

The artist cannot transfer to canvas the most delicate touches of nature upon the human face. There is an indescribable something which all feel but no poet can portray. The finest part of a landscape is never delineated. The writer cannot draw from his brain his
choicest sentiments. They elude the pen and will not stay in words. They evaporate from the choicest language and will not allow themselves to be expressed. But they are suggested to us in the works of the masters, and it is in this suggestive force of their productions rather than in what they have really done or said that their remarkable power lies:

Tears cannot drain the deepest sorrow. Words cannot express the finest sentiments of the heart.

It is roughly estimated that the steam-power of Great Britain is equal to the united strength of 1,000,000,000 men. The number of persons employed in her coal mines is but 200,000, and of these fully two thirds dig coal for other uses than for engines, leaving 66,666 men to mine the coal necessary to do the work of 1,000,000,000. The engines are made by 60,000 men, so that 126,666 men furnish the means of doing the work of 1,000,000,000, the strength of each being thus multiplied nearly eight thousand times. This gives to each man, woman, and child of a population of 35,000,000, some thirty willing slaves, born fully grown, exempt from sickness, needing no clothes, eating only fire and water, and costing merely the work of one man in eight thousand. It is this reserve power of steam which makes certain the supremacy of Britain in the industrial contest with such countries as Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India, Jamaica, China, and Japan. Herein lies the real reserve which reinforces her bayonets in every war she wages.

Too late, Napoleon learned this at St. Helena, saying, " Great Britain conquered me not with her swords but with her spindles; with her spindles she subsidized all Europe, and here I am." He was right, but the real power was in the steam-engines that drove those spindles, and that energy, obtained from the coal, really came from tiny sunbeams stored up ages ago in the leaves and stems of plants.

Pitt, with all his lavish expenditures:

could not squander the wealth of Great Britain as fast as it was created by the genius of Watt, long since dead. It is industry at home that makes legions victorious abroad. A nation with such a reservoir of capital is like a Niagara river with its chain of inland seas behind, and sweeps everything before it in the cataract of war. Only when it meets a greater reserve, like the spirit of liberty in the breasts of the American colonists, is it swept backward, even as the winds sometimes roll the waters of Lake Erie back upon themselves, and for a time lessen the power of Niagara.

He who has occupied his leisure moments in earnest, faithful study, will have large stores in reserve upon which to draw in any emergency. After his answer to Hayne, Webster is reported to have said, "I felt as if everything I had ever seen or read or heard was floating before me in one grand panorama, and I had little else to do than to reach up and cull a thunderbolt and hurl it at him." It was his custom in studying to devote all his faculties to the work before him until he felt fatigue, and then rest. In this way he acquired the power of doing in one day what would seem a hard week's work to many able lawyers.

Back of the preparation for any career should lie the habit of wholeness of mind and conscience which can alone insure the highest success in that career. Opie mixed his colors with brains. Hugh Miller said that the mason of whom he learned his trade put his whole soul into every brick that he laid. Of Francis Horner, a man of medium ability but of unequaled influence, it was said that the Ten Commandments were stamped upon his countenance. Such men of steadfast character in all trials are "like great ships upon November seas, when winds are gruff and waters in rebellion.

While other men, like fishing smacks and shallops, crank and unsteady, must watch each flaw and gust of wind lest suddenly they be caught and whelmed, these spread a bellying sail upon a moveless yard, and heedless of cross-currents drive onward to their home."

What reserve power to bless or ban lies in the affections and passions of man! Even brutes show the might of love and gratitude or their opposites. Androcles hid himself in a cave, where he saw a lion which seemed very lame. Walking up to he beast, he gently lifted his paw, and took out a splinter. The animal seemed very grateful. Later, Androcles was captured and delivered to wild beasts in the arena of the Colosseum. A lion let loose to devour him sprang forward with a hollow roar, but recognized Androcles as one who had relieved his suffering, and fawned at his feet.

"Gentlemen," said one of three ladies, rudely bantered by one hundred and fifty young men while all were waiting the tardy arrival of the lecturer at a medical clinic, "I have been for eighteen years a missionary in China. The Chinese have no medical science, and superstitious rites are chiefly relied on in the treatment of disease. All the people are in need of medical aid, but the women are the neediest. A Chinese woman would under no circumstances go to a male physician for the treatment of any disease peculiar to her sex. She would be prevented by her womanly delicacy, and by all the notions of modesty held by those around her. She would suffer lifelong agony rather than violate her sense of propriety. Her father, her brothers, and her husband would even let her die rather than allow her to be treated by a male physician. Full of sorrow for the sufferings of these women, I have been looking to Christian America to see what hope of help for them might be there. I have been glad to find that, in some of our great medical schools, earnest and self-sacrificing women are fitting themselves for a work of mercy in Asia and other lands. Unless such women learn to do such work well there is no physical salvation for those afflicted ones. And in behalf of those women, who have no medical care while they so sorely need it, I ask from you the courtesy of gentlemen toward ladies who are studying medicine in Philadelphia.” A cheer from the young men followed the remarks, and one student assured the ladies that they should be annoyed no more. The native manliness of the youths was a corps in reserve which, when called upon, conquered all their coarseness and vulgarity.

There is a reserve in every man greater than anything he ever exhibits. There is a hero in the biggest coward which an emergency great and critical enough would call forth. Heroic acts are just what every man intends to perform.

The memory of misspent years should not hang like a millstone about your neck; so long as you have a desire for better things, you still have in reserve, greater or less in proportion to the earnestness of your aspiration, the very power you need in attaining what you seek. Thousands of bad boys have changed their course radically and become good and useful men. The ablest cardinal and statesman of France in his day was known as the incorrigible boy Richelieu. Mazarin, when young, was a reckless gambler. Dumas was a worthless, idle boy. St. Augustine was called a reprobate when a boy. Whitefield, the great preacher, was a thief when young, and his mother kept a public-house. President Thiers was the worst pupil in school; he would strike his teacher when angry, and no punishment awed him. All at once he changed his course, and determined to become a great statesman, although he was very poor. Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

He who does his best will find himself aided at an unexpected moment by another self in reserve, the reflex action of the brain. Many a mathematician, falling asleep in a vain effort to solve some intricate problem, has awakened to find the solution at his tongue's end

On the plains of Ephesus, Chersiphoron had placed the solid jambs on either side of the door to the temple of Artemis, and had exhausted every expedient trying to place thereon the ponderous lintel, when, in sleep, the goddess told him his work was done, and he awoke to find it so.

From the grave of every martyr emanates an influence greater far than he ever exerted in life. "The cause thou fightest for," says Carlyle, "so far as it is true, no further, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory. The falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it ought to be; but the truth of it is part of Nature's own laws, cooperates with the world's eternal tendencies, and cannot be conquered."

Nature works continually by utilizing reserves. Nothing is ever lost in the material or spiritual world. Our fires today give back in heat and light the exact amount absorbed by tree or plant from the sun ages ago. The present generation is fed by the decomposition of the preceding.

The best of every man's work is above and beyond himself, and is accomplished in the struggle to attain a lofty ideal. The artist stands aside and points through his work to a glimpse of the universal art. In his inspired moments the individuality of the orator is melted and fused into the all-pervading fire of eloquence. The gods will help us, but we must go their way. We must move along the line of absolute truth or they will leave us to our own devices. Amid the alternating high and low barometer, gloom and gayety, enthusiasm and discouragement, freshness and fatigue of our physical and mental environment, we cannot always be at our best.

But tasks in hours of sunshine willed May be through hours of gloom fulfilled."

"How strange it seems," said W. J. Tilley, "that some of the most wonderful and most useful inventions in the world today were apparently lying in ambush beside the very pathway where thousands of human feet have trod, and remained, for years, all undiscovered and unknown." They waited but for an eye that could see nature's vast reserves.

Men have groped in physical darkness for ages while walking above untold barrels of petroleum, and have crossed oceans to carry messages which a slender wire would have delivered in a minute. Muscle has been hewing wood and drawing water, while coal and electricity have tried in vain to tell us that they were destined to emancipate man from the world's drudgery and allow him to develop his higher powers.

We call a man like Shakespeare a genius, not because he makes new discoveries, but because he shows us to ourselves; shows us the great reserve in us which, like the oil-fields, awaited a discoverer; because he says that which we had thought or felt, but could not express. Genius merely holds the glass up to nature. We can never see in the world what we do not first have in our. selves. The hemisphere of our vision is really the dome enshrining our minds, and is greater or less according to the sweep of our thought, even as without or within any circumference other circumferences may be drawn without change of centre. Man is the whole of which all the things he sees without are but parts, -segments of a curve which circle themselves in his own soul. We see but the shadow of which we are the substance. Emerson says that "the god of a cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusader a crusader, and of the merchant a merchant.” Beneath its apparent levity there is a vital truth in Andrew Jackson Davis's saying that an honest God is the noblest work of man; for our ideals show what we are.

Not least among our forces in reserve are those which come from that "facility and inclination, acquired by repetition," which we call habit. Any occupation its easiest to him who has familiarized himself with its processes by repeated practice, and he who has become most familiar with those processes is most likely to succeed therein. As men acquire greater and greater skill in the various trades or professions, it becomes more and more difficult for one to do many kinds of work in a satisfactory manner, in competition with others. Jacks-of-all-trades are becoming scarcer as we advance in civilization. We must concentrate our energies to definite purposes in proportion as we wish to excel. “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided," said Patrick Henry, " and that is the lamp of experience." Even the most refined civilization would be impossible but for the reserves of rugged men of ruder manners from which to constantly recruit its ever wasting forces.

In 1806, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country that came to town day before yesterday that is city and court today. The country is the great reserve of civilization.

Not what men do, but what their lives promise and prophesy, gives hope to the race. To keep us from discouragement, Nature now and then sends us a Washington, a Lincoln, a Bossuth, a Gladstone, towering above his fellows, to show us she has spot lost her ideal.

We enter upon life with a physical reserve called the vital force, a mental reserve known as enterprise, and, above all, a moral reserve of conscience, from con, - with," and scio, "I know;" literally, what we know with God. " Endeavor to keep alive in your breast," said Washington, "that spark of heavenly fire called conscience." This inward monitor is akin to that instinct which prompts the bird to seek the South as a refuge from the winter that would kill it; which per.-
suades the squirrel to bury nuts and the bee to store honey to keep them alive when trees are bare and flowers are dead. Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished. Every one is conscious that there are little demons in the background of his life which only wait an opportunity to come forward and disgrace him; such as fault-finding, envy, hatred, slander, irritability, sarcasm, back-biting, and revenge. These are microbes or germs which lie dormant in the character until the moral health-line is so reduced that they develop in the filth and miasma of a degraded soul. On the other hand, the consciousness of the grand reserve of a noble past gives confidence and strength today. The memory of the good we have done inspires and encourages us to worthy endeavor.

The whole creation thunders the Ten Commandments. The very atoms seem to have been dipped in a moral solution. There is a moral tendency in the nature of things. It looks out of the flowers, it shines from the stars. It grows in the forest, it waves in the grass, it laughs in the harvest. Each form of existence brings from the unseen its own little lesson of wisdom, goodness, power, design, and points to something higher than itself, the great Author of its magnificence. But while we see this moral tendency in the works of nature, we find this great moral reserve strongly emphasized in man, who has a sort of instinctive faith that somehow, somewhere, nature will rid herself of the last crime, and restore the lost Paradise of Eden.

"These rules were writ in human hearts, By Him who built the day, The columns of the universe No firmer based than they."

Man finds himself on a limitless ocean with no knowledge of whence he came or whither he shall go. All he knows is, that a Hand he has never seen has traced the Golden Rule upon his heart, hung a chart in his soul, and placed a compass in his hand. He is also conscious of a pilot at the helm, never seen but always there; an angel commissioned at his birth to pilot his frail bark across the uncertain waters of life, and that consciousness is his reserve power.

We may try to stifle the voice of the mysterious angel within, but it always says " Yes " to right actions, and "No" to wrong ones. No matter whether we heed it or not, no power can change its decision one iota. Through health, through disease, through prosperity and adversity, beyond the reach of bribery or influence, this faithful servant stands behind us in the shadow of ourselves, never intruding, but weighing every act we perform, every word we utter, pronouncing the verdict “right" or "wrong."

"Virtue has resources buried in itself, which we know not," says Bulwer, "till the invading hour calls them from their retreats. Surrounded by hosts without, and when Nature itself, turned traitor, is its most deadly enemy within, it assumes a new and a superhuman power which is greater than Nature itself. Whatever be its creed-whatever be its sect-from whatever segment of the globe its visions arise, Virtue is God's empire, and from this throne of thrones He will defend it.

Though cast into the distant earth, and struggling on the dim arena of a human heart, all things above are spectators of its conflict, or enlisted in its cause. The angels have their charge over it-the banners of archangels are on its side, and from sphere to sphere, through the illimitable ether, and round the impenetrable darkness at the feet of God, its triumph is hymned by harps which are strung to the glories of the Creator ! "

In London, June, 1801, Benedict Arnold sits dying. In response to a feeble request, the attendant aids him to don a faded Continental uniform. The shadow of death hovers above the execrated traitor, and mortal pangs rack his emaciated frame; but no sigh or groan comes from his bloodless lips, for his glazing eyes are fixed upon those treasured garments and his mind is busy with the past. Shoulder to shoulder he stands with Allen at Ticonderoga. Through the trackless northern wilderness he leads his determined band, and his haughty voice summons astonished Quebec to surrender. The woods of Valcour Island reverberate with the thunders of his cannon, and from his strategy at Fort Schuyler the dusky hosts of St. Leger scatter like dry leaves before the hurricane. At Stillwater, in September, his spirit animates the army which Horatio Gates commands; and up Bemis Heights in October his coal-black steed leads to glorious victory over the far-famed legionaries of Burgoyne. Treason and disgrace are forgotten, neglect and injury forgiven; honored and respected

he stands once more a giant among his brother officers in the cause of liberty; and thus, while reenacting bygone scenes, his spirit passes from earth.

Oh, the reserve power of noble thoughts - of noble deeds! Not subsequent misery nor crime, not degradation, not death itself, can rob them of their influence upon us; and through the long future of eternity whatever is ours of ecstasy will be augmented, whatever is ours of agony will be diminished, by their recollection and their reward.