from a full mind. Alonzo Cano, the Spanish sculptor, completed a beautiful statue in twenty-five days. When the sordid merchant who had employed him wished to pay him by the day, he cried out indignantly : "Wretch! I have been at work twenty-five years learning to make this statue in twenty-five days." It cannot be too often repeated that all extraordinary skill is the result of vast preparatory training. Facility of every kind comes by labor. Nothing is easy, not even walking or reading, that was not difficult at first.

GREAT ORATORS.

America has probably produced no greater orator than Henry Clay. Though endowed with great natural gifts, he was no exception to the rule that orator fit. He attributed his success to the one single fact that, at the age of twenty-seven, he began, and continued for years, the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical and scientific book. "These off-hand efforts," he says, "were made sometimes in a corn field, at others in the forest, and not infrequently in some distant barn, with the horse and ox for my auditors. It is to this early practice in the great art of all arts, that I am indebted for the primary and leading impulses that stimulated me forward, and shaped and moulded my subsequent entire destiny. Improve, then, young gentlemen, the superior advantages you here enjoy. Let not a day pass without exercising your powers of speech. There is no power like that of oratory. Cæsar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero,

by captivating their affections, and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day." Henry Ward Beecher, when a theological student, was drilled incessantly by a skillful elocutionist in posturing, gesture, and voice culture. There was a large grove between the seminary and his father's house, and it was the habit, he tells us, of his brother Charles and himself, and one or two others, to make the night, and even the day, hideous with their voices, as they passed backward and forward through the wood, exploding all the vowels from the bottom to the very top of their voices. It is said that the greatest sermon ever preached by Dr. Lyman Beecher, the father of Henry, one of the most powerful pulpit orators in America, was one on "The Government of God." When asked, as he descended the pulpit steps, how long it took him to prepare that sermon, he replied: "About forty years, sir."

Therefore, reader of these pages, whoever you are, whether young or old, if the force and inspiration of all these examples are lost upon you, there is little left that can influence or move you. You must be either incorrigibly stupid or depraved. As you stand and look out into the world, remember there is a place for you there, and work for you to do, if you care to rouse yourself up, and go after it. As an anonymous poet has expressed it :

"There is work for all in this world of ours;

Ho! idle dreamers in sunny bowers;

Ho! giddy triflers with time and health;

Ho! covetous hoarders of golden wealth;

There is work for each, there is work for all,

In the peasant's cot or baronial hall.

"There is work for the wise and eloquent tongue,

There is work for the old, there is work for the young;
There is work that tasks manhood's strengthened zeal,
For his nature's welfare, his country's weal;
There is work that asks woman's gentle hand,

Her pitying eye, and her accents bland;
From the uttermost bounds of this earthly ball,
Is heard the loud cry, 'There is work for all.'"

LITTLE THINGS.

"Ye were but little at the first,
But mighty at the last."

T is the close observation of little things, the attention to details, which is the secret of success and of greatness in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit of life. In fact, the vast pile of human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men; these little bits of knowledge and experience at length growing into a mighty pyramid. The huge "chalk cliffs of Albion" were built by insects so small as only to be seen by the help of a microscope, and so were the coral islands. Christ said to his disciples at one time, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost." The best of" Poor Richard's" maxims, perhaps, is the one which says, "Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves."

In looking at the paintings and drawings of the old masters, one striking difference between them and the modern style of art is their conscientious nicety about little things, the almost endless dwelling upon a foot, or a hand, or a face, until it was true to

nature.

Michael Angelo was one day explaining to a visitor at his studio what he had been doing at a statue since his previous visit. "I have retouched this part, polished that, softened this feature, brought out that muscle, given some expression to this lip, and more energy to that limb." "But these are trifles," remarked the visitor. "It may be so," replied the sculptor, "but recollect that trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." Sedulous attention and painstaking industry always make the true and successful worker. Nicholas Poussin, when asked by what means he had gained so high a reputation among other painters in Italy, replied, "Because I have neglected nothing." It will be found upon examination that many, if not most of the great discoveries of the world have resulted in part from the attentive observation of little things.

Dr. Johnson once remarked to a fine gentleman who had just returned from Italy, that "some men would see and learn more in an ordinary stage-ride, than others would in making the tour of Europe." Many, before Galileo, had seen a suspended weight swing before their eyes with a measured beat; but he was the first to detect the value of the fact. One of the vergers in the cathedral at Pisa, after replenishing with oil a lamp which hung from the roof, left it swinging to and fro; and Galileo, then a youth of only eighteen, noting it attentively, conceived the idea of applying it to the measurement of time. Fifty years of study and labor, however, elapsed before he completed the invention of the pendulum, -an invention, the importance of which, in the measurement of time, and in astronomical calcula