"HABITS." "Habit at first is but a silken thread, Fine as the light-winged gossamers that sway A lion's whelp that hath not scented prey; A little smiling child obedient led. Beware! that thread may bind thee as a chain; That streamlet gather to a fatal sea; That sapling spread into a gnarled tree; That thorn, grown hard, may wound and give thee pain; That child, a giant, crush thee 'neath his heel." E come now to personal habits which are essential to business success. Habits of all kinds play a more important part in human life than most people realize. What is done once and again, soon becomes a kind of second nature from which it is almost impossible to break Lord Brougham said in reference to the training of youth, "I trust everything under God to habit, on which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance; habit, which makes everything easy, and away. casts the difficulties upon the deviation from a wonted course." Character is always weakest where it has once given way, just as a water-dyke is most treacherous where the current has once broken through. A principle restored can never become as strong as one that has never been moved. In fact, principles themselves are but the names which we give to habits, for the principles are but words, while the habits are the things in reality. The small acts of life, taken singly, are like the snowflakes which fall one by one, but when accumulated, they constitute the resistless avalanche. Montaigne, in one of his essays, says of custom or habit, "She is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage nor the power so much as to lift up our eyes." The habit at first may seem no stronger than a spider's web, but when once rooted and formed it becomes a chain of iron. "Remember," said Lord Collingwood to a young man, "before you are fiveand-twenty, you must establish a character that will serve or ruin you for life." Even happiness may become a matter of habit, that is, a man can accustom himself to look upon the bright or upon the dark side of things. Dr. Johnson said that the habit of looking upon the best side of things was worth to a man, more than a thousand pounds a year. Old men, accustomed to certain ways in life, find it exceedingly difficult to change those ways. Thus Lord Kames tells of a man who, having relinquished the sea for a country life, reared in the corner of his garden an artificial mound with a level summit, resembling most accurately a quarter-deck, not only in shape, but in size, where he generally walked. When Franklin was superintending the erection of some forts on the frontier, as a defense against the Indians, he slept at night in a blanket on the hard floor, and, on his first return to civilized life, could hardly sleep in a bed. Captain Ross and his crew, having been accustomed during their polar wanderings to lie on the frozen snow, or on the bare rock, afterward found the accommodations of a whaler too luxurious for them, and he was obliged to exchange his hammock for a chair. METHOD. Among good business habits, method holds an important place. In the past ages, before the invention of the steam-engine and the electric telegraph, when commerce had a narrow range, but few faculties of the mind were called into play by business; but today, when submarine cables are making of the whole world a whispering gallery, and the fluctuations of one market are felt in every other, when so varied a knowledge and so constant a watchfulness are necessary to success, method becomes doubly important. In fact, there is hardly any kind of business which does not demand system. Commissioners of insolvency say that the books of nine bankrupts out of ten are always found to be in a perfect muddlekept without plan or method. It is easy enough to sneer at "red tape" and formality, but "an intelligent method, which surveys the whole work before it, and assigns the several parts to distinct times and agents, which adapts itself to exigencies, and keeps ever in its eye the object to be attained, is one of the most powerful instruments of human labor. The professional or business man who despises it will never do anything well. It matters not how clever or brilliant he is, or how fertile in expedients, if he works without system, catching up whatever is nearest at hand, or trying to do half a dozen things at once, he will sooner or later come to grief." The importance of system in the discharge of daily duties was strikingly illustrated in the experience of Dr. Kane when he was locked up among the icebergs of the Arctic Circle, with the prospect of months of dreary imprisonment. With his men enfeebled by disease and privations, and when all but eight of his company had left him to search for a way of escape, he sustained the drooping spirits of the handful who clung to him, and kept up their energies, by a systematic performance of duties and moral discipline. "It is," he observes, "the experience of every man who has either combated difficulties himself or attempted to guide others through them, that the controlling law shall be systematic action. Nothing depresses and demoralizes so much as a surrender of the approved and habitual forms of life. I resolved that everything should go on as it had done. The arrangement of hours, the distribution and details of duty, the religious exercises, the ceremonials of the table, the fires, the lights, the watch, the labors of the observatory, and the notation of the tides and the sky, nothing should be intermitted that had contributed to make up the day." William Cecil afterward, Lord Burleigh, said of method, it is like packing things in a box; a good packer will get in half as much again as a bad one." Cecil's dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, "The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once; one thing at once;" and he never left a thing undone when it could be attended to at the He would rather encroach on his hours for time. De Witt's If I have meals than omit any part of his work. maxim also was; "One thing at a time. dispatches to make, I think of nothing else until they are finished; if other affairs demand my attention, I give myself wholly to them until done. Besides this, all peculiarly important affairs should be attended to in person. An indolent country gentleman in England had a freehold estate producing about five hundred a year. Becoming involved in debt, he sold half of the estate, and let the remainder to an industrious farmer for twenty years. About the end of the term the farmer called to pay his rent, and asked the owner whether he would sell the farm. "Will you buy it?" asked the owner, surprised. “Yes, if we can agree about the price." "That is exceedingly strange," observed the gentleman; "pray, tell me how it happens that while I could not live upon twice as much land, for which I paid no rent, you are regularly paying me two hundred a year for your farm, and are able, in a few years, to purchase it." "The reason is plain," was the reply; "you sat still and said Go; I got up and said Come; you laid in bed and enjoyed your estate, I rose in the |