ment before a house, offered to carry them in, and was employed. He thus earned a few pence, requested some meat and drink as a gratuity, which was given him, and the pennies were laid by. Pursuing this menial labor, he earned and saved more pennies; accumulated sufficient to enable him to purchase some cattle, the value of which he understood, and these he sold to advantage. He now pursued money with a step as steady as time, and an appetite as keen as death; advancing by degrees into larger and larger transactions, until he became rich. The result was, that he more than recovered his possessions, and died an inveterate miser. When he was buried, mere earth went to earth. With a nobler spirit, the same determination might have enabled such a man to be a benefactor to others as well as to himself. But the life and its end in this case were alike sordid."

MECHANISM OF CHARACTER.

Hence it has been truly observed that it is one of the defects of business too exclusively followed, that it insensibly tends to a mechanism of character. The business man gets into a rut, and often does not look beyond it. If he lives for himself only, he becomes apt to regard other human beings only in so far as they minister to his ends. Take a leaf from the ledger of such men, and you have their life. It is against the growth of this habit of inordinate saving, that a man needs most carefully to guard himself; else, what in youth was simple economy, may in old age grow into avarice.

He who recognizes no higher logic than that of the shilling, may become a very rich man, and yet remain all the while an exceedingly poor creature. For riches are no proof whatever of moral worth; and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor, as the glowworm's light reveals the grub. Let a man be what he will, it is the mind and heart that make a man poor or rich, miserable or happy; for these are always stronger than fortune. Not only industry, honesty, frugality, perseverance amid hardships and ever-baffling discouragements, but much more miraculous attributes, as meek contentment, severe selfsacrifice, tender affections, unwavering trust in Providence, all are found blooming in the hearts of the poorest poor, even in the sunless regions of absolute destitution, where honesty might be expected to wear an everlasting scowl of churlishness, and a bitter disbelief in the love of God to accompany obedience to the laws of man.

And more than this, it is well to remember that the greatest things which have been done for the world have not been accomplished by rich men, but by men generally of small pecuniary means. Christianity was propagated over half the world by men of the poorest class; and the greatest thinkers, discoverers, inventors, and artists, have been men of moderate wealth, many of them little raised above the condition of manual laborers in point of worldly circumstances. And it will always be so. The youth who inherits wealth is apt to have life made too easy for him, and he soon grows sated with it because he has nothing left to desire. Having no special object

to struggle for, he finds time hang heavy on his hands; he remains morally and spiritually asleep; and his position in society is often no higher than that of a polypus over which the tide floats.

The highest object of life we take to be forming a manly character, and to work out the best development possible, of body and spirit,—of mind, conscience, heart, and soul. This is the end; all else ought to be regarded but as the means. Accordingly, that is not the most successful life in which a man gets the most pleasure, the most money, the most power of place, honor, or fame; but that in which a man gets the most manhood, and performs the greatest amount of useful work and of human duty. Money is power, it is true, but intelligence, character, public spirit and moral virtue are powers, too, and far nobler ones.

WEIGHT OF CHARACTER.

"There's no power

In ancestry to make the foolish wise,
The ignorant learned, the cowardly and base
Deserving our respect as brave and good.
Hence man's best riches must be gained, not given,
His noblest name deserved, and not derived."

HERE is hardly any other word in the language which means more in life, or which is more essential to all that makes life valuable, than the word character. It does not stand for any one endowment,

faculty, or gift, but it is rather the sum of all that men and women are in themselves. It does not stand for wealth, for there are many wealthy men who have no weight or strength of character. They are lifted upon a pinnacle by the force of circumstances or by the power of money, but those around and those below them see their essential hollowness and worthlessness, and see through their pretentious greatness, as though it were but transparent glass. Neither is character a synonym for intellectual ability simply, because there are very many men and women of considerable talent who have no weight of char

acter.

Character, then, may be compared to a reservoir

into which all the rills and streamlets of personal power empty themselves, forming the collected result of life's accumulations. Or, as another has said, "It is the crown and glory of life. It is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well-governed state they are its best motive power. The strength, the civil security, and the civilization of a nation, all depend upon individual character. It constitutes a rank in itself, and dignifies and exalts every station in life. It carries with it an influence which always tells."

Though a man have comparatively little culture, slender abilities, and but small wealth, yet, if his character be of sterling worth, he will always command an influence, whether it be in the workshop, the counting-house, the mart, or the senate. Canning wisely wrote in 1801, "My road must be through character to power; I will try no other course; and I am sanguine enough to believe that this course, though not perhaps the quickest, is the surest." You may admire men of intellect; but something more is necessary before you will trust them. Hence Lord John Russell once observed, in a sentence full of truth, "It is not the nature of party in England to ask the assistance of men of genius, but to follow the guidance of men of character."

Our own Franklin attributed his success as a public man, not to his talents or his powers of speaking -for these were but moderate-but to his known integrity of character. "Hence it was," says he, "that I had so much weight with my fellow-citizens.

I was