have been printed in no scientific journal.

I have called these Hints WEAR and TEAR, because this title clearly and
briefly points out my meaning. _Wear_ is a natural and legitimate result
of lawful use, and is what we all have to put up with as the result of
years of activity of brain and body. _Tear_ is another matter: it comes
of hard or evil usage of body or engine, of putting things to wrong
purposes, using a chisel for a screw-driver, a penknife for a gimlet.
Long strain, or the sudden demand of strength from weakness, causes
tear. Wear comes of use; tear, of abuse.

The sermon of which these words are the text has been preached many
times in many ways to congregations for whom the Dollar Devil had always
a more winning eloquence. Like many another man who has talked wearily
to his fellows with an honest sense of what they truly need, I feel how
vain it is to hope for many earnest listeners. Yet here and there may be
men and women, ignorantly sinning against the laws by which they should
live or should guide the lives of others, who will perhaps be willing to
heed what one unbiased thinker has to say in regard to the dangers of
the way they are treading with so little knowledge as to where it is
leading.

The man who lives an out-door life--who sleeps with the stars visible
above him--who wins his bodily subsistence at first hand from the earth
and waters--is a being who defies rain and sun, has a strange sense of
elastic strength, may drink if he likes, and may smoke all day long, and
feel none the worse for it. Some such return to the earth for the means
of life is what gives vigor and developing power to the colonist of an
older race cast on a land like ours. A few generations of men living in
such fashion store up a capital of vitality which accounts largely for