day, and in no matter what place. The exercise is a very convenient
one. If you got into your morning train with a pair of dumb-bells
for your muscles or an encyclopaedia in ten volumes for your
learning, you would probably excite remark. But as you walk in the
street, or sit in the corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or
"strap-hang" on the Subterranean, who is to know that you are
engaged in the most important of daily acts? What asinine boor can
laugh at you?

I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate.
It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts.
But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and
concentrate on something useful. I suggest--it is only a
suggestion--a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know nothing more
"actual," more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the
daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose,
and nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Read a chapter--
and so short they are, the chapters!--in the evening and
concentrate on it the next morning. You will see.

Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the fact.
I can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear. You are saying to
yourself: "This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh
chapter. He had begun to interest me faintly. But what he says
about thinking in trains, and concentration, and so on, is not for
me. It may be well enough for some folks, but it isn't in my line."

It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you. Indeed, you