"It is probable that you will get the chance of a few lessons; do not by
preference accept the easier and more lucrative, but rather the more
difficult, even when the subject is one of which as yet you know nothing.
The self-esteem which will not allow one's true character to be seen is a
powerful aid to the will. Do not forget the method of Jules Janin, running
from house to house in Paris for a few wretched lessons in Latin: 'Unable
to get anything out of my stupid pupils, with the besotted son of the
marquis I was simultaneously pupil and professor: I explained the ancient
authors to myself, and so, in a few months, I went through an excellent
course of rhetoric...'

"Above all you must not be discouraged; time is nothing provided the will
is always alert, always active, and never distracted; 'strength will come
as you travel.'

"Try only for a few days this method of working, in which the whole energy,
concentrated on one point, explodes like a mine and shatters obstacles; try
for a few days the force of patience, strength, and perseverance; and you
will see that nothing is impossible!" (2/4.)

These serious reflections show very clearly that his mind was already as
mature, as earnest, and as concentrated as it was ever to be.

Not only did he join example to precept; he looked about him and began to
observe nature in her own house. The doings of the Mason-bee, which he
encountered for the first time, aroused his interest to such a pitch that,
being no longer able to constrain his curiosity, he bought--at the cost of
what privations!--Blanchard's "Natural History of the Articulata," then a
classic work, which he was to re-read a hundred times, and which he still