of Salamis, each put his own name first, graciously according to
Themistocles, the real hero of the day, the second rank.

Not a few come to know themselves only through failures and
disappointments. Strangers to their own defects--perhaps also to their
own powers--they see how they might have succeeded only when success is
finally forfeited. Their eyes open too late. A Southern orator tells of
a little colored lad who very much wished to have a kitten from a
newborn litter, and whose mistress promised that, as soon as they wer
old enough, he should take one. Too impatient to wait, he slyly carried
one off to his hut. Its eyes were not open, and, in disgust, he drowned
it. But, subsequently finding the kitten lying in the pail dead, but
with open eyes, he exclaimed, "Umph! When you's alive, you's blind. Now
you's dead, you see!" It will be a real calamity to us if our eyes only
open when it is too late to make our life of any use.

All true life-power has a basis of high _moral integrity_. Far higher in
the scale than any life of impulse, passion, or even opinion,
is the life regulated by principle. The end of life is something more
than pleasure. Man is not a piece of vitalized sponge, to absorb all
into himself. The essentials of happiness are something to love,
something to hope for, something to do--affection, aspiration, action.

We must also educate our dispositions. Some one has said: "Disposition
is a lens through which men and things are seen. A fiery temper, like a
red glass, gives to all objects a lurid glare; a melancholic temper,
like a blue lens, imparts its own hue; through the green spectacles of
jealousy every one else becomes an object of distrust and dislike; and
he who looks through the black glass of malice, finds others wearing the
aspect of his own malevolence. Only the cheerful and charitable soul