motions of their private life. The man who is slipshod and thoughtless
in his daily speech, whose vocabulary is a collection of anaemic
commonplaces, whose repetitions of phrases and extravagance of
interjections act but as feeble disguises to his lack of ideas, will
never be brilliant on an occasion when he longs to outshine the stars.
Living at one's best is constant preparation for instant use. It can
never make one over-precise, self-conscious, affected, or priggish.
Education, in its highest sense, is _conscious_ training of mind
or body to act _unconsciously_. It is conscious formation of
mental habits, not mere acquisition of information.

One of the many ways in which the individual unwisely eclipses himself,
is in his worship of the fetich of luck. He feels that all others are
lucky, and that whatever he attempts, fails. He does not realize the
untiring energy, the unremitting concentration, the heroic courage, the
sublime patience that is the secret of some men's success. Their "luck"
was that they had prepared themselves to be equal to their opportunity
when it came and were awake to recognize it and receive it. His own
opportunity came and departed unnoted, it would not waken him from his
dreams of some untold wealth that would fall into his lap. So he grows
discouraged and envies those whom he should emulate, and he bandages
his arm and chloroforms his energies, and performs his duties in a
perfunctory way, or he passes through life, just ever "sampling" lines
of activity.

The honest, faithful struggler should always realize that failure is
but an episode in a true man's life,--never the whole story. It is
never easy to meet, and no philosophy can make it so, but the steadfast
courage to master conditions, instead of complaining of them, will help
him on his way; it will ever enable him to get the best out of what he