it. Here we have the ambitious maxim challenging truth itself. It is
certainly not impossible that Mozart wrote a difficult concerto at the age
of five; nor is it impossible that, in precocious children of a different
type, worry from failure to accomplish the desired may cause profound
despair productive of disastrous results.

Nor are such children either geniuses or freaks--they are merely inheritors
of the "New England Conscience," so named, I suppose, because the trait
has multiplied in this section more rapidly even than the furniture and
fittings of the Mayflower. Without underrating the sterling qualities of
the devoted band who founded this community it may safely be suggested that
neither the effectiveness nor the staying qualities of their descendants
will be lessened by a certain modification of the querulous insistence
which dominates the overtrained adult in the rearing of the nervously
precocious child.

The maxim "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," if carried to
its ultimate conclusion by the over-careful, would justify the expenditure
of a quarter of an hour in sharpening a lead-pencil. This maxim, while
losing in sententiousness would gain in reason if it ran thus: "What is
worth doing at all is worth doing as well as the situation demands." "Never
put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," an excellent maxim for
the shiftless, must not be taken too literally by the individual already
obsessed to do to-day twice what he can and quadruple what he ought.

Neither the chronic doubter nor the prematurely thoughtful need be
admonished, "Look before you leap," or "Be sure you're right, then go
ahead." Such guides to conduct, however effective in the case of three
individuals, in the fourth hinder accomplishment by encouraging querulous
doubt;--it is for the benefit of the fourth that these pages are written. A