_he_ silenced this battery, and how _he_ rode over that field of carnage,
in the first place we do not believe a tenth part of his story, and in the
second place we wish he would not tell the fraction which we suppose is
possibly true.

Life is given to us that we may learn how to live. That is what it is for.
We are here in a great boarding-school, where we are being trained in the
use of our bodies and our minds, so that in another world we may know how
to use other bodies and minds with other faculties. Or, if you please,
life is a gymnasium. Take which figure you choose. Because of this, good
talk, following the principle of life, is always directed with a general
desire for learning rather than teaching. No good talker is obtrusive,
thrusting forward his observation on men and things. He is rather
receptive, trying to get at other people's observations; and what he says
himself falls from him, as it were, by accident, he unconscious that he is
saying anything that is worth while. As the late Professor Harris said,
one of the last times I saw him, "There are unsounded depths in a man's
nature of which he himself knows nothing till they are revealed to him by
the plash and ripple of his own conversation with other men." This great
principle of life, when applied in conversation, may be stated simply then
in two words,--

Confess Ignorance.

You are both so young that you cannot yet conceive of the amount of
treasure that will yet be poured in upon you, by all sorts of people, if
you do not go about professing that you have all you want already. You
know the story of the two school-girls on the Central Railroad. They were
dead faint with hunger, having ridden all day without food, but, on
consulting together, agreed that they did not dare to get out at any