the student taking a passage for each day. He may indefinitely extend the list at his own taste and discretion.

1. Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close. Then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others; some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourself.

JOHN RUSKIN.

2. The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep. "Morning Prayer." ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

3. Let no soft slumber close my eyes,
Ere I have recollected thrice

The train of actions through the day.

Where have my feet marked out their way?
What have I learnt where'er I've been,
From all I've heard, from all I've seen ?
What know I more that's worth the knowing?
What have I done that's worth the doing?
What have I sought that I should shun?
What duties have I left undone,

Or into what new follies run?
These self-inquiries are the road
That leads to virtue and to God.
"Self-Inquiry."

From the Greek of PYTHAGORAS.

4. A little thing, a sunny smile,
A loving word, at morn,

And all day long the sun shone bright,
The cares of life were made more light,
And sweetest hopes were born.

A little thing, a hasty word,

A cruel frown, at morn,

And aching hearts went on their way
And toiled throughout a dreary day,
Disheartened, sad and lorn.

"In the Morning."

ANONYMOUS.

5. Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier; the kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffin, send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends have alabaster boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my body, I would much rather that they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours, and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin, without a flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit. Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way. ANONYMOUS.

6. Now Love is the remedy, the great sweetener of the mind and body. It produces harmony, and harmony is equilibriumhealth.

This must first be established in the mind through belief and trust in the Infinite Love, and Omnipresent Good, then the practise of love and self-forgetfulness toward others.

If we would attract love to ourselves, we must feel it for others, and make ourselves lovable; and that should be our whole concern, to love more and more, and think less and less of self; then we will grow sweet and wholesome, and fragrant as a flower. The blood will be pure and rich, and filled with vitality,

and, in short, all things will become new, for the former things

will have passed away.

"Spiritual Realizations."

FLORENCE WILLARD DAY.

7. So live that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
"Thanatopsis.”

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

8. Some men employ their health, an ugly trick,
In making known how oft they have been sick.
And give us in recitals of disease,

A doctor's trouble, but without the fees;
Relate how many weeks they kept their bed,
How an emetic or cathartic sped:

Nothing is slightly touched, much less forgot.
Nose, ears, and eyes seem present on the spot.
Now the distemper, spite of draft or pill,
Victorious seemed, and now the doctor's skill;
And now,-alas, for unforeseen mishaps!
They put on a damp nightcap and relapse:

They thought they must have died, they were so bad;
Their peevish hearers almost wish they had.

"Descanting on Illness.”

WILLIAM COWPER.

CHAPTER IX

POWER OF ILLUSTRATION

A story well-told, or an illustration that illustrates, gives an added power to public speaking. Illustrations not only stimulate the imagination of the hearer, but also move the heart and arouse special interest. Appropriateness, clearness, and fluency are essential to successful story-telling. Hesitation, lack of memory, and irrelevancy invariably invite disaster. It is not always necessary nor desirable that a story be memorized and repeated in exact words, but the thought and the order of the thought, as well as the particular points to be made, should be clearly fixed in the mind. It is good practise to rehearse a story several times, endeavoring to vary the phraseology.

Some one has likened illustrations unto windows that let the light in. Because of their concrete character they make a strong and direct appeal to the hearer, touching, as they usually do, his personal experience. For this reason illustrations should be chosen, whenever possible, upon subjects that are familiar to the audience. There must, however, be something to illustrate. Stories introduced merely for their own sake, or to fill up gaps, or to disguise poverty of thought, are undesirable and ineffective. Phillips Brooks goes further and says: "We confine too much the office of illustration if we give it only the duty of making truth clear to the understanding and do not also allow it the privilege of making truth glorious to the imagination." Abstract philosophy and close argument, if long con

tinued in speech, become wearisome to an audience. They demand some relief. A good illustration, skilfully introduced, rests the mind of the listener, lends variety and vivacity to the speaker's style, and drives home his message with increased effectiveness.

Henry Ward Beecher owed much of his power and success to his resourcefulness in this respect. He says:

"The effect of illustrations upon ideality is very great. They bring into play the imaginative faculty, which is only another name for ideality. Now all great truth is beautiful. It carries in it elements of taste and fitness. The 'beauty of holiness' we find spoken of in the Word of God, and this is a beauty that does not belong to anything material. God is transcendently a lover of beauty, and all the issues of the divine soul are, if we could see them as He sees them, beautiful, just as self-denial and love are beautiful, and as purity and truth and all good things are beautiful.

"It is not, therefore, in the interest of truth that a man should sift it down to the merest bare nuggets of statement that it is susceptible of; and this is not best for an audience. It is best that a truth should have argument to substantiate it, and analysis and close reasoning; yet when you come to give it to an audience you should clothe it with flesh, so that it shall be fit for their understandings. In no other way can you so stir up that side of the mind to grasp your statements and arguments easily, and prepare it to remember them. You can not help your audience in any other way so well as by keeping alive in them the sense of the imagination and making the truth palpable to them, because it is appealing to the taste, to the sense of the beautiful in imagery as well as to the sense of truth.”’1

1 Yale Lectures on Preaching, Henry Ward Beecher.