fore him is worthy, that his reputation is irreproachable.

It goes without saying that no man can afford to sacrifice his independence for the sake of gaining the good opinion of others; but, if a man is normal, he can not be indifferent to what others think of him; he can not be denounced without pain, without a certain sense of regret, because it is perfectly natural that we should value the good opinion of our fellow-men.

We all know how a mere trifle will sometimes seriously injure a man's or a firm's credit. Just a breath of suspicion that the firm is hard-pressed for money, and the creditors all rush with their bills— a breath of suspicion about the solvency of a banking institution, and immediately there is a run on the bank.

An important step in establishing a reputation is to ground yourself strongly in the good-will of others by making yourself agreeable. This will have everything to do with your credit and your standing in the community; while the young man who despises public opinion will soon find himself without credit and without the support of others' good-will.

No one can hide his true character. Wherever we go, we are on exhibition. We are holding ourselves up like a bulletin board for everybody to read, not as we would like to be, but as we are, for everybody to estimate and to judge. A thousand

eyes and a thousand judgments are scrutinizing us, weighing us, estimating us wherever we go. We can not get away from them.

Willing or unwilling, we must step upon the scales of a thousand judgments to be weighed and estimated as they will.

The criminal trembles and shrinks from the eyes of the crowd because he fears that there may be some one who may read the fearful thing in his mind and see the crime in the glance of his eye or in his manner. He can not cover up the secret entirely, for there are a thousand things in him trying all the time to tell the truth at every opportunity, and he can not hide or cover them all. He may teach the tongue to lie, but the eye and the manner, never. They are the truth-tellers, the proclaimers who do not hesitate to betray the murderer although it may cost him his life.

There is something within us which tells the truth, regardless of consequences, and can never be trained to deceive or to lie.

We are covered all over with the earmarks of our quality. The things we do voluntarily and habitually are prophetic of ourselves as a whole. Professor Agassiz could reconstruct an entire animal which had lived millions of years before man came to the earth; he could tell where the animal lived, its habits, what it lived upon, from a single fossil bone.

People can tell what kind of a man you are by

observing your little voluntary everyday acts. If you are selfish, if you exhibit pettiness, greed, and trickiness on a car, or on a train, or at the table, an observing stranger could reconstruct, build up, the sort of a man you are, from these acts; he would know to a certainty that you are not large, that you are not a big, broad, honest man. He would know that you are petty, small, and narrow, a man unworthy of confidence.

We do not need to eat a whole ox to test its quality.

If you are small, mean, and picayune in little things you may be sure you will never be the great man or woman you would like people to consider

you.

Character is power, a mighty force. There is nothing in this world so convincing as character. Nothing that speaks with such masterly authority. The man who lacks it can not hope to win, or to retain among his fellow-men. a reputation worth having.

WHEN DISCOURAGED—

WHAT TO DO

There is something grand and inspiring in a young man who fails squarely after doing his level best and then enters the contest a second and third time with undaunted and redoubled energy.

RENTICE MULFORD says: "There are

no limits to the strength to be gained through the cultivation of our thought power. It can keep us from all pain, whether from grief, from loss of fortune, loss of friends, or disagreeable situations in life. The strong mind throws off the burdensome, worrying, fretting thought, forgets it, and interests itself in something else. A fearless man or woman can command any state of mind."

If we do not train ourselves to be always above the reach of vicious moods, despondent thoughts and feelings, there will be no certainty in our lives, no assurance of victory as to our future. We shall be mere driftwood, ever the victims of the strongest tide of feeling.

The great mass of people, however, seem to take it for granted that they were intended to be victims of their moods. They have no idea that

the antidotes, the remedies for every gloomy thought, for every adverse attitude of mind, are in their own possession. They plod on day after day, doing their work as if compelled by fate to wade through about so much dry, dreary drudgery. Their load is not lightened by the expectancy of better things. They have not enthusiasm enough to take the drudgery out of their work, so they drag on through the weary years, mere slaves of their occupation and their environment, when they have right within themselves that which would lift them above themselves, that which would lighten their burden, dispel the sense of drudgery and make them happy, willing artists in their vocations instead of unhappy, unwilling artisans.

When we see men and women moving about in a "dead-and-alive" sort of way with slouchy, seedy dress, with dragging step, with nothing about their atmosphere that speaks of pride in themselves, indifferent as to what others think of them, we know perfectly well that there is something wrong with their minds. They have allowed their moods of despondency, inertia, distrust, lack of confidence in themselves to master them. They have surrendered to the enemies of their success and happiness. They have become hopeless victims of those distressing rudderless moods, in which they have no deep desire, no great ambition, no program of action, no direction of movement. They are drifting in the quagmire of failure,