bling lest some blunder should expose one's emptiness" are pitiable.

Take but one calling, stenography, for instance, and what do we find? Multitudes of stenographers who are practically doomed to inferior positions and small salaries, because they never prepared themselves for the best positions. They may be perfectly capable, but they are held down by their ignorance. They are not broadly read, not well educated; they are confused every time they come across an unusual word, a scientific term, an historical or political reference. Their vocabularies are painfully limited, their experience narrow; they are always running to other people for the meaning of words, or asking how to spell them. Many of them are absolutely ignorant of the commonest historical events and of the greatest names in history.

Short

The same is true of other vocations. cuts and abridged methods are the demand of the hour; skimping on foundations is the rule. Young men barely squeeze through their examinations in specialties. Many a law student does not think it worth while to read up the cases which would throw light on class lectures and lessons as he goes along; all he wants is just to get through, just barely to slip into the profession; and then all will be well. If he can only get admission to the bar he will be all right. If he ever succeeds in this he makes only a third or fourth-rate lawyer. Because

he is not well grounded in general principles, he is obliged to study for every odd case that comes his way as though he had never seen a law book. He cannot cite precedents because when a student he did not read them if he could possibly avoid it.

An art student begins to paint pictures before he is grounded in the fundamental principles of art. He sells a few amateur productions and is so flattered by his success that he is never again content to study first principles, and of course proves to be only a second-class artist.

One who wants to be a great musician learns to play a few tunes in public, and is not willing afterward to spend hours every day in dry, dreary practice, and to his chagrin never becomes more than

an amateur.

A young writer, flattered by seeing some of his early productions in print, thinks he can get along without devoting years to practice in rewriting articles, in study and observation, in hunting for hours for a word to fit a thought exactly, in learning his thesaurus by heart. Of course, his vocabulary is limited, his expression poverty-stricken, his knowledge scant, his imagination weak, his power of portrayal almost nil, and he becomes just a hack writer, or more likely has to turn to something else to eke out a living.

A student in a technical school who is all eagerness to begin to earn money cannot see much use

in chemistry, mechanics, of physics for the man who is to be an ordinary engineer. But by and by a great engineering problem demanding a thorough knowledge of the very subjects he slighted confronts him, and he is helpless to solve it. He has struck the weak point in his preparation and of course the chain of his career parts at the weak link. The opportunity of his life has come and he is not ready for it.

How many a man has stood in this position when the great chance of a lifetime stared him in the face! How bitter his chagrin and disappointment when obliged to step aside for another, perhaps a fellow-student, who had thought it worth while to study a hundred things which he neglected, because they did not seem at the time to bear directly upon his future profession!

Turner, the great English artist, went out one day with some fellow-students to study nature. When evening came his companions showed him their sketches, and rallied him upon his idleness, since he had nothing to show. "I have done this, at least," he said, "I have learned how a lake looks when pebbles are thrown into it." He had spent the whole day sitting upon a rock, throwing pebbles into a lake! No other artist could paint such ripples as Turner painted.

How much pains are you willing to put into the important job of preparing for your life work? How much time are you ready to give to studying

the details of your trade or profession so that you may be a master craftsman in your line?

"The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price." The price of mastery in any field is thorough preparation. A good opportunity will only hold you up to ridicule, will only emphasize your inefficiency and make your weakness all the more conspicuous if you are not prepared for it. The preparation is more than the opportunity. In fact, the preparation makes the opportunity.

It is the surgeon who has spent years in the minute study of anatomy, the one who is master of every detail of his profession who is called in great crises, and whose skill saves many a precious life.

The great trouble with the majority of youth is that they do not appreciate that it is the little difference between fairly good, or good, and excellent that wins. The difference between the good surgeon and the superb operator, for example, is that which enables the one to get from five to ten thousand dollars for an operation and limits the other to perhaps a hundred dollars, or less.

Very often the layman cannot appreciate or understand why this little difference between the expert in surgery, the man who has the quick eye and the superbly trained hand, and the one who is not so finely trained can be of such importance. But it is just that degree of extra equipment and skill that will not let the knife slip when a life hangs in the balance, and a slip but the depth of a sheet

of tissue paper might mean death, that makes all the difference between a superb success and mediocrity. The man who has not acquired that delicacy of touch, that nicety of adjustment between eye and hand that insures perfect work, has not paid the expert's price in special training.

"Half-way knowledge is all right if you want to go half-way to the goal of success," said E. C. Holman. It is knowledge, complete skill, expertness that takes the first prize in life. There are tens of thousands of people in this country to-day who will never take second, or even third or fourth prizes in life, because they never prepared, or at best only half prepared, for the contest. "Never half prepared for his life work" would make a good epitaph for innumerable failures.

"Do we marvel," asks one, "at the skill which enables a great artist to take a little color that lies inert upon his palette and presently so to transform it into a living presence that our hearts throb faster only to look upon it, and there come upon the soul all those influences which one feels beneath the shadow of the Jungfrau, the Matterhorn, or amid the awful solitude of Mont Blanc? But back of that apparent ease and skill are the years of struggling and effort and application which have conferred the envied power."

The engineer at a power-house knows that comparatively little power will pull the electric cars through the level streets, but he must always have