I have heard people so long advise, "Be yourself," that I am tired of it. Why should you always be yourself, unless, which is quite unlikely, you happen to be the best person that ever was? Seems to me, if I am going to improve at all I ought to be someone else. There is a little trick of conduct I learned from my bright mother, thirty years ago, that may not be unique to you. I never have happened to see any one describe it anywhere and so I will venture to confide it as though it were something new.

Whenever I am in perplexity what to do or how to act I find myself thinking of the various people, real or fictitious, now living or enshrined in history, that I have known. I am trying to hit upon the one that would be the best person to get into my place for the time being. When I get him I find it remarkably easy to imagine just what he would do. I do that, if I have the nerve to. Even if I am afraid, the recollection of my model for the moment superinduces a better performance of the disagreeable business than would ensue if I were merely my own guide.

For instance, I received yesterday one of those nasty letters that come to schoolmasters, "through your neglect" this and that damage had resulted. It was only another case of a superintendent vexed that something had gone wrong and desiring to put the blame somewhere and get the grouch out of his system. So, as usual, he jumped at a conclusion where the error was and made his ill-considered slap. As I read the note I had the same old instinctive resentment of forty years back when Ed Beaubien used falsely to say that it was I who had broken his slate. But in a minute my mother's great old trick suggested itself to me, and I thought of what this or that admirable person would do in the case until I reached Thoreau. Then I knew I had found the proper person. I should for a few minutes lose my wonted individuality and walk the earth as Henry D. Thoreau. So I took my pen and wrote: "Dear Mr. Superintendent:

"I have received your reprimand, but I can not consider myself designated by it, for that would be hypocrisy. I did the best I could in the case you mention considering the other things I had to do on the same day. As I did not forget and did not neglect, I can only express regret that the outcome was imperfect."

I know that is what Thoreau would say, for that is what he did say in a letter that impressed me when I read his life.

Once I was Henry Villard, when a schoolboard tried to investigate me by summoning my pupils secretly and cross-questioning them. I remembered Henry's protest against the backhanded way they tried to undermine Grant. I have been Patrick Henry, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Diogenes upon occasion so faintly that you might not have recognized the likeness, but it was the best I could do and very much easier for me to talk through my assumed character than if I had been just merely I.

The more I think of this device, the more I am pleased with it. Am I conscious of having offended by not sufficient dignity I say to myself, "your name is Senator Bayard," and at once cool self-control and courteous quiet is easy. Do I feel conscious of having been too reserved and cold, then I assume the character of James G. Angell, with whom by an accident I was once delayed all day in the rain in a crippled steamboat whereon he was the genial and lovable spirit of a miscellaneous party of forty strangers. I have been James Freeman Clarke when selfishness was rife in a street car; Sir Philip Sidney when a man was in distress at a ticket window; William Hawley Smith when a boy had been babied too much; and so many other people that you could accuse me of being all things to all men.

It is a habit worth while. It not only serves you in good stead when in need, but it makes all the reading of biography you do a hundred times more interesting, because it becomes a search for more patterns to store in your moldloft against the time of need.

I think my mother had the advocates of literature in the school beaten by a length or two. They advocate the reading of the lives and thoughts of great men because these furnish unconscious suggestions for conduct. But my mother consciously and deliberately selected great men and women and others-great for the time being-and not only imitated their lives but lived them.

Woodrow Wilson would think it intolerable to try to build up your character by larding portions of other personalities into it. I think, myself, it would be priggish indeed IF YOU TOLD But my mother never told me she did it. She suggested that I do it. If I have told you that I do it, there is no harm in that, for you do not know who I am, nor do you care, so long as I am outspoken with you and remain your

PEOPLE YOU WERE DOING IT.

CHEERFUL CONFIDANT.

NOVEMBER 1

1764-Stephen Van Rensselaer, "the patroon," distinguished American statesman and founder of Rensselaer Polytechnic School at Troy, N. Y. (1824), born in New York. NOVEMBER 2

1755-Marie Antoinette, the ill-fated Queen of France during the French Revolution, and wife of Louis XVI, born at Vienna. Daughter of Maria Theresa and Francis I of Austria.

1795 James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States, during whose administration the Mexican war took place, and gold was discovered in California, born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

1821-Dostojefsky, Russian novelist, born in

Moscow.

1837-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, American poet, born in Portsmouth, N. H.

NOVEMBER 13

1782-Esaius Tegner, Swedish poet, born in Kyrkerud.

1850-Robert Louis Stevenson, English writer, born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

NOVEMBER 14

1803-Jacob Abbott, American writer, born at Hallowell, Maine.

NOVEMBER 15

1708 William Pitt, "the great commoner," English statesman and orator, born at Boconnock, in Cornwall.

1738-Sir William Herschel, astronomer, born in Hanover, Germany.

1741-John Caspar Lavater, theologian and writer on physiognomy, born at Zurich, Switzerland.

1862-Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, born in Silesia.

NOVEMBER 16

1717-D'Alembert, French philosopher and encyclopedist, born in Paris.

1811-John Bright, English orator and statesman, born in Lancashire.

NOVEMBER 18

1810-Asa Gray, American botanist, born at Paris, N. Y.

NOVEMBER 19

1770-Albert Bertel Thorwaldsen, Danish sculptor, born in Copenhagen.

1805-Ferdinand de Lesseps, French engineer, builder of the Suez Canal, born in Versailles.

1831-James A. Garfield, twentieth President of the United States, born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

1869-Opening of the Suez Canal.

NOVEMBER 21

1694-Voltaire, French writer, born in Paris. 1790-Bryan Waller Proctor, "Barry Cornwall," English poet, born in London.

NOVEMBER 22

1767-Andreas Hofer, Swiss patriot, born. 1819 "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans), English novelist, born in Warwickshire.

NOVEMBER 23

1804 Franklin Pierce, fourteenth President of the United States, born at Hillsborough, N. H.

1862-Gilbert Parker, American writer, born in Canada.