forgetting the past. Powers that are not increased wane; the mind will not stand still in its development.
If you are taking up any work or profession it is wisest to understand beforehand what it involves. Read books on the subject; if you are thinking of engineering or medicine or law, get hold of some successful engineer or doctor or lawyer and ask him about the training necessary to success in his profession and the difficulties incident to it. He will probably advise you to try some other profession. He will enlarge on the difficulties, no doubt, of his own particular calling, but this fact need not serve to discourage you. You will find often that what on the surface seemed easy sailing has been a hazardous voyage full of storms and often suggestive of shipwreck. Men will advise you to keep out of the profession which they are following, because knowing as intimately as they do the hardships of their own calling, and being acquainted only with the externals of others, they imagine their own to be the most difficult and wearing and unsatisfactory of all. Fathers especially are loath to seeing their sons take up the line of work in which they themselves have become established and have succeeded.
"I don't want my son to take up my profession," I hear scores of fathers say. "There is nothing in it but hard work."
So, too, men who have come up to affluence through sacrifice and toil, say, "I never want my son to go through what I have gone through," not realizing that what
