the beginning, but how long has man known of their power?— how much does he know now? The lightning flashed before the blinded eyes of Adam, but how long since the electric spark became not the terror but the friend of man? Steam curled up from the kettle of Tubal Cain, but how long since man knew how strong were the shoulders of the prisoned vapor which now bears so many burdens? Charcoal lay in the ashes of the first fire kindled by man on the earth; nitre formed on the walls of the cave, and sulphur lurked in the earth: but how long since man knew that these substances, harmless apart, were, linked together, a black conspirator who without warning can tear a city or a mountain to fragments? No man can say that further investigation on these lines will reveal nothing. How long is it since gunpowder, supposed to be the most powerful of all explosive substances, was found to be to nitro-glycerine what a boy's strength is to a man's? Investigation! there is room for enough of that to fill the next thousand years, during which the question of our primitive gorilla-hood can be suffered to rest.

In the World's School, as in the district school, a great hindrance to study is too much whispering, too much noise, too much talk. The present age demands and admires action—not words. Said an intelligent gentleman, speaking the other evening of the British House of Commons: "A great orator is a great nuisance and a great bore." It will, I think, be so considered in this country some day. It is certainly a consummation devoutly to be wished. If any of these young ladies or gentlemen have a habit of keeping still until they have something to say, they can rest easy in the belief that the world is coming round to their

fashion. I think even now if Demosthenes were living, and were to repeat his experiment of the pebbles, he would meet with little sympathy. At this time, and I may remark, in this State, where we are so little advanced in the practice of Agriculture—the oldest of human vocations—that the failure of a single crop reduces us to the condition of Indians when the buffalo fails to put in an appearance, and a piteous cry for "aid" goes up from one end of the State to the other-in such a State there is little time for speech-making. The world needs, nay more, will have, men of action, not of mere words, either spoken or printed. A volume of speeches is not a very enduring monument, generally a fading and perishable one; a fine bridge, a noble aqueduct, a row of tenement houses, built by generosity, not avarice, a beautiful farmhouse-such are the monuments men should leave behind them. It is the impatience of the world with talk that leads to Carlyle's "Hero Worship," and such grim books as his Cromwell and Frederick; and who that reads these books does not imbibe a feeling of respect for men of action, rather than the men of pamphlets, speeches and proclamations? Who, whatever may be his idea of the career, as a whole, of the first Napoleon, does not, in reading that last chapter save one in Carlyle's "French Revolution," stand an admirer of that young artillery officer, Bonaparte by name, as he stands amid his guns at four o'clock in the afternoon of that October day, waiting the approach of that bloody mob of Paris who succeeded as rulers those "great lords" whom Arthur Young hated? They are moving forty thousand strong; their stray shot rattle on the staircase of the Tuileries; they are very near. "Whereupon, thou bronze artillery officer? 'Fire!'

say the bronze lips." Roar and roar again go his great guns, and "it was all over by six," said citizen Bonaparte in his report. The mob which had cut off the heads of many speech-makers had met at last a man of action.

And yet, what is called a "talent for affairs" is not inconsistent with the possession of a kindly spirit, manifesting itself outwardly and visibly in perfect courtesy. Some of the busiest men I have known always found time to be civil. In the World's School you will find that your progress and happiness depend much upon your treatment of your fellow-students. The nineteenth is a good century for firm men; it is a bad one for bullies-even of the pious variety. Lord Chesterfield was never wiser than when he exhorted his son always to be the friend, but never the bully, of virtue. This you may depend upon, that you may lead your class but you will never drive it, except, perhaps, after the manner of the Irishman's horse, of which his enthusiastic owner exclaimed, "Bedad, he's driving everything before him!" As you cannot safely domineer over your fellows, so you may be sure you cannot long deceive them. The stolen composition will be found in your desk; the plagiarized speech will be detected. Blinder than the blindest bat that fluttered in dark Egypt's deepest darkness are those who put not their trust in God or man, but in tricks. Little traps, set by little men, are daily knocked to pieces beneath the very noses of their sagacious contrivers, and the world's derisive laughter rings out at "Strategy, my boy!"

This, then, in your intercourse with your fellow-students of this world, is the chief end of life: to be a gentleman; and this includes the ladies, for a lady is but the feminine of a gentleman. To be a gentleman you have the world's encouragement, nay

more, you have an angelic warrant; for what says Thackeray in the "End of the Play:"

"A gentleman, or old or young!

(Bear kindly with my humble lays,)
The sacred chorus first was sung
Upon the first of Christmas days.
The shepherds heard it overhead,
The joyful angels raised it then;
Glory to Heaven on high, it said,

And peace on earth to gentle men."

But I must not keep you here listening to words which, after all, may not be worth your remembrance, and which, in the hurlyburly of that world which soon, very soon, will open up before the youngest here, you will scarcely find time to remember; and yet the blessing and benediction of any human being, even that of the sightless beggar by the wayside, is worth the having.

Young men, young women, crowding forward from the byways into the broad highway of life, may you do well the work that is waiting for your hands, realizing the obligation spoken of by Lord Bacon: "I hold every man a debtor to his profession; from the which as men of course do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves by way of amends to be a help and ornament thereunto."

May your lives resemble not the desert's bitter stream, which mocks the cracked and blistered lips of the fainting, dying traveler; which but adds horror to the fiery desert, and sinks at last into the burning sands, to which it brought no verdure, no gladness- from which it received nothing but poison and a grave.

May the course of your lives find no counterpart in the sluggish course of the dull bayou, a fungus among streams, which winds and doubles and winds again through miles of rank vegetation, which

curtain its dark course, and shut out from its sullen waters the gladsome light of day; a waveless, tideless stream, in which reptiles of hideous shape crawl and glide and swim, and which at night seems to lie still in the darkness and listen to doleful and mysterious voices. May none of you ever live isolated from your kind, like those lakes which lurk amid dark, once-volcanic mountains, with no visible inlet or outlet; deep, self-contained, solitary, giving back no reflection save the dim images of scorched and barren rocks, and splintered peaks; lakes on which nothing lives or floats, which hide forever in their dark bosoms everything cast into them.

But may your lives be like the river which rises amid the pure snows of the bold mountain; which, hurling itself over the cliffs, answers back the wild, free eagle's scream; which forces its way through the rocks that would impede it in its search for the valley; which slakes as it goes the thirst of the deer, and washes the roots of the pine tree from which the flag of the far-sailing merchantmen is yet to fly; which turns the rude wheel of the mountain mill, and whirls in its eddies the gathering sawdust as it speeds from under the whirring, glittering teeth of steel it has bidden to rend the logs it has brought them. It grows wider and deeper, and more silent and yet stronger, as it flows between smiling farms and thrifty villages which owe their existence to the bounteous river. At night it sends its mist over all the valley and half-way up the hills, like sweet Charity, who silently wraps in her sheltering mantle all the sons of men. It carries on its bosom all floating craft—the light canoe, the slowly-drifting raft, the arrow-like steamer. In time, its wavelets give back at night, in dancing gleams, the thousand lights of the great cotton mill,