VOCATION.

"Brutes find out where their talents lie;
A bear will not attempt to fly,

A foundered horse will oft debate
Before he tries a five-barred gate.
A dog by instinct turns aside

Who sees the ditch too deep and wide.
But man we find the only creature
Who, led by folly, combats nature;
Who, when she loudly cries-forbear!
With obstinacy fixes there;

And where his genius least inclines,
Absurdly bends his whole designs."
-DEAN SWIFT.

HE two most important things for a young man just starting out in life to determine are, vocation and location, or what shall he turn his hand to, and where shall he settle?

Concerning the calling or occupation which a young man should choose as his life-work, we urge first that the question should engage his most serious thought and earnest study before coming to any decision. A mistake here may prove fatal through life, and no man can afford to throw away his time and energies recklessly. At the very best we have only one life to live on earth, and that one is not very long at the longest.

There is many a man who has made perfect shipwreck of himself and his prospects, by rushing hastily and ill-advisedly into some business or profession for which he was in no wise adapted, and then not finding out his mistake until so many years of his life had passed away in experimenting, that it became too late to change callings to advantage. A man's only alternative in such a case is to continue on as he begun, and make the best of his choice, or throw up his calling and try again with the feeling that he starts in his new line of work ten or fifteen years behind others in his class. Either horn of this dilemma will be sure to gore the mind and feelings of the one choosing it, and leave behind a perpetually sore spot in his memory and consciousness. Therefore we repeat the remark, that this question should be well considered by all concerned, by young men, their parents and friends, before any decision is made.

NATURAL CAPACITIES.

"Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; but be anything else, and you will be worse than nothing." Good old Roger Ascham, who was the preceptor of Queen Elizabeth, and one of the first writers on education in the English language (living about 1540), said upon this subject, "The ignorance in men who know not for what time and to what thing they be fit, causeth some to wish themselves rich for whom it were better a great deal to be poor; some to desire to be in the court, which be born and be fitter rather for the cart; some to be masters and rule others, who never yet began to rule themselves; some to teach,

which rather should learn; some to be priests, which were fitter to be clerks."

Again, Dr. Matthews has well observed that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced, as to a mistaken calling. A youth who might become a first-rate mechanic chances to have been born of ambitious parents, who think it more honorable for their son to handle the lancet than the chisel, and so make him a doctor. Accordingly he is sent to college, pitchforked through a course of Latin and Greek, attends lectures, crams for an examination, gets a diploma, and with 'all his blushing honors thick upon his vacant head,' settles down to pour, as Voltaire said, drugs of which he knows little, into bodies of which he knows less,-till his incapacity is discovered, when he starves. In another case, a boy

is forced by unwise parents to measure tape and calico, when nature shows by his intellectual acumen, -by his skill in hair-splitting, his adroitness at parry and thrust, his fertility of resources in every exigency, and a score of other signs,—that she designed him for the bar or the forum."

Many a man has gone into business possessing no business brains. But as no sensible father would try to make a musician of his son unless he had a natural ear for music, so no sensible father will put his son into business unless he discover in him some natural aptness for trade. Again, the idea that no man can be really respectable or honorable among men without going into one of the three learned professions, as they are called, namely, Law, Medicine and Divinity, is one of the most false, mischievous notions which ever obtained a lodgment in the popular mind. This

idea "has spoiled many a good carpenter, done injustice to the sledge and the anvil, cheated the goose and the shears out of their rights, and committed fraud on the corn and the potato field. Thousands have died of broken hearts in these professions,-thousands who might have been happy at the plow, or opulent behind the counter; thousands, dispirited and hopeless, look upon the healthful and independent calling of the farmer with envy and chagrin; thousands more, by a worse fate still, are reduced to necessities which degrade them in their own estimation, and render the most brilliant success but a wretched compensation for the humiliation with which it is accompanied."

A WARNING EXAMPLE.

To illustrate the truthfulness of the foregoing observations, the writer remembers the case of a boy whom he knew in early youth. The lad was born and reared in a sparsely-settled and rather. out-of-the-way corner of a New England town. His parents were poor but sensible farming people, working hard to bring up a somewhat numerous family on a naturally rocky and somewhat sterile piece of land. The boy was a bright, active lad, easy to learn and with a very

retentive memory. His advantages for learning, however, were nothing more than ordinary, and up to early manhood he had attended nothing higher than the common district school. But as he began to read and expand mentally, he tired of these lowly and humble surroundings, and panted for distinction and greatness in a larger sphere of life.

It was common in that part of the world and at that

time, for the minister of the parish church to be looked upon as the highest in rank and ability of all the surrounding population. Moreover, the boy's mother was the daughter of a widely-known and justlyrevered minister, whose visits to the boy's home, taken in connection with the general sentiment of the place. and time, naturally turned his thoughts toward the ministerial calling. His mother, too, was very anxious that one of her sons should imitate her father's example, and follow in the same path of usefulness and honor. This little boy, whom we will call Jerry, had been selected by her almost from his birth as the one to be thus consecrated to the Lord. So, when at the age of eighteen, Jerry was converted, joined the parish church and began to exhort in the evening meetings, his own thoughts, as well as those of his mother and the parish priest, at once recurred to this pre-determined choice of a profession. The duty of entering the ministry was urged upon him with a force which he found very difficult to resist, accompanied, as it was, by a mother's appeals and prayers, and a minister's solemn adjurations. Still Jerry hesitated; he did not really want to be a minister. In fact, he had marked out in his own mind a career of a different sort.

From boyhood he had always loved composition, and to be able to write an article for a paper or a magazine was at that time the height of his ambition. While working on the farm with his father, he went into the neighboring woods, set snares for wild game, sold it when caught, took the money, and bought paper, pens and ink, built himself a rude, unplaned, and unpainted pine table in the old attic, and there