Our earthly life is a treasure to be guarded, it is an outrageous thing to die when we ought to live.  There is no use in firing up a Cunarder to such a speed that the boiler bursts mid-Atlantic, when at a more moderate rate it might have reached the docks at Liverpool.  It is a sin to try to do the work of thirty years in five years.

A Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer told us that at certain places they change locomotives and let the machine rest, as a locomotive always kept in full heat soon got out of order.  Our advice to all overworked good people is, “Slow up!” Slacken your speed as you come to the crossings.  All your faculties for work at this rate will be consumed.  You are on fire now—­see the premonitory smoke.  A hot axle!

Some of our young people have read till they are crazed of learned blacksmiths who at the forge conquered thirty languages, and of shoemakers who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers, and of milliners who, while their customers were at the glass trying on their spring hats, wrote a volume of first-rate poems.  The fact is no blacksmith ought to be troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand that we wish milliners would stick to their business.  Extraordinary examples of work and endurance may do as much harm as good.  Because Napoleon slept only three hours a night, hundreds of students have tried the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Saragossa, there came of it only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation.  We are told of how many books a man can read in the five spare minutes before breakfast, and the ten minutes at noon, but I wish some one could tell us how much rest a man can get in fifteen minutes after dinner, or how much health in an hour’s horseback ride, or how much fun in a Saturday afternoon of cricket.  He who has such an idea of the value of time that he takes none of it for rest wastes all his time.

Most Americans do not take time for sufficient sleep.  We account for our own extraordinary health by the fact that we are fanatics on the subject of sleep.  We differ from our friend Napoleon Bonaparte in one respect:  we want nine hours’ sleep, and we take it—­eight hours at night and one hour in the day.  If we miss our allowance one week, as we often do, we make it up the next week or the next month.  We have sometimes been twenty-one hours in arrearages.  We formerly kept a memorandum of the hours for sleep lost.  We pursued those hours till we caught them.  If at the beginning of our summer vacation we are many hours behind in slumber, we go down to the sea-shore or among the mountains and sleep a month.  If the world abuses us at any time, we go and take an extra sleep; and when we wake up, all the world is smiling on us.  If we come to a knotty point in our discourse, we take