OFFICERS ARE VERY SCARCE.

Make up your mind to have shoulder-straps early in the campaign.  You cannot afford to miss a single battle.  Every opportunity which opens to you is a city to be taken, and you are to be put in command.  See that it surrenders.  No city ever properly besieged evaded final capitulation.  The chances are all in your favor.  Remember, when you contemplate your unambitious comrade, that he is likely to change his tastes as he grows older.  If he cannot give a reasonable degree of encouragement to those tastes he will then become crabbed and sour.  Wherever you see men crusty and difficult to please, be sure they have had cities to take and failed to capture them.

ALEXANDER SMITH,

a Scotch poet who died at a very early age, said very appropriately:  “To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required—­just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and strawberries.”  Now how are you to catch this marvelous sunshine of prosperity?  Simply, do not shut it out.  Your comrade has had the moral ague.  He fears that, if the sun shine on him, it will bring a return of his fever.  When the sun shines on you, do not miss a ray.  It makes you grow.

YOUR PARTICULAR DUTIES

are soon learned.  Why is it that the affairs of walking behind a counter and actually knowing what your employer pays for his goods so soon lose the magic there once was in them?  It is because the human brain is supple, and comprehends quickly.  By the time certain problems are solved others spring up.  See that you solve them.  The mind should be pacified in its desire for new conquests.

THE SAFE RULE

as to whether or not you are fitted for new endeavors is to find to your own true satisfaction that you can do your duties better than anyone not in daily practice of the same kind of work.  If your employer can take hold and do a thing once a week better than you who do it a hundred times a day, then it should still have considerable charm for you, for your mind is strangely unfamiliar with the procedure.  When a clerk stays in one position all his life, it is certain to be from

LACK OF BOTH AMBITION AND ABILITY,

and he lacks a good deal of each.  Every little while, through the sickness, advancement, or bad judgment of others, a place just a little more responsible than your own is left vacant.  Somebody is wanted badly.  You are the man, and are put there for the interval.  There is the pivotal point.  By unusual endeavor you can probably fill the place better than it was filled by the regular occupant.  Your employer, expecting less of you, gets more, and praises you.  Now, by praising you, he is, somehow or other,