arm from the shoulder.  This may be an improvement perhaps:  and that man had brooded over the mischiefs of moving the fingers in writing till these mischiefs shut out the view of the rest of creation, or at least till he saw nothing but irrationality in writing otherwise.  All the millions who wrote by the fingers were cracked.  The writing-master, in short, though possibly a reasonable man on other subjects, was certainly unsound upon this.  You may allow yourself to speculate on the chance of being bitten by a mad dog, or of being maimed by a railway accident, till you grow morbid on these points.  If you live in the country, you may give in to the idea that your house will be broken into at night by burglars, till, every time you wake in the dark hours, you may fancy you hear the centre-bit at work boring through the window-shutters down stairs.  A very clever woman once told me, that for a year she yielded so much to the fear that she had left, a spark behind her in any room into which she had gone with a lighted candle, which spark would set the house on fire, that she could not be easy till she had groped her way back in the dark to see that things were right.  Now, ye readers whose minds must be carefully driven (I mean all the readers who will ever see this page), don’t give in to these fancies.  As you would carefully train your horse to pass the corner he always shies at, so break your mind of this bad habit.  And in breaking your mind of the smallest bad habit, I would counsel you to resort to the same kindly Helper whose aid you would ask in breaking your mind of the greatest and worst.  It is not a small matter, the existence in the mind of any tendency or characteristic which is unsound.  We know what lies in that direction.  You are like the railway-train which, with breaks unapplied, is stealing the first yard down the incline at the rale of a mile in two hours; but if that train be not pulled up, in ten minutes it may be tearing down to destruction at sixty miles an hour.

I have said that almost every human being is mentally a screw; that all have some intellectual peculiarity, some moral twist, away from the normal standard of Tightness.  Let it, be added, that it is little wonder that the fact should be as it is.  I do not think merely of a certain unhappy warping, of an old original wrench, which human nature long ago received, and from which it never has recovered.  I am not writing as a theologian; and so I do not suggest the grave consideration that human nature, being fallen, need not be expected to be the right-working machinery that it may have been before it fell.  But I may at least say, look how most people are educated; consider the kind of training they get, and the incompetent hands that train them:  what chance have they of being anything but screws?  Ah, my reader, if horses were broken by people as unfit for their work as most of the people who form human minds, there would not be a horse in the world that would not be