tion in favor of Akmed's admission. They handed him their registry of names, and he inscribed his own name at the end.

10. It now only remained for him to pronounce, according to custom, an address of thanks; but he was resolved to act consistently with that principle of the academy which enjoined the utmost parsimony of words. On the margin of the column where he had written his name, he traced the number 100, representing his brethren of the academy and the number to which they had been limited. Then placing a cipher before the figure 1 (thus, 0100), he wrote underneath: "Their number has been neither diminished nor increased."

II. Delighted at the laconic ingenuity and becoming modesty of Akmed, the President shook him affectionately by the hand; and then, substituting the figure for the cipher which preceded the number 100 (thus, 1100), he appended these words: "Their number has been increased tenfold."

- From the French.

XXXV. IS KNOWLEDGE POWER?

1. If I wished to prove the value of religion, would you think I served it much if I took as my motto "Religion is power"? Would not that be a base and sordid view of its advantages? And would you not say, he who regards religion as a power intends to abuse it? If the cause be holy, do not weigh it in the scales of the market; if its objects be peaceful, do not seek to arm it with the weapons of strife; if it is to be the cement of society, do not vaunt it as the triumph of class against class.

2. Knowledge is one of the powers in the moral world

but one that, in its immediate result, is not always of the most worldly advantage to the possessor. It is one of the slowest, because one of the most durable, of agencies. It may take a thousand years for a thought to come into power, and the thinker who originated it might have died in rags or in chains. Saith an Italian proverb, “The teacher is like the candle, which lights others in consuming itself." 3. Therefore, he who has the true ambition of knowledge should entertain it for the power of his idea, not for the power it may bestow on himself. It should be lodged in the conscience, and, like the conscience, look for no certain reward on this side the grave. And, since knowledge is compatible with good and with evil, would it not be better to say, "Knowledge is a trust"? Hence, so far from considering that we do all that is needful to accomplish ourselves as men when we cultivate only the intellect, we should remember that we thereby continually increase the range of our desires, and therefore of our temptations.

4. We should endeavor, simultaneously, to cultivate both those affections of the heart which prove the ignorant to be God's children no less than the wise, and those moral qualities which have made men great and good when reading and writing were scarcely known. Patience and fortitude under poverty and distress; humility and beneficence amidst grandeur and wealth, justice, the father of all the more solid virtues, softened by charity, which is their loving mother; accompanied by these, knowledge, indeed, becomes the magnificent crown of humanity, not the imperious despot, but the checked and tempered sovereign of the soul.

- SIR E. BULWER-LYTTON.

XXXVI. THE PLOWMAN

1. Clear the brown path, to meet his coulter's gleam! Lo! on he comes, behind his smoking team,

With Toil's bright dewdrops on his sunburnt brow,
The lord of earth, the hero of the plow!
First in the field before the reddening sun,
Last in the shadows when the day is done,
Line after line, along the bursting sod,

Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod.

2. Still, where he treads, the stubborn clods divide,
The smooth, fresh furrow opens deep and wide;
Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves,
Mellow and dark the ridgy cornfield cleaves;
Up the steep hillside, where the laboring train
Slants the long track that scores the level plain.

3. Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing clay,
The patient convoy breaks its destined way;
At every turn the loosening chains resound,
The swinging plowshare circles glistening round,
Till the wide field one billowy waste appears,
And weary hands unbind the panting steers.

4. These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings
The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings:
This is the page, whose letters shall be seen
Changed by the sun to words of living green;
This is the scholar, whose immortal pen
Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men;
These are the lines, O Heaven-commanded Toil!
That fill thy deed the charter of the soil!

5. O gracious mother, whose benignant breast
Wakes us to life and lulls us all to rest!

How thy sweet features, kind to every clime,
Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of Time!
We stain thy flowers, they blossom o'er the dead;
We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread;
O'er the red field that trampling strife has torn,
Waves the green plumage of thy tasseled corn;
Our maddening conflicts scar thy fairest plain,
Still thy soft answer is the growing grain.

- OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

XXXVII. LABOR AND GENIUS

1. The prevailing idea with young people has been, the incompatibility of labor and genius; and, therefore, from the fear of being thought dull, they have thought it necessary to remain ignorant. I have seen, at school and at college, a great many young men completely destroyed by having been so unfortunate as to produce an excellent copy of verses. Their genius being now established, all that remained for them to do was to act up to the dignity of the character; and as this dignity consisted in reading nothing new, in forgetting what they had already read, and in pretending to be acquainted with all subjects by a sort of offhand exertion of talents, they soon collapsed into the most frivolous and insignificant of men.

2. It would be an extremely profitable thing to draw up a short and well-authenticated account of the habits of study of the most celebrated writers with whose style of literary industry we happen to be most acquainted. It would go very far to destroy the absurd and pernicious association of genius and idleness, by showing that the greatest

Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing clay,

The patient convoy breaks its destined way."