Part 60 (2/2)

ROBERTSON

It is a beautiful provision in the ement of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty may by frequent repetition, become a habit; and the habit of stern virtue, so repulsive to others,around our neck like a wreath of flowers--PAXTON HOOD

”When shall I begin to trainmother of a learned physician

”How old is the child?” inquired the doctor

”Two years, sir”

”Then you have lost just two years,” replied he, gravely

”You randmother,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked a similar question

”At the mouth of the Mississippi,” says Beecher, ”how impossible would it be to stay its waters, and to separate from each other the drops from the various streams that have poured in on either side,--of the Red River, the Arkansas, the Ohio, and the Missouri,--or to sift, grain by grain the particles of sand that have been washed frohany, or the Rocky Mountains; yet how much more impossible would it be when character is the river, and habits are the side-streams!”

”We sow an act, we reap a habit;a habit, we reap a character”

While correct habits depend largely on self-discipline, and often on self-denial, bad habits, like weeds, spring up, unaided and untrained, to choke the plants of virtue and as with Canada thistles, allowed to go to seed in a fair , ten years'

weeding”

We seldoet to be twenty-five or thirty years of age, except in going further in the way they have started; but it is a great co, it is alood habit as a bad one, and that it is possible to be hardened in goodness as well as in evil

Take good care of the first twenty years of your life, and you ood care of you

A writer on the history of Staffordshi+re tells of an idiot who, living near a town clock, and always a the hour of the day whenever the clock struck, continued to strike and count the hour correctly without its aid, when at one time it happened to be injured by an accident

Dr Johnson had acquired the habit of touching every post he passed in the street; and, if he missed one, he was uneasy, irritable, and nervous till he went back and touched the neglected post

”Even thought is but a habit”

Heredity is a

A special study of hereditary drunkenness has been made by Professor Pellman of Bonn University, Gerrandchildren, and great-grandchildren in all parts of the present Gerraphies of the hundreds descended fro the persons described by Professor Pellman is Frau Ada Jurke, as born in 1740, and was a drunkard, a thief, and a tramp for the last forty years of her life, which ended in 1800 Her descendants numbered 834, of whom 709 were traced in local records from youth to death One hundred and six of the 709 were born out of wedlock There were 144 beggars, and 62 more who lived from charity

Of the women, 181 led disreputable lives There were in the family 76 convicts, 7 of ere sentenced for murder In a period of some seventy-five years, this one family rolled up a bill of costs in al to at least 5,000,000 marks, or about 1,250,000

Isaac Watts had a habit of rhyreeary of it, and set out to punish him, which made the boy cry out:--

”Pray, father, on me mercy take, And I will no eration, which seriously impaired his usefulness His brethren came to expostulate With extreme humiliation over this fault as they set it forth, he said, ”Brethren, I have long mourned over this fault, and I have shed _barrels of tears_ because of it” They gave hiet into habits of speech or act which become so natural that they speak or act as they do not intend, to their discomfiture Professor Phelps told of soed the initial consonants of adjacent words

”But,” said he, ”retribution overtook the the devotions, he prayed the Lord to 'have mercy on us, feak and weeble sinners'” The habit had come to possess him

Many speakers have undesirable habits of utterance or gesture So the hand to soive the nose a peck with thuer; others have the habit characterized as,--