Perhaps we might get along better if we remembered that it is all in a day's work.

There's a lot to be done, but we don't have to do it all today. And the higher the task, and the more difficult, delicate, and important the matter, the more necessary it is to attack in the spirit of a day's work at a time.

To learn to play the piano, or to read French, or to overcome a bad habit, or to write shorthand, or to achieve poise, and pa­tience, or to be good - nobody can come at such accomplishments at once.

It is little by little, the steady forcing of the will upon one's stubborn desire, mind, or fingers, whether we feel like it or not, just as a day's work, it is so we crawl up the steep hill of perfection.

The will to do is important, and the ambi­ion to do is necessary, and hard work counts; but one essential to any excellence, whether in craftsmanship or character, is time.

Somehow or other the past endues us. There's no such thing as a fresh start. Every new start carries with it something of those we made before. Every effort silts some-thing into our nerves or muscles or brain cells so that they are different next time.

The power of the thirtieth day is the re­sult of the invisible dividends of the twenty-nine preceding days' work.

Somebody asked Susanne Wesley, John's mother, why she told her children the same thing over and over twenty times. "Because nineteen is not enough," she answered.

In that greatest of earthly businesses, mothering, it is the spirit of the day's work that helps. To carry on so complicated and vital affair as the training of children there is needed above all that self-possession which comes only when we conceive of our work as lasting but one day. And it is when we look forward too much and keep expect­ing results that time alone can give, that we fall into the petulance or fretfulness that de­stroys the quality of our guidance.

The clock has millions of tick-tocks to make, but it has a moment in which to do each one of them. The sun rises regularly to his duty, and sets at night satisfied with what increment of growth his day's work has supplied to living things.

And we-we need never expect to arrive - our business is not to arrive, it is to travel, to cover each day our allotted span, leaving all questions of ends and values and rewards to that Mind that thinks in centuries and weaves men and the labors of men into its vast fabric.

Our plan is on the trestle-board, our lines are known for this day's duties, let us do what is marked out for us; it is for us in this world to live "by the day," and not "by the job."