withering corn-stalk with no ears of corn at all; that his life was the other extreme from Fred’s, and that neither he nor Fred had in their younger days studied and applied in practice the controlling regulators of life. Jim’s sermons on self-control always hit the mark; and when, referring to his advice to me to control my temper, my heart, and my speech, I suggested that according to him life was a series of all kinds of controls difficult to manage, he answered that nothing is difficult when it becomes a habit. “Just examine my boiler-room,” he said, “and you will find that everything is controlled. The centrifugal governor controls the speed of the engine; the safety-valve limits the pressure of steam; every fire has a regulator of its air draft, and every oven has a temperature indicator. I know them all and I watch their operations without knowing that I am doing it. Practice makes perfect, my lad, and perfection knows no difficulties even in a boiler-room as full of all kinds of tricks as human life is.” Jim’s sermons were always short and far ahead of anything I had ever heard in the churches in Delaware City, or in Dayton, New Jersey, or in the Bowery Mission, or in any other church which up to that time I had visited in this country; and, moreover, they were not accompanied by congregational singing, which bored me. I understood why so many blacksmiths and other people of small learning made a great success as preachers in this country, whereas in my native village the priest, who prided himself upon his learning, was obliged to read those sermons only which were sent to him by the bishop of the diocese. I suggested to Jim in a jocular way to quit the boiler-room and become a preacher, and he answered that the boys and girls of the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street furnished a sufficiently large field for his religious and educational mission. Jim’s assistance helped me much to let the dream about Jane fade away gradually and make room in my imagination for the dreams which I first saw at Princeton under that elm-tree in front of Nassau Hall.