There is nothing in this world that more appeals to my admiration than a man who makes the best of himself _under difficulties_. Robert Louis Stevenson deservedly has many admirers by reason of his writings, but what in him most appeals to my admiration was the struggle he waged with difficulties. "For fourteen years," he wrote the year before his death, "I have not had a day's real health. I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary. I have written in bed, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written worn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness. I am better now, and still few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battle-field should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. Still I have done my work unflinchingly." The story of many a strong and useful life is very similar to this story of Stevenson's. Parkman wrote his histories in the brief intervals between racking headaches. Prescott struggled with blindness as he prepared his volumes. Kitto was deaf from boyhood, but he wrote works that caught the hearing of the English-speaking world. It sometimes seems as though God never intended to bring the best out of us excepting through pain and pressure. The most costly perfume that is known is the pure attar of roses, and one drop of it represents millions of damascene roses that were bruised before the sweet scent they contained was secured. "The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer." The sphere of difficulty is usually the sphere of opportunity. "I was made for contest," Stevenson said. We all are made for it. As we let the contest overpower us, we fail; as we overpower the contest, we succeed. One particular personage of the Old Testament is in mind as illustrative of these thoughts, Jeremiah. He always reminds me of a violet I once saw growing on Mount St. Bernard in Switzerland. The snow was deep on every side, excepting on one little slope a few feet in width, exposed to the eastern sun. There, so close to the snow as almost to be chilled to death by the cold atmosphere about it, was a violet sweetly lifting its head and blooming as serenely as though it knew nothing of the struggle for life.