=Robbing a vine of its life.=--“When I was only a small boy, one lovely spring morning, I stepped up to a vigorous young grapevine, at the time the sap was rising and flowing out the branches to every bursting bud and cluster of blooms. I had watched my father bore holes in the sugar maple trees, a century old, and we would use the sap to make syrup and maple sugar. I did not know that this really injured the old trees and that tapping them when ten or twenty years old would have very seriously injured them. So, with my knife, I cut a hole in the vine some two feet from the ground. At once the sap flowed as freely as from an old sugar tree. I stood by proudly and watched the sap flow out. Soon a puddle of sap had formed at the foot of the vine and the ground became damp all around. An hour passed and still the sap flowed. I became frightened. I wondered whether, at that rate, the vine would not disappear after a while. With mud, made from the sap and soil, I tried to stop up the wound and stop the flow. Quickly the flowing sap dissolved the mud and washed it down. After repeated failures, I ran to the house and got some rags and strings and tried to stop the flow, but soon the rags would get damp and the sap flowed as before. “I decided to leave the vine to its own fate. The next morning I ventured out to see what had occurred. The vine looked as it did the day before. I found that kind nature had formed a reddish substance and had filled the wound and stopped the flow. That day I cut another hole in the vine. Again the sap flowed but not so freely as the day before. Day after day I repeated this for ten days. Will you be surprised when I tell you that the buds never matured into full size leaves, the clusters of blooms never matured into large clusters of grapes, and that the vine did not live many years? I had robbed the vine of its very life.” =Some boys and men sap their life.=--Now there is an act that is performed by many boys and men by which they waste the vital fluid from their bodies. This act soon becomes a habit. It has the same effect upon them that we found in the vine. Instead of their eyes glowing with luster, they become dull and sunken. Instead of their cheeks having the rosy look of youth and health the face becomes pale. Instead of offering a hearty warm handshake, it is lifeless and cold. Instead of muscles being hard and elastic, they are soft and weak. Instead of bright, alert minds, they are dull and listless. Instead of an elastic bearing and a straightforward step, there are the languid movements and the swaggering walk.