This deeper self-appreciation is a slow and gradual process. At first, a child thinks he can do everything. I remember when I thought I could lift a house, if I would only try hard enough. So I began with the hind wheel of a heavy old family-coach, built like that in which my Lady Bountiful carried little King Pippin, if you happen to remember the illustrations of that story. I lifted with all my might, and the planet pulled down with all its might. The planet beat. After that, my ideas of the difference between my will and my muscular force were more accurately defined. Then came the illusion, that I could, of course, "lick," "serve out," or "polish off," various small boys who had been or might be obnoxious to me. The event of the different "set-tos" to which, this hypothesis led not uniformly confirming it, another limitation of my possibilities was the consequence. In this way I groped along into a knowledge of my physical relations to the organic and inorganic universe. A man must be very stupid indeed, if, by the time he is fully ripened, he does not know tolerably well what his physical powers are. His weight, his height, his general development, his constitutional force, his good or ill looks, he has had time to find out; and he is a fool, if he does not carry a reasonable consciousness of these conditions with him always. It is a little harder with the mind; but some qualities are generally estimated fairly enough by their owners. Thus, a man may be trusted when he says he has a good or a bad memory. Not so of his opinion of his own judgment or imagination. It is only by a very slow process that he finds out how much or how little of those qualities he possesses. But it is one of the blessed privileges of growing older, that we come to have a much clearer sense of what we can do and what we cannot, and settle down to our work quietly, knowing what our tools are and what we have to do with them.