That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism, as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the exercises of the college course. The consequences were the graver that I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander. I came out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist were past.