We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had been taught every manner of stirring, and this unwonted exercise of being still takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts me painfully out of breath in my soul. “Wisdom is the principal thing,” my other teachers would repeat, “therefore get wisdom, but keep exceedingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short. There are _only_ twenty-four hours to the day. The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do. Let us then be up and doing”--all of this at random from one of their lectures on “The Simple Life, or the Pace that Kills.” Of course there is more or less of truth in this teaching of theirs. A little leisure has no doubt become a dangerous thing--unless one spend it talking or golfing or automobiling, or aëroplaning or elephant-killing, or in some other diverting manner; otherwise one’s nerves, like pulled candy, might set and cease to quiver; or one might even have time to think. “Keep going,”--I quote from another of their lectures,--“keep going; it is the only certainty you have against knowing whither you are going.” I learned that lesson well. See me go--with half a breakfast and the whole morning paper; with less of lunch and the 4:30 edition. But I balance my books, snatch the evening edition, catch my car, get into my clothes, rush out to dinner, and spend the evening lecturing or being lectured to. I do everything but think. But suppose I did think? It could only disturb me--my politics, or ethics, or religion. I had better let the editors and professors and preachers think for me. The editorial office is such a quiet thought-inducing place; as quiet as a boiler factory; and the thinkers there, from editor-in-chief to the printer’s devil, are so thoughtful for the size of the circulation! And the college professors, they have the time and the cloistered quiet needed. But they have pitiful salaries, and enormous needs, and their social status to worry over, and themes to correct, and a fragmentary year to contend with, and Europe to see every summer, and-- Is it right to ask them, with all this, to think? We will ask the preachers instead. They are set apart among the divine and eternal things; they are dedicated to thought; they have covenanted with their creeds to think; it is their business to study, but, “to study to be careful and harmless.”