How grateful I am for all this; and to these writers immortal! How they have sweetened life! But they really changed no course, formed no character, opened no doors, “influenced” nothing. In a little children’s booklet I have explained my own nature--timid, sensitive, bashful to awkwardness--and that at this period of a dozen years or so I chanced to make the acquaintance of L. W. Fowler, of the “Fowler Brothers,” the earliest, and then only, exponents of Phrenology in the country. I had at that time read much of the literatures above cited which then existed. Mr. Fowler placed in my hands their well-written book and brochures on Phrenology, “The Science of the Mind.” This carried me to another class of writers, Spurzheim, and Combe--“The Constitution of Man.” These became my exemplars and “Know thyself” became my text and my study. A long life has passed, and so have they, but their influence has remained. In every walk of life it has gone with me. It has enabled me to better comprehend the seeming mysteries about me; the course of those with whom I had to deal, or come in contact; not by the studying of their thoughts, or intentions, for I abhor the practice of reading one’s friends; but to enable me to excuse, without offense, many acts which I could in no other way have accounted for. It has enabled me to see, not only that, but why it was their nature, and could not be changed. They “could no other, so help them God.” It has enriched my field of charitable judgment; enlarged my powers of forgiveness, made those things plain that would have been obscure to me, easy, that would have been hard, and sometimes made possible to endure, without complaint, that which might otherwise have proved unendurable. “Know thyself” has taught me in any great crisis to put myself under my own feet; bury enmity, cast ambition to the winds, ignore complaint, despise retaliation, and stand erect in the consciousness of those higher qualities that made for the good of human kind, even though we may not clearly see the way. “I know not where His Islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.”