beginnings;” and he should strive with might and main to guard against the first approaches, if he wishes his old age to be exempt from a malady, at once so distressing and so fatal. To postpone any useful act, any thing from which we ourselves, or others, may derive the least benefit, is bad enough; but to defer so essential a duty as constant attention to our scholastic studies, in the vain expectation that some future day will answer as well as the present, is like drawing a pecuniary order on an unknown person, without naming any time, and for money to which we have not even the shadow of right or title. The resemblance holds good, too in another important particular: neither the person, we know, nor the future day, will ever answer the draft, for the first is not under the smallest obligation to do so, and the last has no power to change, even to accommodate idlers, that irreversible law of nature, which assures us that _time once abused is lost forever_. It may be said, perhaps by some, that this is a truism odiously trite and wearisome. But let the young and the old, too, beware how they neglect or despise it on this account. Education and all its blessings, great and glorious as they most assuredly are, depend entirely upon the strictest regard being paid to this truism: nor can either the scoffs of the idle, the taunts of the infidel, or the lamentations of sufferers abate one tittle—one jot of the fatal consequences which inevitably follow, when we disregard or contemn it.