Let the young reader take note of this, and in like manner find for everything its fitting and sufficient time. There is much wisdom in the adage, "A place for everything, and everything in its place;" but it is equally necessary that there should be "an hour for everything, and everything in its hour." The best talents, the best opportunities, will be wholly wasted, unless their possessor can recognize the value of method. The man who does not systematize his time, who does not economize it so as to accomplish in each day the largest possible amount of work, without haste or unhealthy pressure, will make but an indifferent use of his gifts, and will assuredly lose many precious hours. He will be always too late; always endeavouring to overtake the lost moments, and never succeeding in doing so; until at length such a weight will accumulate upon him of work undone and opportunities neglected, that, in his exhaustion and discontent, he will lose all hope, and sink into the idleness of apathy. Method is the secret of success: the methodical student will get out of the twenty-four hours all that it is possible to get out of them; while the irregular and disorderly will lose a more or less considerable portion of them, according to the degree of his want of system. [Sidenote: Smeaton abroad.] Smeaton devoted a portion of his time to the study of French, in order that he might be able to read the valuable scientific treatises contained in that language, and also that he might be able to take a journey which he contemplated into the Low Countries, for the purpose of inspecting the great canal works of the Dutch engineers. [Sidenote: Smeaton in Holland.] He carried out his intention in 1754, when he traversed Holland and Belgium--mostly on foot, or in the _truckschuyts_ or canal boats, which form the national conveyance of those countries--and carefully inspected the most remarkable achievements of mechanical science in the districts through which he passed. It was with no little interest he found himself in a land which has been literally rescued from the sea by the efforts of human skill and industry; a great portion of which, even in comparatively modern times, was buried deep beneath the waters of ocean; a land to which nature has been so unkindly, and for which man has done so much. In a certain sense, Holland is the creation, as well as the trophy, of the engineer; and wherever Smeaton went, he found himself in the engineer's track. From Rotterdam he travelled by Delft, famous for its pottery, and the Hague, to the great commercial emporium of Amsterdam, and thence, as far north as Holder, examining with critical attention the huge dikes and embankments raised by the labour of man to prevent the sea from recovering its own.