'Only think of the inconvenience attending the common practice! There must be _hot water_; to have this there must be _a fire_, and, in some cases, a fire for that purpose alone; to have these, there must be a _servant_, or you must light a fire yourself. For the want of these, the job is put off until a later hour: this causes a stripping and another dressing bout: or, you go in a slovenly state all that day, and the next day the thing must be done, or cleanliness must be abandoned altogether. If you are on a journey, you must wait the pleasure of the servants at the inn before you can dress and set out in the morning; the pleasant time for travelling is gone before you can move from the spot: instead of being at the end of your day's journey in good time, you are benighted, and have to endure all the great inconveniences attendant on tardy movements. And all this from the apparently insignificant affair of shaving. How many a piece of important business has failed from a short delay! And how many thousand of such delays daily proceed from this unworthy cause!' These remarks are especially important to those persons in boarding-houses and elsewhere, for whom hot water, if they use it, must be expressly prepared. Let me urge you never to say I cannot go, or do such a thing, till I am shaved or dressed. Take care always to BE _shaved and dressed_, and then you will always be ready to act. But to this end the habit must be formed in early life, and pertinaciously adhered to. There are those who can truly say that to the habit of adhering to the principles which have been laid down, they owe much of their success in life; that however sober, discreet, and abstinent they might have been, they never could have accomplished much without it. We should suppose by reasoning beforehand, that the _army_ could not be very favorable to steady habits of this or any other kind; yet the following is the testimony of one who had made the trial. 'To the habit of early rising and husbanding my time well, more than to any other thing, I owed my very extraordinary promotion in the army. I was _always ready_. If I had to mount guard at _ten_, I was ready at _nine_: never did any man, or any thing, wait one moment for me. Being, at an age _under twenty years_, raised from corporal to sergeant major _at once_, over the heads of thirty sergeants, I should naturally have been an object of envy and hatred; but this habit of early rising really subdued these passions. 'Before my promotion, a clerk was wanted to make out the morning report of the regiment. I rendered the clerk unnecessary; and, long before any other man was dressed for the parade, my work for the morning was all done, and I myself was on the parade ground, walking, in fine weather, for an hour perhaps.