“I owe my success in business chiefly to you,” said a stationer to a paper-maker, as they were settling a large account; “but let me ask how a man of your caution came to give credit so freely to a beginner with my slender means?” “Because,” replied the paper-maker, “at whatever hour in the morning I passed to my business, I always observed you without your coat at yours.” Upon this Mr. Walker, the police-magistrate, observes: “I knew both parties. Different men will have different degrees of success, and every man must expect to experience ebbs and flows; but I fully believe that no one in this country, of whatever condition, who is really attentive, and, what is of great importance, who lets it appear that he is so, can fail in the long-run. Pretence is ever bad; but there are many who obscure their good qualities by a certain carelessness, or even an affected indifference, which deprives them of the advantages they would otherwise infallibly reap, and then they complain of the injustice of the world. The man who conceals or disguises his merit might as well expect to be thought clean in his person if he chose to go covered with filthy rags. The world will not, and cannot in great measure, judge but by appearances; and worth must stamp itself, if it hopes to pass current, even against baser metal: Worth makes the man, want of it the fellow; The rest is all but leather or prunello.—_Pope._” ---------------------------- ENGINEERS AND MECHANICIANS. “No man can look back on the last twenty or thirty years without feeling that it has been _the age of Engineers and Mechanicians_. The profession has, in that period of time, done much to change the aspect of human affairs; for what agency during that period, single or combined, can be compared in its effects, or in its tendency towards the amelioration of the condition of mankind, with the establishment of railroads, of the electric telegraph, and to the improvement in steam navigation?”