Providence aids those who aid themselves, and just in proportion as they do their work honestly and conscientiously. Luck is a kind of capricious spirit which is expected to set at naught all the laws of nature for our advantage, or to our disadvantage, without the slightest apparent reason why it should intervene at all. If there is such a thing, that can either make or mar us, our first duty is not to be its slave, but to make ourselves its master.

We must not stand like beggars at a street corner until luck drops a few coppers into our hats. We must be a law unto ourselves, and not mere playthings of chance. Let us be honest enough to acknowledge our own mistakes. The grumbler who laments,

"I never had a slice of bread,
Cut nice and smooth and long and wide,
But fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side,"

fancies himself unlucky. If he were honest, he would blame himself for not keeping good hold of his bread and butter, and if he thought about it, he would see that falling on the buttered side was a natural result of the way in which he was holding it.

This notion of luck very often arises from a mixture of conceit and jealousy. We do not like to allow that another has more talent than we have, and has used his faculties better. He has, however, if we examine his career, been more studious, more careful, more observant. It would be much more noble of us, instead of repeating like parrots the word "luck," meaning thereby that he has got a reward which he does not deserve, to candidly say, "He has deserved all he has won; he is the better fellow."

Another evil arising from this talk about luck is that at last we actually believe in it. Once under the influence of this notion, we exercise no caution or foresight. "Luck," we say, "will bring us through." Fortunately for our future and permanent success, luck does nothing of the sort. In the long-run, luck is nowhere. You may have heard of games of chance—gambling games, as they are styled—and of lotteries and the like. You have heard of people being lucky at them. The professional gambler and lottery-keeper know better than that; they know that even in throwing dice there is very little luck. The man who is lucky to-day is unlucky to-morrow: it is in reality skill or trickery and not luck that enables the professional gambler to pursue his career.

Lucky people, in fact, are people who have thoroughly trained themselves for the battle of life. They have eyes open to perceive a coming danger, and have learned how to avoid it; they recognize a difficulty, and know how to overcome it; they see an opportunity, and know how to make use of it; and they are ready, with all their faculties alert, to seize it before it has gone forever. Their success is visible to every eye, and arrests our attention at once. What we do not see, very often what we will not see, but deliberately shut our eyes to, is the foresight they exercise, the careful training they have undergone, the long practice which has made them perfect.

There is nothing brilliant or showy about this practice and training, and therefore we have not noticed them. But they are there, nevertheless. To all of us, every day of our lives, opportunities present themselves which pass without our heeding them, or, if we see them, without our having the courage and skill to avail ourselves of them. We let them fly, never to return, because we are not ready, and then we cry, "Just like our luck!" As Shakspeare says,

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Away with your notions of luck. Be manly, and trust to work. Do your duty, and let luck do its worst.

THE TALKING LEAVES.[1]

An Indian Story.

BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.

Chapter VII.

efore Steve Harrison and his friend left the ruins of the ancient town behind them, they had decided that they were going away from a complete solitude—a place where even wild Indians did not very often come.

It looked desolate enough, with its scattered inclosures of rough stone, not one of them with any roof on, or any sign that people had lived there for a hundred years at least. The windows in the tumbling walls had probably never had either sash or glass in them, and the furniture, used by the people who built the village, whatever it may have been, had long since disappeared.

It could never have been a very large or populous town, but it could hardly at any time have had a wilder-looking set of inhabitants than were the party of men who drew near it at about the time when Steve and Murray were killing their cougar.

Two tilted wagons, a good deal the worse for wear, apparently pretty heavily laden, and drawn by six mules each, were accompanied by about two dozen men on horseback. Their portraits would have made the fortune of any picture-gallery in the world. Everybody would have gone to look at such a collection of bearded desperadoes.

They were not Indians, nor were they dressed as such. They were attired in every fashion except well and cleanly. If the odds and ends of several clothing stores had been picked up after a fire, and then worn about out, and patched and mended with bits of blankets and greasy buckskin, something like those twenty odd suits of clothes might have been produced; that is, if the man who tried to do it could have had these for a pattern. If not, he would have failed.

The men themselves were as much out of the common way as were the clothes they wore, but they had somehow managed to keep their horses and mules in pretty good condition.

Horses and mules are of more importance than clothing to men who are as far away from tailors and civilization as were these new-comers in the neighborhood of Steve's mine.

If Steve had seen them he would probably have trembled for the "Buckhorn," for Murray would at once have told him that these men were miners.

That was nothing against them, certainly, and they must have been daring fellows to push their hunt for gold so far beyond any region known to such hunters.

One look at their hard, reckless faces would have convinced anybody about their "daring." They looked as if they were ready for anything.

So they were, indeed, and it is quite probable a man of Murray's experience would have guessed at once that they were ready for a good many other things besides mining.

Just now certainly they were thinking of something else.

"Bill," said the foremost rider to a man a little behind him, "we were wrong to leave the trail of them army fellers. We're stuck and lost in here among the mountains."

"It looks like it. We'll hev to go into camp, and scout around till we find a pass. But it wasn't any use follerin' the cavalry arter we found they was bound west."

"That's so. It won't do for us to come out on the Pacific slope. It's Mexico or Texas for us."

"We'd better say Santa Fe."

"They'd make us give too close an account of ourselves there. Some of the boys might let out somethin'."

"Guess it's Mexico, then. That isn't far away now. But I wish I knew the way down out of this."

The ruins, strange and wonderful as they were, did not seem to excite any great degree of curiosity among those men. They talked about them, to be sure, but in a way which showed