It is the false ideal that builds the "Paradise of Fools." It is the eagerness to achieve success in realms we cannot reach, which breeds more than half the ills that curse the world. If all the fish eggs were to hatch, and every little fish become a big fish, the oceans would be pushed from their beds, and the rivers would be eternally "dammed"—with fish; but the whales, and sharks, and sturgeons, and dog-fish, and eels, and snakes, and turtles, make three meals every day in the year on fish and fish eggs. If all the legal spawn should hatch out lawyers, the earth and the fullness thereof would be mortgaged for fees, and mankind would starve to death in the effort to pay off the "aforesaid and the same." If the entire crop of medical eggs should hatch out full fledged doctors, old "Skull and Cross Bones" would hold high carnival among the children of men, and the old sexton would sing:

If I could get the ear of the young men who pant after politics, as the hart panteth after the water brook, I would exhort them to seek honors in some other way, for "Jordan is a hard road to travel."

The poet truly said: "How like a mounting devil in the heart is the unreined ambition. Let it once but play the monarch, and its haughty brow glows with a beauty that bewilders thought and unthrones peace forever. Putting on the very pomp of Lucifer, it turns the heart to ashes, and with not a spring left in the bosom for the spirit's lip, we look upon our splendor and forget the thirst of which we perish."