THE ACORN 8 People Who Live in Air Castles By george gordon Living in an air-castle is about as profitable as owning- a half interest in a rainbow. It is no more nourishing than a dinner of twelve courses eaten in a dream. Air-castles are built of golden moments of time, and their only value is in the raw material thus rendered valueless. The atmosphere of air-castles is heavy and stupefying with the incense of vague hopes and phantom ideals. In them man lulls himself into dreaming inactivity with the songs of the mighty deeds he is going to do, the great influence he some day will have and the vast wealth that will be his, sometime, somehow, somewhere, in the rosy, sunlit days of the future. The architectural error about air-castles is that the owner builds them downward from their gilded turrets in the clouds, instead of upward from a solid, firm foundation of purpose and energy. This diet of mental lotus-leaves is a mental narcotic, not a stimulant. Ambition, when wedded to tireless energy, is a great thing and a good thing, but in itself it amounts to little. Man cannot raise himself to higher things by what he would like to accomplish, but only by what he endeavors to accomplish. To be of value, ambition must ever be made manifest in zeal, in determination, in energy consecrated to an ideal. If it be thus reinforced, thus combined, the thin airy castle melts into nothingness, and the individual stands on a new strong foundation of solid rock, whereon, day by day and stone by stone, he can rear a mighty material structure of life-work to last through time and etern- ity. The air-castle ever represents the work of an architect without a builder; it means plans never put into execution. They tell us that man is the architect of his own fortunes. But if he be merely architect he will make only an air-castle of his life; he should be architect and builder too. Living in the future is living in an air-castle. To-morrow is the grave where the dreams of the dreamer, the toiler who toils not, are buried. The man who says he will lead a newer and better life to-morrow, who promises great things for the future, and yet does nothing in the present to make that future possible, is living in an air-castle. In his arrogance he is attempting to perform a miracle; he is seeking to turn water into wine, to have harvest without seedtime, to have an end without a beginning. If we would make our lives worthy of us, grand and noble, solid and impregnable, we must forsake air-castles of dreaming for THE ACORN 9 strongholds of doing. Every man with an ideal has a right to live in the glow and inspiration of it, and to picture the joy of attainment, as the tired traveler fills his mind with the thought of the brightness of home, to quicken his steps and to make the weary miles seem shorter; but the worker should never really worry about the future, think little of it except for inspiration, to determine his course, as mariners study the stars, to make his plans wisely, and to prepare for that future by making each separate day the best and truest that he can. Let us live up to the fullness of our possibilities each day. Man has only one day of life today. He did live yesterday, he may live to-morrow, but he has only to-day. The secret of true living mental, physical and moral, material and spiritual may be expressed in five words: Live up to your portion. This is the magic formula that transforms air-castles into fortresses. Men sometimes grow mellow and generous in the thought of what they would do if great wealth came to them. "If I were a millionaire," they say and they let the phrase melt sweetly in their mouths as though it were a carmel "I would subsidize genius; I would found a college; I would build a great hospital; I would erect model tenements; I would show the world what real charity is." Oh, it is all so easy, so easy, this vicarious benevolence, this spending of other people's fortunes! Few of us, according to the latest statistics,have amillion,but we allhave something-, some part of it. Are we living up to our portion? Are we generous with what we have? The man who is selfish with one thousand pounds will not develop angelic wings of generosity when his million comes. If the generous spirit be a reality with the individual, instead of an empty boast, he will, every hour, find opportunity to make it manifest. The radiation of kindness need not be expressed in money at all. It may be shown in a smile of human interest, a glow of sympathy, a word of fellowship with the sorrowing and the struggling an instinctive outstretching of a helping hand to one in need. No man living is so poor that he cannot evidence his spirit of benevolence toward his fellow-man. It may assume that rare and wondrously beautiful phase of divine charity, in realizing how often a motive is misrepresented in the act, how sin, sorrow and suffering have warped and disguised latent good, in substituting a word of gentle tolerance for some cheap tinsel of shabby cynicism that pretends to be wit. If we are not rich enough to give "cold, hard" cash, let us at least be too rich to give "cold, hard" words. Let us leave our air-castles of vague self-adulation for so wisely spending millions we have never seen, and