TALKS WITH A KID BROTHER
best. It is not given to mere man to do his very best. You must not expect it.
Nothing is ever so well done but that it can't be improved. And by the time you have incorporated those improvements, you yourself, the artificer, will have developed and improved, so that you will have a new point of view from which you will gain new conceptions of your piece of work, showing new defects not dreamed of before. Then when these are corrected you will by the same process perceive other faults—unless by this time you have knocked the whole thing out of proportion and have nothing to show for your labor at all—and so on indefinitely. It is an endless process and a dangerous tendency. The limit of the perfect circle can never be reached, and meanwhile time is flying, and your head is becoming muddled by too much intensity on the same subject, quite out of proportion to the object.
I remember, when our track team went abroad, the English athletes were amazed and amused at the strictness and strenuousness of our training. "But I fancy you miss
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