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said in one of his wise essays, “Hitch your wagon to a star’; by which he meant that sometimes the only way to make a thing go is to tie it on to something above it. “Hitching our wagon to a star,” means that our lives often run slowly or come to a dead stop, unless we find something above us to lift them upward. It is this that we need when we feel discouraged.

In olden days, the study of the stars was very common, and for a long time they were the only lights that people had at night. But to-day we have so many other lights after dark, that the poor stars are neglected and forgotten.

What I want to do in our talk together is to see if we are not mistaken in our heedlessness about the stars. As important as the North Star is to sailors are some of those which I have now in mind.

One of the first stars is ambition. “Oh,” some one will say, “if a boy is ambitious, he may want to get ahead in school or athletics by some wrong means.” Certainly, that is true. But in that case his ambition is not a-star. A real ambition never guides us slantwise, or crooked, but straight ahead. It will not let us win our way unless we win it fairly. One of the saddest things to say about a person is, “He has lost his ambition.” That means that his sky is dark, his head is down, and he does not see the stars above him.

I cannot now stop to name all the noble ambitions that we may have. Yet for each of us there ought to be some one ambition greater than all the others, so that we can use it as the sailor