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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Architects of Fate
+       or, Steps to Success and Power
+
+Author: Orison Swett Marden
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2007 [EBook #21622]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCHITECTS OF FATE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Phillips Brooks]
+
+"The best-loved man in New England."
+
+"The ideal life, the life full of completion, haunts us all.  We feel
+the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are."
+
+"_First, be a man._"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE
+
+OR, STEPS TO SUCCESS AND POWER
+
+
+  A BOOK DESIGNED TO INSPIRE YOUTH TO
+  CHARACTER BUILDING, SELF-CULTURE
+  AND NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT
+
+
+BY
+
+ORISON SWETT MARDEN
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "PUSHING TO THE FRONT
+  OR, SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES"
+
+
+
+_ILLUSTRATED WITH SIXTEEN FINE
+  PORTRAITS OF EMINENT PERSONS_
+
+
+
+  "All are architects of fate
+  Working in these walls of time."
+
+  "Our to-days and yesterdays
+  Are the blocks with which we build."
+
+  "Let thy great deed be thy prayer to thy God."
+
+
+
+
+TORONTO
+
+WILLIAM BRIGGS
+
+WESLEY BUILDINGS
+
+MONTREAL: C. W. COATES
+
+HALIFAX: S. F. HUESTIS
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1895,
+
+BY ORISON SWETT MARDEN.
+
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+The demand for more than a dozen editions of "Pushing to the Front"
+during its first year and its universally favorable reception, both at
+home and abroad, have encouraged the author to publish this companion
+volume of somewhat similar scope and purpose.  The two books were
+prepared simultaneously, and the story of the first, given in its
+preface, applies equally well to this.
+
+Inspiration to character-building and worthy achievement is the keynote
+of the present volume, its object, to arouse to honorable exertion
+youth who are drifting without aim, to awaken dormant ambitions in
+those who have grown discouraged in the struggle for success, to
+encourage and stimulate to higher resolve those who are setting out to
+make their own way, with perhaps neither friendship nor capital other
+than a determination to get on in the world.
+
+Nothing is so fascinating to a youth with high purpose, life, and
+energy throbbing in his young blood as stories of men and women who
+have brought great things to pass.  Though these themes are as old as
+the human race, yet they are ever new, and more interesting to the
+young than any fiction.  The cry of youth is for life! more life!  No
+didactic or dogmatic teaching, however brilliant, will capture a
+twentieth-century boy, keyed up to the highest pitch by the pressure of
+an intense civilization.  The romance of achievement under
+difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant ends; the story of
+how great men started, their struggles, their long waitings, amid want
+and woe, the obstacles overcome, the final triumphs; examples, which
+explode excuses, of men who have seized common situations and made them
+great, of those of average capacity who have succeeded by the use of
+ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose:
+these will most inspire the ambitious youth.  The author teaches that
+there are bread and success for every youth under the American flag who
+has the grit to seize his chance and work his way to his own loaf; that
+the barriers are not yet erected which declare to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther"; that the most forbidding circumstances
+cannot repress a longing for knowledge, a yearning for growth; that
+poverty, humble birth, loss of limbs or even eyesight, have not been
+able to bar the progress of men with grit; that poverty has rocked the
+cradle of the giants who have wrung civilization from barbarism, and
+have led the world up from savagery to the Gladstones, the Lincolns,
+and the Grants.
+
+The book shows that it is the man with one unwavering aim who cuts his
+way through opposition and forges to the front; that in this electric
+age, where everything is pusher or pushed, he who would succeed must
+hold his ground and push hard; that what are stumbling-blocks and
+defeats to the weak and vacillating, are but stepping-stones and
+victories to the strong and determined.  The author teaches that every
+germ of goodness will at last struggle into bloom and fruitage, and
+that true success follows every right step.  He has tried to touch the
+higher springs of the youth's aspiration; to lead him to high ideals;
+to teach him that there is something nobler in an occupation than
+merely living-getting or money-getting; that a man may make millions
+and be a failure still; to caution youth not to allow the maxims of a
+low prudence, dinned daily into his ears in this money-getting age, to
+repress the longings for a higher life; that the hand can never safely
+reach higher than does the heart.
+
+The author's aim has been largely through concrete illustrations which
+have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in
+a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more
+pertinent than novel.
+
+The author wishes to acknowledge valuable assistance from Mr. Arthur W.
+Brown, of W. Kingston, R. I.
+
+O. S. M.
+
+43 BOWDOIN ST., BOSTON, MASS.
+
+December 2, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.  WANTED--A MAN
+
+God after a _man_.  Wealth is nothing, fame is nothing.  _Manhood is
+everything_.
+
+II.  DARE
+
+Dare to live thy creed.  Conquer your place in the world.  All things
+serve a brave soul.
+
+III.  THE WILL AND THE WAY
+
+Find a way or make one.  Everything is either pusher or pushed.  The
+world always listens to a man with a will in him.
+
+IV.  SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES
+
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to recognition through detraction, calumny, and persecution.
+
+V.  USES OR OBSTACLES
+
+The Great Sculptor cares little for the human block as such; it is the
+statue He is after; and He will blast, hammer, and chisel with poverty,
+hardships, anything to get out the man.
+
+VI.  ONE UNWAVERING AIM
+
+Find your purpose and fling your life out to it.  Try to be somebody
+with all your might.
+
+VII.  SOWING AND REAPING
+
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.
+_Start right_.
+
+VIII.  SELF-HELP
+
+Self-made or never made.  The greatest men have risen from the ranks.
+
+IX.  WORK AND WAIT
+
+Don't risk a life's superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+
+X.  CLEAR GRIT
+
+The goddess of fame or of fortune has been won by many a poor boy who
+had no friends, no backing, or anything but pure grit and invincible
+purpose to commend him.
+
+XI.  THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD
+
+Manhood is above all riches and overtops all titles; character is
+greater than any career.
+
+XII.  WEALTH IN ECONOMY
+
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach,
+are disagreeable; but debt is infinitely worse than all."
+
+XIII.  RICH WITHOUT MONEY
+
+To have nothing is not poverty.  Whoever uplifts civilization is rich
+though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.
+
+XIV.  OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE
+
+"How speaks the present hour?  _Act_."  Don't wait for great
+opportunities.  _Seize common occasions and make them great_.
+
+XV.  THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS
+
+There is nothing small in a world where a mud-crack swells to an
+Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold.
+
+XVI.  SELF-MASTERY
+
+Guard your weak point.  Be lord over yourself.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF PORTRAITS.
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+    I. Phillips Brooks . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+   II. Oliver Hazard Perry
+  III. Walter Scott
+   IV. William Hickling Prescott
+    V. John Bunyan
+   VI. Richard Arkwright
+  VII. Victor Hugo
+ VIII. James A. Garfield (missing from book)
+   IX. Thomas Alva Edison
+    X. Andrew Jackson
+   XI. John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)
+  XII. Alexander Hamilton
+ XIII. Ralph Waldo Emerson
+  XIV. Thomas Jefferson
+   XV. Louis Agassiz
+  XVI. James Russell Lowell
+
+
+
+
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+WANTED--A MAN.
+
+  "Wanted; men:
+  Not systems fit and wise,
+  Not faiths with rigid eyes,
+  Not wealth in mountain piles,
+  Not power with gracious smiles,
+  Not even the potent pen:
+  Wanted; men."
+
+Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and
+know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a
+man.--JEREMIAH.
+
+All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us?  We want a man!
+Don't look so far for this man.  You have him at hand.  This man,--it
+is you, it is I, it is each one of us! . . .  How to constitute one's
+self a man?  Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
+easier, if one wills it.--ALEXANDRE DUMAS.
+
+  "'Tis life, not death for which we pant!
+  'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant:
+  More life and fuller, that we want."
+
+I do not wish in attempting to paint a man to describe an air-fed,
+unimpassioned, impossible ghost.  My eyes and ears are revolted by any
+neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man.--EMERSON.
+
+  But nature, with a matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born,
+  And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn;
+  She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine,
+  And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?"
+        ELIZA COOK.
+
+
+"In a thousand cups of life," says Emerson, "only one is the right
+mixture.  The fine adjustment of the existing elements, where the
+well-mixed man is born with eyes not too dull, nor too good, with fire
+enough and earth enough, capable of receiving impressions from all
+things, and not too susceptible, then no gift need be bestowed on him.
+He brings his fortune with him."
+
+Diogenes sought with a lantern at noontide in ancient Athens for a
+perfectly honest man, and sought in vain.  In the market place he once
+cried aloud, "Hear me, O men;" and, when a crowd collected around him,
+he said scornfully: "I called for men, not pygmies."
+
+The world has a standing advertisement over the door of every
+profession, every occupation, every calling; "Wanted--A Man."
+
+Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
+has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
+though all the world say "Yes."
+
+Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
+permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
+manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one facility to
+stunt or paralyze his other faculties.
+
+Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
+estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
+living.  Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and
+culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.
+
+A thousand pulpits vacant in a single religious denomination, a
+thousand preachers standing idle in the market place, while a thousand
+church committees scour the land for men to fill those same vacant
+pulpits, and scour in vain, is a sufficient indication, in one
+direction at least, of the largeness of the opportunities of the age,
+and also of the crying need of good men.
+
+Wanted, a man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little
+defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his
+powers.  Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any part of
+his nature.
+
+Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development,
+who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow
+specialty, and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and
+die.  Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of
+things.  Wanted, a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who
+does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day
+life; a man who prefers substance to show, who regards his good name as
+a priceless treasure.
+
+Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
+whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a
+tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of
+nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as
+himself."
+
+God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, but he also calls
+him to be intelligent and skillful and strong and brave.
+
+The world wants a man who is educated all over; whose nerves are
+brought to their acutest sensibility, whose brain is cultured, keen,
+incisive, penetrating, broad, liberal, deep; whose hands are deft;
+whose eyes are alert, sensitive, microscopic, whose heart is tender,
+broad, magnanimous, true.
+
+The whole world is looking for such a man.  Although there are millions
+out of employment, yet it is almost impossible to find just the right
+man in almost any department of life.  Every profession and every
+occupation has a standing advertisement all over the world: "Wanted--A
+Man."
+
+Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on education, says: "According to the
+order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the
+profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the
+duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices
+that have a relation to him.  It matters little to me whether my pupil
+be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.  Nature has destined
+us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination
+concerning society.  To live is the profession I would teach him.  When
+I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a
+lawyer, nor a divine.  _Let him first be a man_; Fortune may remove him
+from one rank to another as she pleases, he will be always found in his
+place."
+
+A little, short doctor of divinity in a large Baptist convention stood
+on a step and said he thanked God he was a Baptist.  The audience could
+not hear and called "Louder."  "Get up higher," some one said.  "I
+can't," he replied.  "To be a Baptist is as high as one can get."  But
+there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
+_man_.
+
+As Emerson says, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he
+rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty?
+is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but is he anybody?
+does he stand for something?  He must be good of his kind.  That is all
+that Talleyrand, all that State Street, all that the common sense of
+mankind asks.
+
+When Garfield was asked as a young boy, "what he meant to be," he
+answered: "First of all, I must make myself a man, if I do not succeed
+in that, I can succeed in nothing."
+
+Montaigne says our work is not to train a soul by itself alone, nor a
+body by itself alone, but to train a man.
+
+One great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
+animals.  To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
+coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits.  They must
+have a robustness of health.  Mere absence of disease is not health.
+It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life
+and beauty to the valley below.  Only he is healthy who exults in mere
+animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding
+pulse throughout his body, who feels life in every limb, as dogs do
+when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of
+ice.
+
+Pope, the poet, was with Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, one day, when
+the latter's nephew, a Guinea slave-trader, came into the room.
+"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two
+greatest men in the world."  "I don't know how great men you may be,"
+said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks.  I have often bought
+a much better man than either of you, all muscles and bones, for ten
+guineas."
+
+Sydney Smith said, "I am convinced that digestion is the great secret
+of life, and that character, virtue and talents, and qualities are
+powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie crust, and rich soups.  I have
+often thought I could feed or starve men into virtues or vices, and
+affect them more powerfully with my instruments of torture than
+Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."
+
+What more glorious than a magnificent manhood, animated with the
+bounding spirits of overflowing health?
+
+It is a sad sight to see thousands of students graduated every year
+from our grand institutions, whose object is to make stalwart,
+independent, self-supporting men, turned out into the world saplings
+instead of stalwart oaks, "memory-glands" instead of brainy men,
+helpless instead of self-supporting, sickly instead of robust, weak
+instead of strong, leaning instead of erect.  "So many promising
+youths, and never a finished man!"
+
+The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of
+the body.  A peevish, snarling, ailing man cannot develop the vigor and
+strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust, jolly
+man.  There is an inherent love in the human mind for wholeness, a
+demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an
+inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency.  Nature too
+demands that man be ever at the top of his condition.  The giant's
+strength with the imbecile's brain will not be characteristic of the
+coming man.
+
+Man has been a dwarf of himself, but a higher type of manhood stands at
+the door of this age knocking for admission.
+
+As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave
+reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes,
+and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a
+while the whole sea is there and beyond it, so now and then there comes
+a man head and shoulders above his fellow-men, showing that Nature has
+not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man will overtop
+the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.
+
+Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points
+of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a
+nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait
+of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.  So the coming man will
+be a composite, many in one.  He will absorb into himself not the
+weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other
+types of men.  He will be a man raised to the highest power.  He will
+be self-centred, equipoised, and ever master of himself.  His
+sensibility will not be deadened or blunted by violation of nature's
+laws.  His whole character will be impressible, and will respond to the
+most delicate touches of nature.
+
+What a piece of work--this coming man!  "How noble in reason.  How
+infinite in faculties.  In form and motion how express and admirable,
+in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.  The
+beauty of the world.  The paragon of animals."
+
+The first requisite of all education and discipline should be
+man-timber.  Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
+Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or
+an exquisite carving.  But it must become timber first.  Time and
+patience develop the sapling into the tree.  So through discipline,
+education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy
+mental, moral, physical timber.
+
+What an aid to character building would be the determination of the
+young man in starting out in life to consider himself his own bank;
+that his notes will be accepted as good or bad, and will pass current
+everywhere or be worthless, according to his individual reputation for
+honor and veracity; that if he lets a note go to protest, his bank of
+character will be suspected; if he lets two or three go to protest,
+public confidence will be seriously shaken; that if they continue to go
+to protest, his reputation will be lost and confidence in him ruined.
+
+If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every
+statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he
+makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be
+kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other
+men's time, if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure,
+feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate
+a hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a
+stand at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost
+unlimited credit and the confidence of all, and would have developed
+into noble man-timber.
+
+What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a
+continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce, compared
+with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the
+accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with the fear of
+exposure, with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no
+stain of dishonor?  To have done no man a wrong; to have put your
+signature to no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not
+have been an attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within
+arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire
+and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;--_this is to
+be a man_.
+
+  "He that of such a height hath built his mind,
+  And reared the dwelling of his thought so strong
+  As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
+  Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
+  Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
+  His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
+  What a fair seat hath he; from whence he may
+  The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey."
+    [_Lines found in one of the books of Beecher's Library._]
+
+A man is never so happy as when he is _totus in se_; as when he
+suffices to himself, and can walk without crutches or a guide.  Said
+Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as much out of myself as could be made
+of the stuff, and no man should require more."
+
+Man is the only great thing in the universe.  All the ages have been
+trying to produce a perfect model.  Only one complete man has yet been
+evolved.  The best of us are but prophecies of what is to come.
+
+    What constitutes a state?
+  Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
+    Thick wall or moated gate;
+  Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned;
+    Not bays and broad-armed ports,
+  Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
+    Not starred and spangled courts,
+  Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
+    No: men, high-minded men,
+  With powers as far above dull brutes endued
+    In forest, brake, or den,
+  As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude,--
+    Men who their duties know,
+  But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
+    Prevent the long-aimed blow,
+  And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.
+        WILLIAM JONES.
+
+  God give us men.  A time like this demands
+  Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands:
+  Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
+  Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
+  Men who possess opinions and a will;
+  Men who have honor--men who will not lie;
+  Men who can stand before a demagogue
+  And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
+  Tall men sun-crowned, who live above the fog
+  In public duty, and in private thinking.
+        ANON.
+
+  Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,
+  And let in manhood--let in happiness;
+  Admit the boundless theatre of thought
+  From nothing up to God . . . which makes a man!
+        YOUNG.
+
+  "The wisest man could ask no more of fate
+  Than to be simple, modest, manly, true."
+
+  In speech right gentle, yet so wise; princely of mien,
+  Yet softly mannered; modest, deferent,
+  And tender-hearted, though of fearless blood.
+        EDWIN ARNOLD.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DARE.
+
+The Spartans did not inquire how many the enemy are, but where they
+are.--AGIS II.
+
+What's brave, what's noble, let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+and make death proud to take us.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  Better, like Hector, in the field to die,
+  Than, like a perfumed Paris, turn and fly.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+Let me die facing the enemy.--BAYARD.
+
+Who conquers me, shall find a stubborn foe.--BYRON.
+
+Courage in danger is half the battle.--PLAUTUS.
+
+  No great deed is done
+  By falterers who ask for certainty.
+        GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+Fortune befriends the bold.--DRYDEN.
+
+  Tender handed stroke a nettle,
+    And it stings you for your pains;
+  Grasp it like a man of mettle,
+    And it soft as silk remains.
+        AARON HILL.
+
+We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.--BOV�E.
+
+  Man should dare all things that he knows is right,
+  And fear to do nothing save what is wrong.
+        PHEBE CARY.
+
+  Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
+  Shows softness in the upper story.
+        LOWELL.
+
+O friend, never strike sail to fear.  Come into port grandly, or sail
+with God the seas.--EMERSON.
+
+To stand with a smile upon your face against a stake from which you
+cannot get away--that, no doubt, is heroic.  But the true glory is
+resignation to the inevitable.  To stand unchained, with perfect
+liberty to go away, held only by the higher claims of duty, and let the
+fire creep up to the heart,--this is heroism.--F. W. ROBERTSON.
+
+
+"Steady, men!  Every man must die where he stands!" said Colin Campbell
+to the Ninety-third Highlanders at Balaklava, as an overwhelming force
+of Russian cavalry came sweeping down.  "Ay, ay, Sir Colin! we'll do
+that!" was the cordial response from men many of whom had to keep their
+word by thus obeying.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: COMMODORE PERRY]
+
+"We have met the enemy and they are ours."
+
+  "He either fears his fate too much
+    Or his deserts too small,
+  That dares not put it to the touch,
+    To gain or lose it all."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Bring back the colors," shouted a captain at the battle of the Alma,
+when an ensign maintained his ground in front, although the men were
+retreating.  "No," cried the ensign, "bring up the men to the colors."
+"To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare," was Danton's
+noble defiance to the enemies of France.
+
+"The Commons of France have resolved to deliberate," said Mirabeau to
+De Breze, who brought an order from the king for them to disperse, June
+23, 1789.  "We have heard the intentions that have been attributed to
+the king; and you, sir, who cannot be recognized as his organ in the
+National Assembly,--you, who have neither place, voice, nor right to
+speak,--you are not the person to bring to us a message of his.  Go,
+say to those who sent you that we are here by the power of the people,
+and that we will not be driven hence, save by the power of the bayonet."
+
+When the assembled senate of Rome begged Regulus not to return to
+Carthage to fulfill an illegal promise, he calmly replied: "Have you
+resolved to dishonor me?  Torture and death are awaiting me, but what
+are these to the shame of an infamous act, or the wounds of a guilty
+mind?  Slave as I am to Carthage, I still have the spirit of a Roman.
+I have sworn to return.  It is my duty.  Let the gods take care of the
+rest."
+
+The courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave
+way the moment his final doom was announced.  The moral cowardice which
+had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and
+despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive
+recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon.  But pardon was
+impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its
+very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford
+on the 21st of March, to repeat his recantation on the way to the
+stake.  "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before
+him,--"now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more
+than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is
+the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now
+renounce and refuse as things written by a hand contrary to the truth
+which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my
+life, if it might be.  And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing
+contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished;
+for if I come to the fire it shall be the first burned."  "This was the
+hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it
+shall suffer first punishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame,
+"he never stirred nor cried till life was gone."
+
+"Oh, if I were only a man!" exclaimed Rebecca Bates, a girl of
+fourteen, as she looked from the window of a lighthouse at Scituate,
+Mass., during the War of 1812, and saw a British warship anchor in the
+harbor.  "What could you do?" asked Sarah Winsor, a young visitor.
+"See what a lot of them the boats contain, and look at their guns!" and
+she pointed to five large boats, filled with soldiers in scarlet
+uniforms, who were coming to burn the vessels in the harbor and destroy
+the town.  "I don't care, I'd fight," said Rebecca.  "I'd use father's
+old shotgun--anything.  Think of uncle's new boat and the sloop!  And
+how hard it is to sit here and see it all, and not lift a finger to
+help.  Father and uncle are in the village and will do all they can.
+How still it is in the town!  There is not a man to be seen."  "Oh,
+they are hiding till the soldiers get nearer," said Sarah, "then we'll
+hear the shots and the drum."  "The drum!" exclaimed Rebecca, "how can
+they use it?  It is here.  Father brought it home last night to mend.
+See! the first boat has reached the sloop.  Oh! they are going to burn
+her.  Where is that drum?  I've a great mind to go down and beat it.
+We could hide behind the sandhills and bushes."  As flames began to
+rise from the sloop the ardor of the girls increased.  They found the
+drum and an old fife, and, slipping out of doors unnoticed by Mrs.
+Bates, soon stood behind a row of sandhills.  "Rub-a-dub-dub,
+rub-a-dub-dub," went the drum, and "squeak, squeak, squeak," went the
+fife.  The Americans in the town thought that help had come from
+Boston, and rushed into boats to attack the redcoats.  The British
+paused in their work of destruction; and, when the fife began to play
+"Yankee Doodle," they scrambled into their boats and rowed in haste to
+the warship, which weighed anchor and sailed away as fast as the wind
+would carry her.
+
+A woman's piercing shriek suddenly startled a party of surveyors at
+dinner in a forest of northern Virginia on a calm, sunny day in 1750.
+The cries were repeated in quick succession, and the men sprang through
+the undergrowth to learn their cause.  "Oh, sir," exclaimed the woman
+as she caught sight of a youth of eighteen, but a man in stature and
+bearing; "you will surely do something for me!  Make these friends
+release me.  My boy,--my poor boy is drowning, and they will not let me
+go!"  "It would be madness; she will jump into the river," said one of
+the men who was holding her; "and the rapids would dash her to pieces
+in a moment!"  Throwing on his coat, the youth sprang to the edge of
+the bank, scanned for a moment the rocks and whirling currents, and
+then, at sight of part of the boy's dress, plunged into the roaring
+rapids.  "Thank God, he will save my child!" cried the mother, and all
+rushed to the brink of the precipice; "there he is!  Oh, my boy, my
+darling boy!  How could I leave you?"
+
+But all eyes were bent upon the youth struggling with strong heart and
+hope amid the dizzy sweep of the whirling currents far below.  Now it
+seemed as if he would be dashed against a projecting rock, over which
+the water flew in foam, and anon a whirlpool would drag him in, from
+whose grasp escape would seem impossible.  Twice the boy went out of
+sight, but he had reappeared the second time, although frightfully near
+the most dangerous part of the river.  The rush of waters here was
+tremendous, and no one had ever dared to approach it, even in a canoe,
+lest he should be dashed to pieces.  The youth redoubled his exertions.
+Three times he was about to grasp the child, when some stronger eddy
+would toss it from him.  One final effort he makes; the child is held
+aloft by his strong right arm, but a cry of horror bursts from the lips
+of every spectator as boy and man shoot over the falls and vanish in
+the seething waters below.
+
+"There they are!" shouted the mother a moment later, in a delirium of
+joy.  "See! they are safe!  Great God, I thank Thee!"  And sure enough
+they emerged unharmed from the boiling vortex, and in a few minutes
+reached a low place in the bank and were drawn up by their friends, the
+boy senseless, but still alive, and the youth almost exhausted.  "God
+will give you a reward," solemnly spoke the grateful woman.  "He will
+do great things for you in return for this day's work, and the
+blessings of thousands besides mine will attend you."
+
+The youth was George Washington.
+
+"Your Grace has not the organ of animal courage largely developed,"
+said a phrenologist, who was examining Wellington's head.  "You are
+right," replied the Iron Duke, "and but for my sense of duty I should
+have retreated in my first fight."  That first fight, on an Indian
+field, was one of the most terrible on record.
+
+In the reverses which followed Napoleon, he met the allies at Arcis.  A
+live shell having fallen in front of one of his young battalions, which
+recoiled and wavered in expectation of an explosion, Napoleon, to
+reassure them, spurred his charger toward the instrument of
+destruction, made him smell the burning match, waited unshaken for the
+explosion, and was blown up.  Rolling in the dust with his mutilated
+steed, and rising without a wound amid the plaudits of his soldiers, he
+calmly called for another horse, and continued to brave the grape-shot,
+and to fly into the thickest of the battle.
+
+When General Jackson was a judge and was holding court in a small
+settlement, a border ruffian, a murderer and desperado, came into the
+court-room with brutal violence and interrupted the court.  The judge
+ordered him to be arrested.  The officer did not dare to approach him.
+"Call a posse," said the judge, "and arrest him."  But they also shrank
+in fear from the ruffian.  "Call me, then," said Jackson; "this court
+is adjourned for five minutes."  He left the bench, walked straight up
+to the man, and with his eagle eye actually cowed the ruffian, who
+dropped his weapons, afterwards saying, "There was something in his eye
+I could not resist."
+
+One of the last official acts of the late President Carnot, of France,
+was the sending of a medal of the French Legion of Honor to a little
+American girl, who lives in Indiana.  While a train on the Pan Handle
+Railroad, having on board several distinguished Frenchmen, was bound to
+Chicago and the World's Fair, Jennie Carey, who was then ten years old,
+discovered that a trestle was on fire, and that if the train, which was
+nearly due, entered it a dreadful wreck would take place.  Thereupon
+she ran out upon the track to a place where she could be seen from some
+little distance.  Then she took off her red flannel skirt and, when the
+train came in view, waved it back and forth across the track.  It was
+seen, and the train stopped.  On board of it were seven hundred people,
+many of whom must have suffered death but for Jennie's courage and
+presence of mind.  When they returned to France, the Frenchmen brought
+the occurrence to the notice of President Carnot, and the result was
+the sending of the medal of this famous French society, the purpose of
+which is the honoring of bravery and merit, wherever they may be found.
+
+After the battle of Fort Donelson, the wounded were hauled down the
+hill in rough board wagons, and most of them died before they reached
+St. Louis.  One blue-eyed boy of nineteen, with both arms and both legs
+shattered, had lain a long time and was neglected.  He said, "Why, you
+see they couldn't stop to bother with us because they had to take the
+fort.  When they took it we all forgot our sufferings and shouted for
+joy, even to the dying."
+
+Louis IX. of France was captured by the Turks at the battle of
+Mansoora, during the Seventh Crusade, and his wife Marguerite, with a
+babe at the breast, was in Damietta, many miles away.  The Infidels
+surrounded the city, and pressed the garrison so hard that it was
+decided to capitulate.  The queen summoned the knights, and told them
+that she at least would die in armor upon the ramparts before the enemy
+should become masters of Damietta.
+
+  "Before her words they thrilled like leaves
+    When winds are in the wood;
+  And a deepening murmur told of men
+    Roused to a loftier mood."
+
+
+Grasping lance and shield, they vowed to defend their queen and the
+cross to the last.  Damietta was saved.
+
+Pyrrhus marched to Sparta to reinstate the deposed Cleonymus, and
+quietly pitched his tents before Laconia, not anticipating resistance.
+In consternation, the Spartans in council decided to send their women
+to Crete for safety.  But the women met and asked Queen Archidamia to
+remonstrate.  She went to the council, sword in hand, and told the men
+that their wives did not care to live after Sparta was destroyed.
+
+  "We are brave men's mothers, and brave men's wives;
+    We are ready to do and dare;
+  We are ready to man your walls with our lives,
+    And string your bows with our hair."
+
+
+They hurried to the walls and worked all night, aiding the men in
+digging trenches.  When Pyrrhus attacked the city next day, his repulse
+was so emphatic that he withdrew from Laconia.
+
+Charles V. of Spain passed through Thuringia in 1547, on his return to
+Swabia after the battle of Muehlburg.  He wrote to Catherine, Countess
+Dowager of Schwartzburg, promising that her subjects should not be
+molested in their persons or property if they would supply the Spanish
+soldiers with provisions at a reasonable price.  On approaching
+Eudolstadt, General Alva and Prince Henry of Brunswick, with his sons,
+invited themselves, by a messenger sent forward, to breakfast with the
+Countess, who had no choice but to ratify so delicate a request from
+the commander of an army.  Just as the guests were seated at a generous
+repast, the Countess was called from the hall and told that the
+Spaniards were using violence and driving away the cattle of the
+peasants.
+
+Quietly arming all her retinue, she bolted and barred all the gates and
+doors of the castle, and returned to the banquet to complain of the
+breach of faith.  General Alva told her that such was the custom of
+war, adding that such trifling disorders were not to be heeded.  "That
+we shall presently see," said Catharine; "my poor subjects must have
+their own again, or, as God lives, prince's blood for oxen's blood!"
+The doors were opened, and armed men took the places of the waiters
+behind the chairs of the guests.  Henry changed color; then, as the
+best way out of a bad scrape, laughed loudly, and ended by praising the
+splendid acting of his hostess, and promising that Alva should order
+the cattle restored at once.  Not until a courier returned, saying that
+the order had been obeyed, and all damages settled satisfactorily, did
+the armed waiters leave.  The Countess then thanked her guests for the
+honor they had done her castle, and they retired with protestations of
+their distinguished consideration.
+
+It was the heroic devotion of an Indian girl that saved the life of
+Captain John Smith, when the powerful King Powhatan had decreed his
+death.  Ill could the struggling colony spare him at that time.
+
+When the consul shouted that the bridge was tottering, Lartius and
+Herminius sought safety in flight.  But Horatius strode still nearer
+the foe, the single champion of his country and liberty, and dared the
+ninety thousand to come on.  Dead stillness fell upon the Tuscans, so
+astonished were they at the audacity of the Roman.  He first broke the
+awful silence, so deep that his clear, strong voice could be heard by
+thousands in both armies, between which rolled the Tiber, as he
+denounced the baseness and perfidy of the invaders.  Not until his
+words were drowned by the loud crash of fiercely disrupturing timbers,
+and the sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their
+showers of arrows and javelins.  Then, dexterously warding off the
+missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber.  Although stabbed
+in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he swam in
+safety to Rome.
+
+"It is a bad omen," said Eric the Red, when his horse slipped and fell
+on the way to his ship, moored on the coast of Greenland, in readiness
+for a voyage of discovery.  "Ill-fortune would be mine should I dare
+venture now upon the sea."  So he returned to his house, but his young
+son Leif decided to go, and, with a crew of thirty-five men, sailed
+southward in search of the unknown shore upon which Captain Biarni had
+been driven by a storm, while sailing in another Viking ship two or
+three years before.  The first land that they saw was probably
+Labrador, a barren, rugged plain.  Leif called this country Heluland,
+or the land of flat stones.  Sailing onward many days, he came to a
+low, level coast thickly covered with woods, on account of which he
+called the country Markland, probably the modern Nova Scotia.  Sailing
+onward, they came to an island which they named Vinland on account of
+the abundance of delicious wild grapes in the woods.  This was in the
+year 1000.  Here where the city of Newport, R. I., stands, they spent
+many months, and then returned to Greenland with their vessel loaded
+with grapes and strange kinds of wood.  The voyage was successful, and
+no doubt Eric was sorry he had been frightened by the bad omen.
+
+May 10, 1796, Napoleon carried the bridge at Lodi, in the face of the
+Austrian batteries.  Fourteen cannon--some accounts say thirty--were
+trained upon the French end of the structure.  Behind them were six
+thousand troops.  Napoleon massed four thousand grenadiers at the head
+of the bridge, with a battalion of three hundred carbineers in front.
+At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover
+of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and
+attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge.  The front ranks went down
+like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled
+backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before
+them.  Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at
+their head, and his aids and generals rushed to his side.  Forward
+again, this time over heaps of dead that choked the passage, and a
+quick run, counted by seconds only, carried the column across two
+hundred yards of clear space, scarcely a shot from the Austrians taking
+effect beyond the point where the platoons wheeled for the first leap.
+So sudden and so miraculous was it all that the Austrian artillerists
+abandoned their guns instantly, and their supports fled in a panic
+instead of rushing to the front and meeting the French onslaught.  This
+Napoleon had counted on in making the bold attack.  The contrast
+between Napoleon's slight figure and the massive grenadiers suggested
+the nickname "Little Corporal."
+
+The great secret of the success of Joan of Arc was the boldness of her
+attacks.
+
+When Stephen of Colonna fell into the hands of base assailants, and
+they asked him in derision, "Where is now your fortress?"  "Here," was
+his bold reply, placing his hand upon his heart.
+
+It was after the Mexican War when General McClellan was employed as a
+topographical engineer in surveying the Pacific coast.  From his
+headquarters at Vancouver he had gone south to the Columbia River with
+two companions, a soldier and a servant.  One evening he received word
+that the chiefs of the Columbia River tribes desired to confer with
+him.  From the messenger's manner he suspected that the Indians meant
+mischief.  He warned his companions that they must be ready to leave
+camp at a moment's notice.  Mounting his horse, he rode boldly into the
+Indian village.  About thirty chiefs were holding council.  McClellan
+was led into the circle, and placed at the right hand of Saltese.  He
+was familiar with the Chinook jargon, and could understand every word
+spoken in the council.  Saltese made known the grievance of the tribes.
+Two Indians had been captured by a party of white pioneers and hanged
+for theft.  Retaliation for this outrage seemed indispensable.  The
+chiefs pondered long, but had little to say.  McClellan had been on
+friendly terms with them, and was not responsible for the forest
+executions.  Still, he was a white man, and the chiefs had vowed
+vengeance against the race.  The council was prolonged for hours before
+sentence was passed, and then Saltese, in the name of the head men of
+the tribes, decreed that McClellan should immediately be put to death
+in retaliation for the hanging of the two Indian thieves.
+
+McClellan had said nothing.  He had known that argument and pleas for
+justice or mercy would be of no avail.  He had sat motionless,
+apparently indifferent to his fate.  By his listlessness he had thrown
+his captors off their guard.  When the sentence was passed he acted
+like a flash.  Flinging his left arm around the neck of Saltese, he
+whipped out his revolver and held it close to the chief's temple.
+"Revoke that sentence, or I shall kill you this instant!" he cried,
+with his fingers clicking the trigger.  "I revoke it!" exclaimed
+Saltese, fairly livid from fear.  "I must have your word that I can
+leave this council in safety."  "You have the word of Saltese," was the
+quick response.  McClellan knew how sacred was the pledge which he had
+received.  The revolver was lowered.  Saltese was released from the
+embrace of the strong arm.  McClellan strode out of the tent with his
+revolver in his hand.  Not a hand was raised against him.  He mounted
+his horse and rode to his camp, where his two followers were ready to
+spring into the saddle and to escape from the villages.  He owed his
+life to his quickness of perception, and to his accurate knowledge of
+Indian character.
+
+In 1866, Rufus Choate spoke to an audience of nearly five thousand in
+Lowell in favor of the candidacy of James Buchanan for the presidency.
+The floor of the great hall began to sink, settling more and more as he
+proceeded with his address, until a sound of cracking timber below
+would have precipitated a stampede with fatal results but for the
+coolness of B. F. Butler, who presided.  Telling the people to remain
+quiet, he said that he would see if there were any cause for alarm.  He
+found the supports of the floor in so bad a condition that the
+slightest applause would be likely to bury the audience in the ruins of
+the building.  Returning rather leisurely to the platform, he whispered
+to Choate as he passed, "We shall all be in ---- in five minutes," then
+he told the crowd that there was no immediate danger if they would
+slowly disperse, although he thought it prudent to adjourn to a place
+where there would be no risk whatever.  The post of danger, he added,
+was on the platform, which was most weakly supported, therefore he and
+those with him would be the last to leave.  No doubt many lives were
+saved by his coolness.
+
+Many distinguished foreign and American statesmen were present at a
+fashionable dinner party where wine was freely poured, but Schuyler
+Colfax, then vice-president of the United States, declined to drink
+from a proffered cup.  "Colfax dares not drink," sneered a Senator who
+had already taken too much.  "You are right," said the Vice-President,
+"I dare not."
+
+When Grant was in Houston several years ago, he was given a rousing
+reception.  Naturally hospitable, and naturally inclined to like a man
+of Grant's make-up, the Houstonites determined to go beyond any other
+Southern city in the way of a banquet and other manifestations of their
+good-will and hospitality.  They made great preparations for the
+dinner, the committee taking great pains to have the finest wines that
+could be procured for the table that night.  When the time came to
+serve the wine, the head-waiter went first to Grant.  Without a word
+the general quietly turned down all the glasses at his plate.  This
+movement was a great surprise to the Texans, but they were equal to the
+occasion.  Without a single word being spoken, every man along the line
+of the long tables turned his glasses down, and there was not a drop of
+wine taken that night.
+
+A deep sewer at Noyon, France, had been opened for repairs, and
+carelessly left at night without covering or lights to warn people of
+danger.  Late at night four men stumbled in, and lay some time before
+their situation was known in the town.  No one dared go to the aid of
+the men, then unconscious from breathing noxious gases, except
+Catherine Vassen, a servant girl of eighteen.  She insisted on being
+lowered at once.  Fastening a rope around two of the men, she aided in
+raising them and restoring them to consciousness.  Descending again,
+she had just tied a rope around a third man, when she felt her breath
+failing.  Tying another rope to her long, curly hair, she swooned, but
+was drawn up with the man, to be quickly revived by fresh air and
+stimulants.  The fourth man was dead when his body was pulled up, on
+account of the delay from the fainting of Catherine.
+
+Two French officers at Waterloo were advancing to charge a greatly
+superior force.  One, observing that the other showed signs of fear,
+said, "Sir, I believe you are frightened."  "Yes, I am," was the reply,
+"and if you were half as much frightened, you would run away."
+
+"That's a brave man," said Wellington, when he saw a soldier turn pale
+as he marched against a battery; "he knows his danger, and faces it."
+
+"There are many cardinals and bishops at Worms," said a friend to
+Luther, "and they will burn your body to ashes as they did that of John
+Huss."  Luther replied: "Although they should make a fire that should
+reach from Worms to Wittenberg, and that should flame up to heaven, in
+the Lord's name I would pass through it and appear before them."  He
+said to another: "I would enter Worms though there were as many devils
+there as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses."  Another said:
+"Duke George will surely arrest you."  He replied: "It is my duty to
+go, and I will go, though it rain Duke Georges for nine days together."
+
+"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me," exclaimed Luther at
+the Diet of Worms, facing his foes.
+
+A Western paper recently invited the surviving Union and Confederate
+officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during
+the Civil War.  Colonel Thomas W. Higginson said that at a dinner at
+Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were
+bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told
+that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung
+a song.  He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although
+I must drink it in water.  It is 'Our Mothers.'"  The men were so
+affected and ashamed that some took him by the hand and thanked him for
+displaying courage greater than that required to walk up to the mouth
+of a cannon.
+
+It took great courage for the commercial Quaker, John Bright, to
+espouse a cause which called down upon his head the derision and scorn
+and hatred of the Parliament.  For years he rested under a cloud of
+obloquy, but Bright was made of stern stuff.  It was only his strength
+of character and masterly eloquence, which saved him from political
+annihilation.  To a man who boasted that his ancestors came over with
+the Conquerors, he replied, "I never heard that they did anything
+else."  A Tory lordling said, when Bright was ill, that Providence had
+inflicted upon Bright, for the measure of his talents, disease of the
+brain.  When Bright went back into the Commons he replied: "This may be
+so, but it will be some consolation to the friends and family of the
+noble lord to know that that disease is one which even Providence
+cannot inflict upon him."
+
+"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World,
+and takes him boldly by the beard," says Holmes, "he is often surprised
+to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare
+away timid adventurers."
+
+It takes courage for a young man to stand firmly erect while others are
+bowing and fawning for praise and power.  It takes courage to wear
+threadbare clothes while your comrades dress in broadcloth.  It takes
+courage to remain in honest poverty when others grow rich by fraud.  It
+takes courage to say "No" squarely when those around you say "Yes."  It
+takes courage to do your duty in silence and obscurity while others
+prosper and grow famous although neglecting sacred obligations.  It
+takes courage to unmask your true self, to show your blemishes to a
+condemning world, and to pass for what you really are.
+
+It takes courage and pluck to be outvoted, beaten, laughed at, scoffed,
+ridiculed, derided, misunderstood, misjudged, to stand alone with all
+the world against you, but
+
+  "They are slaves who dare not be
+  In the right with two or three."
+
+
+"There is never wanting a dog to bark at you."
+
+"An honest man is not the worse because a dog barks at him."
+
+  "Let any man show the world that he feels
+  Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels.
+  Let him fearlessly face it, 't will leave him alone,
+  And 't will fawn at his feet if he fling it a bone."
+
+
+We live ridiculously for fear of being thought ridiculous.
+
+  "'Tis he is the coward who proves false to his vows,
+  To his manhood, his honor, for a laugh or a sneer:
+  'Tis he is the hero who stands firm, though alone,
+  For the truth and the right without flinching or fear."
+
+
+The youth who starts out by being afraid to speak what he thinks will
+usually end by being afraid to think what he wishes.
+
+How we shrink from an act of our own.  We live as others live.  Custom
+or fashion dictates, or your doctor or minister, and they in turn dare
+not depart from their schools.  Dress, living, servants, carriages,
+everything must conform, or be ostracized.  Who dares conduct his
+household or business affairs in his own way, and snap his fingers at
+Dame Grundy?
+
+Many a man has marched up to the cannon's mouth in battle who dared not
+face public opinion or oppose Mrs. Grundy.
+
+It takes courage for a public man not to bend the knee to popular
+prejudice.  It takes courage to refuse to follow custom when it is
+injurious to his health and morals.  To espouse an unpopular cause in
+Congress requires more courage than to lead a charge in battle.  How
+much easier for a politician to prevaricate and dodge an issue than to
+stand squarely on his feet like a man.
+
+As a rule, eccentricity is a badge of power, but how many women would
+not rather strangle their individuality than be tabooed by Mrs. Grundy?
+Yet fear is really the only thing to fear.
+
+"Whoever you may be," said Sainte-Beuve, "great genius, distinguished
+talent, artist honorable or amiable, the qualities for which you
+deserve to be praised will all be turned against you.  Were you a
+Virgil, the pious and sensible singer _par excellence_, there are
+people who will call you an effeminate poet.  Were you a Horace, there
+are people who will reproach you with the very purity and delicacy of
+your taste.  If you were a Shakespeare, some one will call you a
+drunken savage.  If you were a Goethe, more than one Pharisee will
+proclaim you the most selfish of egotists."
+
+As the strongest man has a weakness somewhere, so the greatest hero is
+a coward somewhere.  Peter was courageous enough to draw his sword to
+defend his master, but he could not stand the ridicule and the finger
+of scorn of the maidens in the high priest's hall, and he actually
+denied even the acquaintance of the master he had declared he would die
+for.
+
+"I will take the responsibility," said Andrew Jackson, on a memorable
+occasion, and his words have become proverbial.  Not even Congress
+dared to oppose the edicts of John Quincy Adams.
+
+If a man would accomplish anything in this world, he must not be afraid
+of assuming responsibilities.  Of course it takes courage to run the
+risk of failure, to be subjected to criticism for an unpopular cause,
+to expose one's self to the shafts of everybody's ridicule, but the man
+who is not true to himself, who cannot carry out the sealed orders
+placed in his hands at his birth, regardless of the world's yes or no,
+of its approval or disapproval, the man who has not the courage to
+trace the pattern of his own destiny, which no other soul knows but his
+own, can never rise to the true dignity of manhood.  All the world
+loves courage; youth craves it; they want to hear about it, they want
+to read about it.  The fascination of the "blood and thunder" novels
+and of the cheap story papers for youth are based upon this idea of
+courage.  If the boys cannot get the real article, they will take a
+counterfeit.
+
+Don't be like Uriah Heep, begging everybody's pardon for taking the
+liberty of being in the world.  There is nothing attractive in
+timidity, nothing lovable in fear.  Both are deformities and are
+repulsive.  Manly courage is dignified and graceful.  The worst manners
+in the world are those of persons conscious "of being beneath their
+position, and trying to conceal it or make up for it by style."
+
+Bruno, condemned to be burned alive in Rome, said to his judge: "You
+are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to receive it."
+Anne Askew, racked until her bones were dislocated, never flinched, but
+looked her tormentor calmly in the face and refused to abjure her faith.
+
+"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid
+of each other."  "Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage," said
+Emerson.  Physicians used to teach that courage depends on the
+circulation of the blood in the arteries, and that during passion,
+anger, trials of strength, wrestling or fighting, a large amount of
+blood is collected in the arteries, and does not pass to the veins.  A
+strong pulse is a fortune in itself.
+
+"Rage," said Shaftesbury, "can make a coward forget himself and fight."
+
+"I should have thought fear would have kept you from going so far,"
+said a relative who found the little boy Nelson wandering a long
+distance from home.  "Fear?" said the future admiral, "I don't know
+him."
+
+"Doubt indulged becomes doubt realized."  To determine to do anything
+is half the battle.  "To think a thing is impossible is to make it so."
+_Courage is victory, timidity is defeat_.
+
+That simple shepherd-lad, David, fresh from his flocks, marching
+unattended and unarmed, save with his shepherd's staff and sling, to
+confront the colossal Goliath with his massive armor, is the sublimest
+audacity the world has ever seen.
+
+"Dent, I wish you would get down, and see what is the matter with that
+leg there," said Grant, when he and Colonel Dent were riding through
+the thickest of a fire that had become so concentrated and murderous
+that his troops had all been driven back.  "I guess looking after your
+horse's legs can wait," said Dent; "it is simply murder for us to sit
+here."  "All right," said Grant, "if you don't want to see to it, I
+will."  He dismounted, untwisted a piece of telegraph wire which had
+begun to cut the horse's leg, examined it deliberately, and climbed
+into his saddle.  "Dent," said he, "when you've got a horse that you
+think a great deal of, you should never take any chances with him.  If
+that wire had been left there for a little time longer he would have
+gone dead lame, and would perhaps have been ruined for life."
+
+Wellington said that at Waterloo the hottest of the battle raged round
+a farmhouse, with an orchard surrounded by a thick hedge, which was so
+important a point in the British position that orders were given to
+hold it at any hazard or sacrifice.  At last the powder and ball ran
+short and the hedges took fire, surrounding the orchard with a wall of
+flame.  A messenger had been sent for ammunition, and soon two loaded
+wagons came galloping toward the farmhouse.  "The driver of the first
+wagon, with the reckless daring of an English boy, spurred his
+struggling and terrified horses through the burning heap; but the
+flames rose fiercely round, and caught the powder, which exploded in an
+instant, sending wagon, horses, and rider in fragments into the air.
+For an instant the driver of the second wagon paused, appalled by his
+comrade's fate; the next, observing that the flames, beaten back for
+the moment by the explosion, afforded him one desperate chance, sent
+his horses at the smouldering breach and, amid the deafening cheers of
+the garrison, landed his terrible cargo safely within.  Behind him the
+flames closed up, and raged more fiercely than ever."
+
+At the battle of Friedland a cannon-ball came over the heads of the
+French soldiers, and a young soldier instinctively dodged.  Napoleon
+looked at him and smilingly said: "My friend, if that ball were
+destined for you, though you were to burrow a hundred feet under ground
+it would be sure to find you there."
+
+When the mine in front of Petersburg was finished, the fuse was
+lighted, and the Union troops were drawn up ready to charge the enemy's
+works as soon as the explosion should make a breach.  But seconds,
+minutes, and tens of minutes passed, without a sound from the mine, and
+the suspense became painful.  Lieutenant Doughty and Sergeant Kees
+volunteered to examine the fuse.  Through the long subterranean
+galleries they hurried in silence, not knowing but they were advancing
+to a horrible death.  They found the defect, fired the train anew, and
+soon a terrible upheaval of earth gave the signal to march to victory.
+
+At the battle of Copenhagen, as Nelson walked the deck slippery with
+blood and covered with the dead, he said: "This is warm work, and this
+day may be the last to any of us in a moment.  But, mark me, I would
+not be elsewhere for thousands."  At the battle of Trafalgar, when
+Nelson was shot and was being carried below, he covered his face, that
+those fighting might not know their chief had fallen.
+
+In a skirmish at Salamanca, while the enemy's guns were pouring shot
+into his regiment, Sir William Napier's men became disobedient.  He at
+once ordered a halt, and flogged four of the ringleaders under fire.
+The men yielded at once, and then marched three miles under a heavy
+cannonade as coolly as if it were a review.
+
+Execute your resolutions immediately.  Thoughts are but dreams till
+their effects be tried.  Does competition trouble you? work away; what
+is your competitor but a man?  _Conquer your place in the world_, for
+all things serve a brave soul.  Combat difficulty manfully; sustain
+misfortune bravely; endure poverty nobly; encounter disappointment
+courageously.  The influence of the brave man is a magnetism which
+creates an epidemic of noble zeal in all about him.  Every day sends to
+the grave obscure men, who have only remained in obscurity because
+their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who,
+if they could have been induced to begin, would, in all probability,
+have gone great lengths in the career of usefulness and fame.  "No
+great deed is done," says George Eliot, "by falterers who ask for
+certainty."  The brave, cheerful man will survive his blighted hopes
+and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully
+forward in the battle of life.  Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills
+with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded.
+He is the true hero.
+
+  Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
+  Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
+  Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
+  Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
+        LOWELL.
+
+            Our doubts are traitors,
+  And make us lose the good we oft might win,
+  By fearing to attempt.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+After the great inward struggle was over, and he had determined to
+remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the
+block.  His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy
+prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his
+doctrines, as some of the bishops had done.  But he preferred death to
+dishonor.  His daughter allowed the power of love to drive away fear.
+She remained true to her father when all others, even her mother, had
+forsaken him.  After his head had been cut off and exhibited on a pole
+on London Bridge, the poor girl begged it of the authorities, and
+requested that it be buried in the coffin with her.  Her request was
+granted, for her death occurred soon.
+
+When Sir Walter Raleigh came to the scaffold he was very faint, and
+began his speech to the crowd by saying that during the last two days
+he had been visited by two ague fits.  "If, therefore, you perceive any
+weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to
+myself."  He took the axe and kissed the blade, and said to the
+sheriff: "'T is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+Don't waste time dreaming of obstacles you may never encounter, or in
+crossing bridges you have not reached.  Don't fool with a nettle!
+Grasp with firmness if you would rob it of its sting.  To half will and
+to hang forever in the balance is to lose your grip on life.
+
+Abraham Lincoln's boyhood was one long struggle with poverty, with
+little education, and no influential friends.  When at last he had
+begun the practice of law, it required no little daring to cast his
+fortune with the weaker side in politics, and thus imperil what small
+reputation he had gained.  Only the most sublime moral courage could
+have sustained him as President to hold his ground against hostile
+criticism and a long train of disaster; to issue the Emancipation
+Proclamation; to support Grant and Stanton against the clamor of the
+politicians and the press; and through it all to do the right as God
+gave him to see the right.
+
+Lincoln never shrank from espousing an unpopular cause when he believed
+it to be right.  At the time when it almost cost a young lawyer his
+bread and butter to defend the fugitive slave, and when other lawyers
+had refused, Lincoln would always plead the cause of the unfortunate
+whenever an opportunity presented.  "Go to Lincoln," people would say,
+when these hounded fugitives were seeking protection; "he's not afraid
+of any cause, if it's right."
+
+As Salmon P. Chase left the court room after making an impassioned plea
+for the runaway slave girl Matilda, a man looked at him in surprise and
+said: "There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself."
+But in thus ruining himself Chase had taken the first important step in
+a career in which he became Governor of Ohio, United States Senator
+from Ohio, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and Chief Justice
+of the United States Supreme Court.
+
+At the trial of William Penn for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, the
+recorder, not satisfied with the first verdict, said to the jury: "We
+will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."
+"You are Englishmen," said Penn; "mind your privileges, give not away
+your right."  At last the jury, after two days and two nights without
+food, returned a verdict of "Not guilty."  The recorder fined them
+forty marks apiece for their independence.
+
+What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd?  The palsied hand moved,
+the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
+ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.
+
+What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
+hisses?  In him "at last the scornful world had met its match."  Were
+Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
+extinguish them?  No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
+thousands to hear and to heed.  Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
+when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head?  She
+silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.
+
+"What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
+leveled at his head, a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
+or a scaffold erected in front of his door.
+
+  "Storms may howl around thee,
+    Foes may hunt and hound thee:
+  Shall they overpower thee?
+    Never, never, never."
+
+
+When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
+York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
+thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged more than one man
+to lamp-posts.  Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
+where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
+it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
+murdered your superiors," and the blood-stained crowd quailed before
+the courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando
+Wood could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.
+
+"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
+"And we are before them," was the cool reply of Leonidas.  "Deliver
+your arms," came the message from Xerxes.  "Come and take them," was
+the answer Leonidas sent back.  A Persian soldier said: "You will not
+be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows."  "Then we will
+fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian.  What wonder that a
+handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
+trod the earth.
+
+"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
+for a daring plan.  "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
+"_impossible_ is the adjective of fools!"  Napoleon went to the edge of
+his possibility.
+
+Grant never knew when he was beaten.  When told that he was surrounded
+by the enemy at Belmont, he quietly replied: "Well, then we must cut
+our way out."
+
+The courageous man is an example to the intrepid.  His influence is
+magnetic.  He creates an epidemic of nobleness.  Men follow him, even
+to the death.
+
+The spirit of courage will transform the whole temper of your life.
+"The wise and active conquer difficulties by daring to attempt them.
+Sloth and folly shiver and sicken at the sight of trial and hazard, and
+make the impossibility they fear."
+
+"The hero," says Emerson, "is the man who is immovably centred."
+
+Emin Pasha, the explorer of Africa, was left behind by his exploring
+party under circumstances that were thought certainly fatal, and his
+death was reported with great assurance.  Early the next winter, as his
+troop was on its toilsome but exciting way through Central Africa, it
+came upon a most wretched sight.  A party of natives had been kidnapped
+by the slave-hunters, and dragged in chains thus far toward the land of
+bondage.  But small-pox had set in, and the miserable company had been
+abandoned to their fate.  Emin sent his men ahead, and stayed behind in
+this camp of death to act as physician and nurse.  How many lives he
+saved is not known, though it is known that he nearly lost his own.
+The age of chivalry is not gone by.  This is as knightly a deed as poet
+ever chronicled.
+
+A mouse that dwelt near the abode of a great magician was kept in such
+constant distress by its fear of a cat, that the magician, taking pity
+on it, turned it into a cat itself.  Immediately it began to suffer
+from its fear of a dog, so the magician turned it into a dog.  Then it
+began to suffer from fear of a tiger.  The magician therefore turned it
+into a tiger.  Then it began to suffer from fear of hunters, and the
+magician said in disgust: "Be a mouse again.  As you have only the
+heart of a mouse, it is impossible to help you by giving you the body
+of a nobler animal."
+
+Men who have dared have moved the world, often before reaching the
+prime of life.  It is astonishing what daring to begin and perseverance
+have enabled even youths to achieve.  Alexander, who ascended the
+throne at twenty, had conquered the known world before dying at
+thirty-three.  Julius Caesar captured eight hundred cities, conquered
+three hundred nations, and defeated three million men, became a great
+orator and one of the greatest statesmen known, and still was a young
+man.  Washington was appointed adjutant-general at nineteen, was sent
+at twenty-one as an ambassador to treat with the French, and won his
+first battle as a colonel at twenty-two.  Lafayette was made general of
+the whole French army at twenty.  Charlemagne was master of France and
+Germany at thirty.  Cond� was only twenty-two when he conquered at
+Rocroi.  Galileo was but eighteen when he saw the principle of the
+pendulum in the swinging lamp in the cathedral at Pisa.  Peel was in
+Parliament at twenty-one.  Gladstone was in Parliament before he was
+twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury.  Elizabeth
+Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De
+Quincey at eleven.  Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean
+order.  Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of
+poems at fifteen.  N. P. Willis won lasting fame as a poet before
+leaving college.  Macaulay was a celebrated author before he was
+twenty-three.  Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous
+thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope.  Nelson was a
+lieutenant in the British Navy before he was twenty.  He was but
+forty-seven when he received his death wound at Trafalgar.  Charles the
+Twelfth was only nineteen when he gained the battle of Narva; at
+thirty-six, Cortez was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty-two, Clive
+had established the British power in India.  Hannibal, the greatest of
+military commanders, was only thirty when, at Cannae, he dealt an
+almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only
+twenty-seven when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneraled and
+defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria.
+
+Equal courage and resolution are often shown by men who have passed the
+allotted limit of life.  Victor Hugo and Wellington were both in their
+prime after they had reached the age of threescore years and ten.
+George Bancroft wrote some of his best historical work when he was
+eighty-five.  Gladstone ruled England with a strong hand at
+eighty-four, and was a marvel of literary and scholarly ability.
+
+"Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of
+Ophir.  But shall it therefore rot in the harbor?  No!  Give its sails
+to the wind!"
+
+Shakespeare says: "He is not worthy of the honeycomb that shuns the
+hive because the bees have stings."
+
+  "The brave man is not he who feels no fear,
+    For that were stupid and irrational;
+  But he whose noble soul its fear subdues
+    And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from."
+
+
+The inscription on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold."  On the second
+gate: "Be bold, be bold, and ever more be bold;" the third gate: "Be
+not too bold."
+
+Many a bright youth has accomplished nothing of worth simply because he
+did not dare to commence.
+
+Begin!  Begin!!  Begin!!!
+
+
+Whatever people may think of you, do that which you believe to be
+right.  Be alike indifferent to censure or praise.--PYTHAGORAS.
+
+Fear makes man a slave to others.  This is the tyrant's chain.  Anxiety
+is a form of cowardice embittering life.--CHANNING.
+
+Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal
+of the most precious things.  Our blood is nearer and dearer to us than
+our money, and our life than our estate.  Women are more taken with
+courage than with generosity.--COLTON.
+
+  Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath.
+      _Merchant of Venice_, Inscription on Leaden Casket.
+
+  I dare to do all that may become a man:
+  Who dares do more is none.
+        SHAKESPEAKE.
+
+For man's great actions are performed in minor struggles.  There are
+obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the
+shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude.  There are
+noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, no renown rewards, and
+no flourish of trumpets salutes.  Life, misfortune, isolation,
+abandonment, and poverty are battlefields which have their
+heroes.--VICTOR HUGO.
+
+  Who waits until the wind shall silent keep,
+    Who never finds the ready hour to sow,
+  Who watcheth clouds, will have no time to reap.
+        HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
+
+Quit yourselves like men.--1 SAMUEL iv. 9.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WILL AND THE WAY.
+
+"The 'way' will be found by a resolute will."
+
+"I will find a way or make one."
+
+Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.--MIRABEAU.
+
+A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a
+politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.--E. P. WHIPPLE.
+
+  The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail;
+  A feeble dwarf, dauntlessly resolved, will turn the tide of battle,
+  And rally to a nobler strife the giants that had fled.
+        TUPPER.
+
+"Man alone can perform the impossible.  They can who think they can.
+Character is a perfectly educated will."
+
+The education of the will is the object of our existence.  For the
+resolute and determined there is time and opportunity.--EMERSON.
+
+Invincible determination, and a right nature, are the levers that move
+the world.--PRESIDENT PORTER.
+
+In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood there
+is no such word as fail.--BULWER.
+
+Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and
+make a seeming difficulty give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.
+
+When a firm and decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how
+the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom.--JOHN
+FOSTER.
+
+  The star of the unconquered will,
+  He rises in my breast,
+  Serene, and resolute and still,
+  And calm and self-possessed.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+"As well can the Prince of Orange pluck the stars from the sky, as
+bring the ocean to the wall of Leyden for your relief," was the
+derisive shout of the Spanish soldiers when told that the Dutch fleet
+would raise that terrible four months' siege of 1574.  But from the
+parched lips of William, tossing on his bed of fever at Rotterdam, had
+issued the command: "_Break down the dikes: give Holland back to
+ocean:_" and the people had replied: "Better a drowned land than a lost
+land."  They began to demolish dike after dike of the strong lines,
+ranged one within another for fifteen miles to their city of the
+interior.  It was an enormous task; the garrison was starving; and the
+besiegers laughed in scorn at the slow progress of the puny insects who
+sought to rule the waves of the sea.  But ever, as of old, heaven aids
+those who help themselves.  On the first and second of October a
+violent equinoctial gale rolled the ocean inland, and swept the fleet
+on the rising waters almost to the camp of the Spaniards.  The next
+morning the garrison sallied out to attack their enemies, but the
+besiegers had fled in terror under cover of the darkness.  The next day
+the wind changed, and a counter tempest brushed the water, with the
+fleet upon it, from the surface of Holland.  The outer dikes were
+replaced at once, leaving the North Sea within its old bounds.  When
+the flowers bloomed the following spring, a joyous procession marched
+through the streets to found the University of Leyden, in commemoration
+of the wonderful deliverance of the city.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: WALTER SCOTT]
+
+"The Wizard of the North."
+
+  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+    So near is God to man,
+  When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
+    The youth replies, 'I can.'"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+At a dinner party given in 1837, at the residence of Chancellor Kent,
+in New York city, some of the most distinguished men in the country
+were invited, and among them was a young and rather melancholy and
+reticent Frenchman.  Professor Morse was one of the guests, and during
+the evening he drew the attention of Mr. Gallatin, then a prominent
+statesman, to the stranger, observing that his forehead indicated great
+intellect.  "Yes," replied Mr. Gallatin, touching his own forehead with
+his finger, "there is a great deal in that head of his: but he has a
+strange fancy.  Can you believe it?  He has the idea that he will one
+day be the Emperor of France.  Can you conceive anything more absurd?"
+
+It did seem absurd, for this reserved Frenchman was then a poor
+adventurer, an exile from his country, without fortune or powerful
+connections, and yet, fourteen years later, his idea became a
+fact,--his dream of becoming Napoleon III. was realized.  True, before
+he accomplished his purpose there were long dreary years of
+imprisonment, exile, disaster, and patient labor and hope, but he
+gained his ambition at last.  He was not scrupulous as to the means
+employed to accomplish his ends, yet he is a remarkable example of what
+pluck and energy can do.
+
+When it was proposed to unite England and America by steam, Dr. Lardner
+delivered a lecture before the Royal Society "proving" that steamers
+could never cross the Atlantic, because they could not carry coal
+enough to produce steam during the whole voyage.  The passage of the
+steamship Sirius, which crossed in nineteen days, was fatal to
+Lardner's theory.  When it was proposed to build a vessel of iron, many
+persons said: "Iron sinks--only wood can float:" but experiments proved
+that the miracle of the prophet in making iron "swim" could be
+repeated, and now not only ships of war, but merchant vessels, are
+built of iron or steel.  A will found a way to make iron float.
+
+Mr. Ingram, publisher of the "London Illustrated News," who lost his
+life on Lake Michigan, walked ten miles to deliver a single paper
+rather than disappoint a customer, when he began life as a newsdealer
+at Nottingham, England.  Does any one wonder that such a youth
+succeeded?  Once he rose at two o'clock in the morning and walked to
+London to get some papers because there was no post to bring them.  He
+determined that his customers should not be disappointed.  This is the
+kind of will that finds a way.
+
+There is scarcely anything in all biography grander than the saying of
+young Henry Fawcett, Gladstone's last Postmaster-General, to his
+grief-stricken father, who had put out both his eyes by bird-shot
+during a game hunt: "Never mind, father, blindness shall not interfere
+with my success in life."  One of the most pathetic sights in London
+streets, long afterward, was Henry Fawcett, M. P., led everywhere by a
+faithful daughter, who acted as amanuensis as well as guide to her
+plucky father.  Think of a young man, scarcely on the threshold of
+active life, suddenly losing the sight of both eyes and yet, by mere
+pluck and almost incomprehensible tenacity of purpose, lifting himself
+into eminence, in any direction, to say nothing of becoming one of the
+foremost men in a country noted for its great men.  Most youth would
+have succumbed to such a misfortune, and would never have been heard
+from again.  But fortunately for the world, there are yet left many
+Fawcetts, many Prescotts, Parkmans, Cavanaghs.
+
+The courageous daughter who was eyes to her father was herself a
+marvelous example of pluck and determination.  For the first time in
+the history of Oxford College, which reaches back centuries, she
+succeeded in winning the post which had only been gained before by
+great men, such as Gladstone,--the post of senior wrangler.  This
+achievement had had no parallel in history up to that date, and
+attracted the attention of the whole civilized world.  Not only had no
+woman ever held this position before, but with few exceptions it had
+only been held by men who in after life became highly distinguished.
+Who can deny that where there is a will, as a rule, there's a way?
+
+When Grant was a boy he could not find "can't" in the dictionary.  It
+is the men who have no "can't" in their dictionaries that make things
+move.
+
+"Circumstances," says Milton, "have rarely favored famous men.  They
+have fought their way to triumph through all sorts of opposing
+obstacles."
+
+The true way to conquer circumstances is to be a greater circumstance
+yourself.
+
+Yet, while desiring to impress in the most forcible manner possible the
+fact that will-power is necessary to success, and that, other things
+being equal, the greater the will-power, the grander and more complete
+the success, we cannot indorse the preposterous theory that there is
+nothing in circumstances or environments, or that any man, simply
+because he has an indomitable will, may become a Bonaparte, a Pitt, a
+Webster, a Beecher, a Lincoln.  We must temper determination with
+discretion, and support it with knowledge and common sense, or it will
+only lead us to run our heads against posts.  We must not expect to
+overcome a stubborn fact by a stubborn will.  We merely have the right
+to assume that we can do anything within the limit of our utmost
+faculty, strength, and endurance.  Obstacles permanently insurmountable
+bar our progress in some directions, but in any direction we may
+reasonably hope and attempt to go, we shall find that the obstacles, as
+a rule, are either not insurmountable or else not permanent.  The
+strong-willed, intelligent, persistent man will find or make a way
+where, in the nature of things, a way can be found or made.
+
+Every schoolboy knows that circumstances do give clients to lawyers and
+patients to physicians; place ordinary clergymen in extraordinary
+pulpits; place sons of the rich at the head of immense corporations and
+large houses, when they have very ordinary ability and scarcely any
+experience, while poor young men with extraordinary abilities, good
+education, good character, and large experience, often have to fight
+their way for years to obtain even very ordinary situations.  Every one
+knows that there are thousands of young men, both in the city and in
+the country, of superior ability, who seem to be compelled by
+circumstances to remain in very ordinary positions for small pay, when
+others about them are raised by money or family influence into
+desirable places.  In other words, we all know that the best men do not
+always get the best places: circumstances do have a great deal to do
+with our position, our salaries, and our station in life.
+
+Many young men who are nature's noblemen, who are natural leaders, are
+working under superintendents, foremen, and managers infinitely their
+inferiors, but whom circumstances have placed above them and will keep
+there, unless some emergency makes merit indispensable.  No, the race
+is not always to the swift.
+
+Every one knows that there is not always a way where there is a will,
+that labor does not always conquer all things; that there are things
+impossible even to him that wills, however strongly; that one cannot
+always make anything of himself he chooses; that there are limitations
+in our very natures which no amount of will-power or industry can
+overcome; that no amount of sun-staring can ever make an eagle out of a
+crow.
+
+The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually
+striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time
+very far toward his chosen goal.
+
+The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most
+possible out of the stuff that has been given to him.  This is success,
+and there is no other.
+
+While it is true that our circumstances or environments do affect us,
+in most things they do not prevent our growth.  The corn that is now
+ripe, whence comes it, and what is it?  Is it not large or small,
+stunted wild maize or well-developed ears, according to the conditions
+under which it has grown?  Yet its environments cannot make wheat of
+it.  Nor can our circumstances alter our nature.  It is part of our
+nature, and wholly within our power, greatly to change and to take
+advantage of our circumstances, so that, unlike the corn, we can rise
+much superior to our natural surroundings simply because we can thus
+vary and improve the surroundings.  In other words, man can usually
+build the very road on which he is to run his race.
+
+It is not a question of what some one else can do or become, which
+every youth should ask himself, but what can I do?  How can I develop
+myself into the grandest possible manhood?
+
+So far, then, from the power of circumstances being a hindrance to men
+in trying to build for themselves an imperial highway to fortune, these
+circumstances constitute the very quarry out of which they are to get
+paving-stones for the road.
+
+While it is true that the will-power cannot perform miracles, yet that
+it is almost omnipotent, that it can perform wonders, all history goes
+to prove.  As Shakespeare says:--
+
+  "Men at some time are masters of their fates:
+  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
+  But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
+
+
+"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit
+once in his life: but when she finds he is not ready to receive her,
+she goes in at the door, and out through the window."  Opportunity is
+coy.  The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it,
+or clutch at it when it has gone.  The sharp fellows detect it
+instantly, and catch it when on the wing.
+
+Show me a man who is, according to popular prejudice, a victim of bad
+luck, and I will show you one who has some unfortunate crooked twist of
+temperament that invites disaster.  He is ill-tempered, or conceited,
+or trifling; lacks character, enthusiasm, or some other requisite for
+success.
+
+Disraeli says that man is not the creature of circumstances, but that
+circumstances are the creatures of men.
+
+What has chance ever done in the world?  Has it built any cities?  Has
+it invented any telephones, any telegraphs?  Has it built any
+steamships, established any universities, any asylums, any hospitals?
+Was there any chance in Caesar's crossing the Rubicon?  What had chance
+to do with Napoleon's career, with Wellington's, or Grant's, or Von
+Moltke's?  Every battle was won before it was begun.  What had luck to
+do with Thermopylae, Trafalgar, Gettysburg?  Our successes we ascribe
+to ourselves; our failures to destiny.
+
+Man is not a helpless atom in this vast creation, with a fixed
+position, and naught to do but obey his own polarity.
+
+Believe in the power of will, which annihilates the sickly, sentimental
+doctrine of fatalism,--you must but can't, you ought but it is
+impossible.
+
+Give me the man
+
+  "Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
+  And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
+  And breasts the blows of circumstance,
+  And grapples with his evil star."
+
+
+It is only the ignorant and superficial who believe in fate.  "The
+first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity."  "Fate is
+unpenetrated causes."  "They may well fear fate who have any infirmity
+of habit or aim: but he who rests on what he is has a destiny beyond
+destiny, and can make mouths at fortune."
+
+The indomitable will, the inflexible purpose, will find a way or make
+one.  There is always room for a man of force.
+
+"He who has a firm will," says Goethe, "moulds the world to himself."
+"People do not lack strength," says Victor Hugo, "they lack will."
+
+"He who resolves upon any great end, by that very resolution has scaled
+the great barriers to it, and he who seizes the grand idea of
+self-cultivation, and solemnly resolves upon it, will find that idea,
+that resolution, burning like fire within him, and ever putting him
+upon his own improvement.  He will find it removing difficulties,
+searching out, or making means; giving courage for despondency, and
+strength for weakness."
+
+Nearly all great men, those who have towered high above their fellows,
+have been remarkable above all things else for their energy of will.
+Of Julius Caesar it was said by a contemporary that it was his activity
+and giant determination, rather than his military skill, that won his
+victories.  The youth who starts out in life determined to make the
+most of his eyes and let nothing escape him which he can possibly use
+for his own advancement; who keeps his ears open for every sound that
+can help him on his way, who keeps his hands open that he may clutch
+every opportunity, who is ever on the alert for everything which can
+help him to get on in the world, who seizes every experience in life
+and grinds it up into paint for his great life's picture, who keeps his
+heart open that he may catch every noble impulse, and everything which
+may inspire him,--that youth will be sure to make his life successful;
+there are no "ifs" or "ands" about it.  If he has his health, nothing
+can keep him from final success.
+
+No tyranny of circumstances can permanently imprison a determined will.
+
+The world always stands aside for the determined man.  Will makes a
+way, even through seeming impossibilities.  "It is the half a neck
+nearer that shows the blood and wins the race; the one march more that
+wins the campaign: the five minutes more of unyielding courage that
+wins the fight."  Again and again had the irrepressible Carter Harrison
+been consigned to oblivion by the educated and moral element of
+Chicago.  Nothing could keep him down.  He was invincible.  A son of
+Chicago, he had partaken of that nineteenth century miracle, that
+phoenix-like nature of the city which, though she was burned, caused
+her to rise from her ashes and become a greater and a grander Chicago,
+a wonder of the world.  Carter Harrison would not down.  He entered the
+Democratic Convention and, with an audacity rarely equaled, in spite of
+their protest, boldly declared himself their candidate.  Every
+newspaper in Chicago, save the "Times," his own paper, bitterly opposed
+his election: but notwithstanding all opposition, he was elected by
+twenty thousand majority.  The aristocrats hated him, the moral element
+feared him, but the poor people believed in him: he pandered to them,
+flattered them, till they elected him.  While we would not by any means
+hold Carter Harrison up to youth as a model, yet there is a great
+lesson in his will-power and wonderful tenacity of purpose.
+
+"The general of a large army may be defeated," said Confucius, "but you
+cannot defeat the determined mind of a peasant."
+
+The poor, deaf pauper, Kitto, who made shoes in the almshouse, and who
+became the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the
+threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I
+think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere
+rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and
+industry, render himself almost anything he wishes to become."
+
+Years ago, a young mechanic took a bath in the river Clyde.  While
+swimming from shore to shore he discerned a beautiful bank,
+uncultivated, and he then and there resolved to be the owner of it, and
+to adorn it, and to build upon it the finest mansion in all the
+borough, and name it in honor of the maiden to whom he was espoused.
+"Last summer," says a well-known American, "I had the pleasure of
+dining in that princely mansion, and receiving this fact from the lips
+of the great shipbuilder of the Clyde."  That one purpose was made the
+ruling passion of his life, and all the energies of his soul were put
+in requisition for its accomplishment.
+
+Lincoln is probably the most remarkable example on the pages of
+history, showing the possibilities of our country.  From the poverty in
+which he was born, through the rowdyism of a frontier town, the
+rudeness of frontier society, the discouragement of early bankruptcy,
+and the fluctuations of popular politics, he rose to the championship
+of union and freedom.
+
+Lincoln's will made his way.  When his friends nominated him as a
+candidate for the legislature, his enemies made fun of him.  When
+making his campaign speeches he wore a mixed jean coat so short that he
+could not sit down on it, flax and tow-linen trousers, straw hat, and
+pot-metal boots.  He had nothing in the world but character and friends.
+
+When his friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his
+being a lawyer.  He said he hadn't brains enough.  He read law barefoot
+under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the
+counter in the store where he worked.  He had to borrow money to buy a
+suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature,
+and walked to take his seat at Vandalia,--one hundred miles.  While he
+was in the legislature, John F. Stuart, an eminent lawyer of
+Springfield, told him how Clay had even inferior chances to his, had
+got all of the education he had in a log schoolhouse without windows or
+doors; and finally induced Lincoln to study law.
+
+See Thurlow Weed, defying poverty and wading through the snow two
+miles, with rags for shoes, to borrow a book to read before the
+sap-bush fire.  See Locke, living on bread and water in a Dutch garret.
+See Heyne, sleeping many a night on a barn floor with only a book for
+his pillow.  See Samuel Drew, tightening his apron strings "in lieu of
+a dinner."  See young Lord Eldon, before daylight copying Coke on
+Littleton over and over again.  History is full of such examples.  He
+who will pay the price for victory needs never fear final defeat.  Why
+were the Roman legionaries victorious?
+
+  "For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,
+  Spared neither land nor gold,
+  Nor son, nor wife, nor limb nor life,
+  In the brave days of old."
+
+
+Fowell Buxton, writing to one of his sons, says: "I am sure that a
+young man may be very much what he pleases."
+
+Dr. Mathews has well said that "there is hardly a word in the whole
+human vocabulary which is more cruelly abused than the word 'luck.'  To
+all the faults and failures of men, their positive sins and their less
+culpable shortcomings, it is made to stand a godfather and sponsor.  Go
+talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by
+wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you
+will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the
+steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by
+'circumstances,' and complacently regarding himself as the victim of
+ill-luck.  Go visit the incarcerated criminal, who has imbued his hands
+in the blood of his fellow-man, or who is guilty of less heinous
+crimes, and you will find that, joining the temptations which were easy
+to avoid with those which were comparatively irresistible, he has
+hurriedly patched up a treaty with conscience, and stifles its
+compunctious visitings by persuading himself that, from first to last,
+he was the victim of circumstances.  Go talk with the mediocre in
+talents and attainments, the weak-spirited man who, from lack of energy
+and application, has made but little headway in the world, being
+outstripped in the race of life by those whom he had despised as his
+inferiors, and you will find that he, too, acknowledges the all-potent
+power of luck, and soothes his humbled pride by deeming himself the
+victim of ill-fortune.  In short, from the most venial offense to the
+most flagrant, there is hardly any wrong act or neglect to which this
+too fatally convenient word is not applied as a palliation."
+
+Paris was in the hands of a mob, the authorities were panic-stricken,
+for they did not dare to trust their underlings.  In came a man who
+said, "I know a young officer who has the courage and ability to quell
+this mob."  "Send for him; send for him; send for him," said they.
+Napoleon was sent for, came, subjugated the mob, subjugated the
+authorities, ruled France, then conquered Europe.
+
+What a lesson is Napoleon's life for the sickly, wishy-washy, dwarfed,
+sentimental "dudes," hanging about our cities, country, and
+universities, complaining of their hard lot, dreaming of success, and
+wondering why they are left in the rear in the great race of life.
+
+Success in life is dependent largely upon the willpower, and whatever
+weakens or impairs it diminishes success.  The will can be educated.
+That which most easily becomes a habit in us is the will.  Learn, then,
+to will decisively and strongly; thus fix your floating life, and leave
+it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by
+every wind that blows.  "It is not talent that men lack, it is the will
+to labor; it is the purpose, not the power to produce."
+
+It was this insatiable thirst for knowledge which held to his task,
+through poverty and discouragement, John Leyden, a Scotch shepherd's
+son.  Barefoot and alone, he walked six or eight miles daily to learn
+to read, which was all the schooling he had.  His desire for an
+education defied the extremest poverty, and no obstacle could turn him
+from his purpose.  He was rich when he discovered a little bookstore,
+and his thirsty soul would drink in the precious treasures from its
+priceless volumes for hours, perfectly oblivious of the scanty meal of
+bread and water which awaited him at his lowly lodging.  Nothing could
+discourage him from trying to improve himself by study.  It seemed to
+him that an opportunity to get at books and lectures was all that any
+man could need.  Before he was nineteen, this poor shepherd boy with no
+chance had astonished the professors of Edinburgh by his knowledge of
+Greek and Latin.
+
+Hearing that a surgeon's assistant in the Civil Service was wanted,
+although he knew nothing whatever of medicine, he determined to apply
+for it.  There were only six months before the place was to be filled,
+but nothing could daunt him, and in six months' time he actually took
+his degree with honor.  Walter Scott, who thought this one of the most
+remarkable illustrations of perseverance, helped to fit him out, and he
+sailed for India.
+
+Webster was very poor even after he entered Dartmouth College.  A
+friend sent him a recipe for greasing his boots.  Webster wrote and
+thanked him, and added: "But my boots need other doctoring, for they
+not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones."  Yet he became
+one of the greatest men in the world.  Sydney Smith said: "Webster was
+a living lie, because no man on earth could be as great as he looked."
+Carlyle said of him: "One would incline at sight to back him against
+the world."
+
+What seemed to be luck followed Stephen Girard all his life.  No matter
+what he did, it always seemed to others to turn to his account.  His
+coming to Philadelphia seemed a lucky accident.  A sloop was seen one
+morning off the mouth of Delaware Bay floating the flag of France and a
+signal of distress.  Young Girard was captain of this sloop, and was on
+his way to a Canadian port with freight from New Orleans.  An American
+skipper, seeing his distress, went to his aid, but told him the
+American war had broken out, and that the British cruisers were all
+along the American coast, and would seize his vessel.  He told him his
+only chance was to make a push for Philadelphia.  Girard did not know
+the way, and had no money.  The skipper loaned him five dollars to get
+the service of a pilot who demanded his money in advance.
+
+His sloop passed into the Delaware just in time to avoid capture by a
+British war vessel.  He sold the sloop and cargo in Philadelphia, and
+began business on the capital.  Being a foreigner, unable to speak
+English, short, stout, and with a repulsive face, blind in one eye, it
+was hard for him to get a start.  But he was not the man to give up.
+He had begun as a cabin boy at thirteen, and for nine years sailed
+between Bordeaux and the French West Indies.  He improved every leisure
+minute at sea, mastering the art of navigation.
+
+At the age of eight he first discovered that he was blind in one eye.
+His father, evidently thinking that he would never amount to anything,
+would not help him to an education beyond that of mere reading and
+writing, but sent his younger brothers to college.  The discovery of
+his blindness, the neglect of his father, and the chagrin of his
+brothers' advancement, soured his whole life.
+
+When he began business for himself in Philadelphia, there seemed to be
+nothing he would not do for money.  He bought and sold anything, from
+groceries to old junk.  He bottled wine and cider, from which he made a
+good profit.  Everything he touched prospered.  In 1780, he resumed the
+New Orleans and St. Domingo trade, in which he had been engaged at the
+breaking out of the Revolution.  Here great success again attended him.
+He had two vessels lying in one of the St. Domingo ports when the great
+insurrection on that island broke out.  A number of the rich planters
+fled to his vessels with their valuables, which they left for safe
+keeping while they went back to their estates to secure more.  They
+probably fell victims to the cruel negroes, for they never returned,
+and Girard was the lucky possessor of $50,000 which the goods brought
+in Philadephia.
+
+Everybody, especially his jealous brother merchants, attributed his
+great success to his luck.  While undoubtedly he was fortunate in
+happening to be at the right place at the right time, yet he was
+precision, method, accuracy, energy itself.  He left nothing to chance.
+His plans and schemes were worked out with mathematical care.  His
+letters, written to his captains in foreign ports, laying out their
+routes and giving detailed instruction from which they were never
+allowed to deviate under any circumstances, are models of foresight and
+systematic planning.  He never left anything of importance to others.
+He was rigidly accurate in his instructions, and would not allow the
+slightest departure from them.  He used to say that while his captains
+might save him money by deviating from instructions once, yet they
+would cause loss in ninety-nine other cases.  Once, when a captain
+returned and had saved him several thousand dollars by buying his cargo
+of cheese in another port than that in which he had been instructed to
+buy, Girard was so enraged, although he was several thousand dollars
+richer, that he discharged the captain on the spot, notwithstanding the
+latter had been faithful in his service for many years, and thought he
+was saving his employer a great deal of money by deviating from his
+instructions.
+
+Girard lived in a dingy little house, poorer than that occupied by many
+of his employees.  He married a servant girl of great beauty, but she
+proved totally unfitted for him, and died at last in the insane asylum.
+
+Girard never lost a ship, and many times what brought financial ruin to
+many others, as the War of 1812, only increased his wealth.  What
+seemed luck with him was only good judgment and promptness in seizing
+opportunities, and the greatest care and zeal in improving them to
+their utmost possibilities.
+
+Luck is not God's price for success: that is altogether too cheap, nor
+does he dicker with men.
+
+The mathematician tells you that if you throw the dice, there are
+thirty chances to one against your turning up a particular number, and
+a hundred to one against your repeating the same throw three times in
+succession: and so on in an augmenting ratio.  What is luck?  Is it, as
+has been suggested, a blind man's buff among the laws? a ruse among the
+elements? a trick of Dame Nature?  Has any scholar defined luck? any
+philosopher explained its nature? any chemist shown its composition?
+Is luck that strange, nondescript fairy, that does all things among men
+that they cannot account for?  If so, why does not luck make a fool
+speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter lectures on philosophy?
+
+Many a young man who has read the story of John Wanamaker's romantic
+career has gained very little inspiration or help from it toward his
+own elevation and advancement, for he looks upon it as the result of
+good luck, chance, or fate.  "What a lucky fellow," he says to himself
+as he reads; "what a bonanza he fell into."  But a careful analysis of
+Wanamaker's life only enforces the same lesson taught by the analysis
+of most great lives, namely, that a good mother, a good constitution,
+the habit of hard work, indomitable energy, a determination which knows
+no defeat, a decision which never wavers, a concentration which never
+scatters its forces, courage which never falters, a self-mastery which
+can say No, and stick to it, an "ignominious love of detail," strict
+integrity and downright honesty, a cheerful disposition, unbounded
+enthusiasm in one's calling, and a high aim and noble purpose insure a
+very large measure of success.
+
+Youth should be taught that there is something in circumstances; that
+there is such a thing as a poor pedestrian happening to find no
+obstruction in his way, and reaching the goal when a better walker
+finds the drawbridge up, the street blockaded, and so fails to win the
+race; that wealth often does place unworthy sons in high positions,
+that family influence does gain a lawyer clients, a physician patients,
+an ordinary scholar a good professorship; but that, on the other hand,
+position, clients, patients, professorships, manager's and
+superintendent's positions do not necessarily constitute success.  He
+should be taught that in the long run, as a rule, _the best man does
+win the best place_, and that persistent merit does succeed.
+
+There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real
+success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a
+Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of
+Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
+Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their
+shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry,
+irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt
+and detail.
+
+The youth should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life
+heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;"
+that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere
+bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless,
+the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or
+seize his opportunity.  Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before
+the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize
+her:--
+
+  "In idle wishes fools supinely stay:
+  Be there a will and wisdom finds a way."
+
+
+It has been well said that the very reputation of being strong willed,
+plucky, and indefatigable is of priceless value.  It often cows enemies
+and dispels at the start opposition to one's undertakings which would
+otherwise be formidable.
+
+"If Eric's in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of
+his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland,"
+says Emerson, "he will steer west and his ships will reach
+Newfoundland.  But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man,
+and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred
+miles further, and reach Labrador and New England.  There is no chance
+in results."  Obstacles tower before the living man like mountain
+chains, stopping his path and hindering his progress.  He surmounts
+them by his energy.  He makes a new path over them.  He climbs upon
+them to mountain heights.  They cannot stop him.  They do not much
+delay him.  He transmutes difficulties into power, and makes temporary
+failures into stepping-stones to ultimate success.
+
+How many might have been giants who are only dwarfs.  How many a one
+has died "with all his music in him."
+
+It is astonishing what men who have come to their senses late in life
+have accomplished by a sudden resolution.
+
+Arkwright was fifty years of age when he began to learn English grammar
+and improve his writing and spelling.  Benjamin Franklin was past fifty
+before he began the study of science and philosophy.  Milton, in his
+blindness, was past the age of fifty when he sat down to complete his
+world-known epic, and Scott at fifty-five took up his pen to redeem an
+enormous liability.  "Yet I am learning," said Michael Angelo, when
+threescore years and ten were past, and he had long attained the
+highest triumphs of his art.
+
+Even brains are second in importance to will.  The vacillating man is
+always pushed aside in the race of life.  It is only the weak and
+vacillating who halt before adverse circumstances and obstacles.  A man
+with an iron will, with a determination that nothing shall check his
+career, if he has perseverance and grit, is sure to succeed.  We may
+not find time for what we would like, but what we long for and strive
+for with all our strength, we usually approximate if we do not fully
+reach.  Hunger breaks through stone walls; stern necessity will find a
+way or make one.
+
+Success is also a great physical as well as mental tonic, and tends to
+strengthen the will-power.  Dr. Johnson says: "Resolutions and success
+reciprocally produce each other."  Strong-willed men, as a rule, are
+successful men, and great success is almost impossible without it.
+
+A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns
+neither to the right nor the left, though a paradise tempt him, who
+keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of
+success.  We could almost classify successes and failures by their
+various degrees of will-power.  Men like Sir James Mackintosh,
+Coleridge, La Harpe, and many others who have dazzled the world with
+their brilliancy, but who never accomplished a tithe of what they
+attempted, who were always raising our expectations that they were
+about to perform wonderful deeds, but who accomplished nothing worthy
+of their abilities, have been deficient in will-power.  One talent with
+a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it.  The great
+linguist of Bologna mastered a hundred languages by taking them singly,
+as the lion fought the bulls.
+
+I wish it were possible to show the youth of America the great part
+that the will might play in their success in life and in their
+happiness also.  The achievements of will-power are simply beyond
+computation.  Scarcely anything in reason seems impossible to the man
+who can will strong enough and long enough.
+
+How often we see this illustrated in the case of a young woman who
+suddenly becomes conscious that she is plain and unattractive; who, by
+prodigious exercise of her will and untiring industry, resolves to
+redeem herself from obscurity and commonness; and who not only makes up
+for her deficiencies, but elevates herself into a prominence and
+importance which mere personal attractions could never have given her.
+Charlotte Cushman, without a charm of form or face, climbed to the very
+top of her profession.  How many young men, stung by consciousness of
+physical deformity or mental deficiencies, have, by a strong persistent
+exercise of will-power, raised themselves from mediocrity and placed
+themselves high above those who scorned them.
+
+History is full of examples of men and women who have redeemed
+themselves from disgrace, poverty, and misfortune, by the firm
+resolution of an iron will.  The consciousness of being looked upon as
+inferior, as incapable of accomplishing what others accomplish; the
+sensitiveness at being considered a dunce in school, has stung many a
+youth into a determination which has elevated him far above those who
+laughed at him, as in the case of Newton, of Adam Clark, of Sheridan,
+Wellington, Goldsmith, Dr. Chalmers, Curran, Disraeli, and hundreds of
+others.  "Whatever you wish, that you are; for such is the force of the
+human will, joined to the Divine, that whatever we wish to be
+seriously, and with a true intention, that we become."  While this is
+not strictly true, yet there is a deal of truth in it.
+
+It is men like Mirabeau, who "trample upon impossibilities;" like
+Napoleon, who do not wait for opportunities, but make them; like Grant,
+who has only "unconditional surrender" for the enemy, who change the
+very front of the world.  "We have but what we make, and every good is
+locked by nature in a granite hand, sheer labor must unclench."
+
+What cares Henry L. Bulwer for the suffocating cough, even though he
+can scarcely speak above a whisper?  In the House of Commons he makes
+his immortal speech on the Irish Church just the same.
+
+"I can't, it is impossible," said a foiled lieutenant, to Alexander.
+"Be gone," shouted the conquering Macedonian, "there is nothing
+impossible to him who will try."
+
+Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures
+among those who started out in life with high hopes, I should say
+unhesitatingly, they lacked will-power.  They could not half will.
+What is a man without a will?  He is like an engine without steam, a
+mere sport of chance, to be tossed about hither and thither, always at
+the mercy of those who have wills.  I should call the strength of will
+the test of a young man's possibilities.  Can he will strong enough,
+and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?  It is the iron grip
+that takes the strong hold on life.  What chance is there in this
+crowding, pushing, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or
+pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life?  "The truest
+wisdom," said Napoleon, "is a resolute determination."  An iron will
+without principle might produce a Napoleon; but with character it would
+make a Wellington or a Grant, untarnished by ambition or avarice.
+
+        "The undivided will
+  'T is that compels the elements and wrings
+  A human music from the indifferent air."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
+
+Victories that are easy are cheap.  Those only are worth having which
+come as the result of hard fighting.--BEECHER.
+
+Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that
+encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonishing
+to find how often results that seemed impracticable are thus made
+possible.--EPES SARGENT.
+
+I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as
+that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, or
+parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but
+wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.--EMERSON.
+
+  Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
+  The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
+  He only earns his freedom and existence
+  Who daily conquers them anew.
+        GOETHE.
+
+Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise
+above them.--WASHINGTON IRVING.
+
+
+"I have here three teams that I want to get over to Staten Island,"
+said a boy of twelve one day in 1806 to the innkeeper at South Amboy,
+N. J.  "If you will put us across, I'll leave with you one of my horses
+in pawn, and if I don't send you back six dollars within forty-eight
+hours you may keep the horse."
+
+The innkeeper asked the reason for this novel proposition, and learned
+that the lad's father had contracted to get the cargo of a vessel
+stranded near Sandy Hook, and take it to New York in lighters.  The boy
+had been sent with three wagons, six horses, and three men, to carry
+the cargo across a sand-spit to the lighters.  The work accomplished,
+he had started with only six dollars to travel a long distance home
+over the Jersey sands, and reached South Amboy penniless.  "I'll do
+it," said the innkeeper, as he looked into the bright honest eyes of
+the boy.  The horse was soon redeemed.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT]
+
+How can you keep a determined man from success: Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way, and he uses them for stepping-stones.  Imprison him, and he
+produces the "Pilgrim's Progress."  Deprive him of eyesight, and he
+writes the "Conquest of Mexico."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"My son," said this same boy's mother, on the first of May, 1810, when
+he asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat, having
+imbibed a strong liking for the sea; "on the twenty-seventh of this
+month you will be sixteen years old.  If, by that time, you will plow,
+harrow, and plant with corn the eight-acre lot, I will advance you the
+money."  The field was rough and stony, but the work was done in time,
+and well done.  From this small beginning Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the
+foundation of a colossal fortune.  He would often work all night; and,
+as he was never absent from his post by day, he soon had the best
+business in New York harbor.
+
+In 1813, when it was expected that New York would be attacked by
+British ships, all the boatmen except Cornelius put in bids to convey
+provisions to the military posts around New York, naming extremely low
+rates, as the contractor would be exempted from military duty.  "Why
+don't you send in a bid?" asked his father.  "Of what use?" replied
+young Vanderbilt; "they are offering to do the work at half price.  It
+can't be done at such rates."  "Well," said his father, "it can do no
+harm to try for it."  So, to please his father, but with no hope of
+success, Cornelius made an offer fair to both sides, but did not go to
+hear the award.  When his companions had all returned with long faces,
+he went to the commissary's office and asked if the contract had been
+given.  "Oh, yes," was the reply; "that business is settled.  Cornelius
+Vanderbilt is the man.  What?" he asked, seeing that the youth was
+apparently thunderstruck, "is it you?"  "My name is Cornelius
+Vanderbilt," said the boatman.  "Well," said the commissary, "don't you
+know why we have given the contract to you?"  "No."  "Why, it is
+because we want this business _done_, and we know you'll do it."
+Character gives confidence.
+
+In 1818 he owned two or three of the finest coasting schooners in New
+York harbor, and had a capital of nine thousand dollars.  Seeing that
+steam-vessels would soon win supremacy over those carrying sails only,
+he gave up his fine business to become the captain of a steamboat at
+one thousand dollars a year.  For twelve years he ran between New York
+city and New Brunswick, N. J.  In 1829 he began business as a steamboat
+owner, in the face of opposition so bitter that he lost his last
+dollar.  But the tide turned, and he prospered so rapidly that he at
+length owned over one hundred steamboats.  He early identified himself
+with the growing railroad interests of the country, and became the
+richest man of his day in America.
+
+Barnum began the race of business life barefoot, for at the age of
+fifteen he was obliged to buy on credit the shoes he wore at his
+father's funeral.  He was a remarkable example of success under
+difficulties.  There was no keeping him down; no opposition daunted
+him, no obstacles were too great for him to overcome.  Think of a man
+being ruined at fifty years of age; yes, worse than ruined, for he was
+heavily in debt besides.  Yet on the very day of his downfall he begins
+to rise again, wringing victory from defeat by his indomitable
+persistence.
+
+"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.
+Curran.  "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was
+born some three and twenty years and some months after me."  Speaking
+of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up,
+trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but
+imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as
+far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived
+that every eye was turned on me.  There were only six or seven present,
+and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my
+panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature,
+and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.
+I became dismayed and dumb.  My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there
+was nothing to hear."  He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he
+deserve the title until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a
+speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous
+anachronisms."  "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator
+Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend
+him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."
+Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"
+speaking quite fluently in his anger.  Encouraged by this success, he
+took great pains to become a good speaker.  He corrected his habit of
+stuttering by reading favorite passages aloud every day slowly and
+distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.
+
+Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to
+cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals.  Gifford wrote his
+first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on
+small scraps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first
+calculated eclipses on his plow handle.
+
+A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him,
+earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.
+Eight cents a day was often all he could earn.  He traveled through
+France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at
+the cottages of the peasantry.  At twenty-eight he was penniless in
+London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane.  In his
+poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London.  He wore a
+second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which
+he adroitly covered with his three-cornered hat during his visits; and
+we have an amusing anecdote of his contest of courtesy with a patient
+who persisted in endeavoring to relieve him of his hat, which only made
+him press it more devoutly to his heart.  He often had to pawn his
+clothes to keep from starving.  He sold his "Life of Voltaire" for
+twenty dollars.  After great hardship he managed to publish his "Polite
+Learning in Europe," and this brought him to public notice.  Next came
+"The Traveller," and the wretched man in a Fleet Street garret found
+himself famous.  His landlady once arrested him for rent, but Dr.
+Johnson came to his relief, took from his desk the manuscript of the
+"Vicar of Wakefield," and sold it for three hundred dollars.  He spent
+two years revising "The Deserted Village" after it was first written.
+Generous to a fault, vain and improvident, imposed on by others, he was
+continually in debt; although for his "History of the Earth and
+Animated Nature" he received four thousand dollars, and some of his
+works, as, for instance, "She Stoops to Conquer," had a large sale.
+But in spite of fortune's frown and his own weakness, he won success
+and fame.  The world, which so often comes too late with its assistance
+and laurels, gave to the weak, gentle, loving author of "The Vicar of
+Wakefield" a monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
+
+The poor, scrofulous, and almost blind boy, Samuel Johnson, was taken
+by his mother to receive the touch of Queen Anne, which was supposed to
+heal the "King's Evil."  He entered Oxford as a servant, copying
+lectures from a student's notebooks, while the boys made sport of the
+bare feet showing through great holes in his shoes.  Some one left a
+pair of new shoes at his door, but he was too proud to be helped, and
+threw them out of the window.  He was so poor that he was obliged to
+leave college, and at twenty-six married a widow of forty-eight.  He
+started a private school with his wife's money; but, getting only three
+pupils, was obliged to close it.  He went to London, where he lived on
+nine cents a day.  In his distress he wrote a poem in which appeared in
+capital letters the line, "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,"
+which attracted wide attention.  He suffered greatly in London for
+thirteen years, being arrested once for a debt of thirteen dollars.  At
+forty he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in which were these
+lines:--
+
+  "Then mark what ills the scholar's life assail;
+  Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail."
+
+When asked how he felt about his failures, he replied:
+
+"Like a monument,"--that is, steadfast, immovable.  He was an
+indefatigable worker.  In the evenings of a single week he wrote
+"Rasselas," a beautiful little story of the search for happiness, to
+get money to pay the funeral expenses of his mother.  With six
+assistants he worked seven years on his Dictionary, which made his
+fortune.  His name was then in everybody's mouth, and when he no longer
+needed help, assistance, as usual, came from every quarter.  The great
+universities hastened to bestow their degrees, and King George invited
+him to the palace.
+
+Lord Mansfield raised himself by indefatigable industry from oatmeal
+porridge and poverty to affluence and the Lord Chief Justice's Bench.
+
+Of five thousand articles sent every year to "Lippincott's Magazine,"
+only two hundred were accepted.  How much do you think Homer got for
+his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise?  Only bitter bread and salt, and
+going up and down other people's stairs.  In science, the man who
+discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a
+dungeon: the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died
+from starvation, driven from his home.  It is very clear indeed that
+God means all good work and talk to be done for nothing.  Shakespeare's
+"Hamlet" was sold for about twenty-five dollars; but his autograph has
+sold for five thousand dollars.
+
+During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac
+Newton could hardly pay two shillings a week to the Royal Society of
+which he was a member.  Some of his friends wanted to get him excused
+from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.
+
+There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which
+record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of
+a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount
+(five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.
+
+Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education, that he had to mend
+his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his
+friends.
+
+Who in the days of the First Empire cared to recall the fact that
+Napoleon, Emperor and King, was once forced to borrow a louis from
+Talma, when he lived in a garret on the Quai Conti?
+
+David Livingstone at ten years of age was put into a cotton factory
+near Glasgow.  Out of his first week's wages he bought a Latin Grammar,
+and studied in the night schools for years.  He would sit up and study
+till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he
+had to be at the factory at six in the morning.  He mastered Virgil and
+Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany.  So
+eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book
+before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of
+machinery would pore over its pages.
+
+George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I
+began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman."  One of Emerson's
+biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising,
+correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over
+again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left.  It did
+not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make
+clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast
+aside."  Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him.  The pains he
+took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were
+incredible.  Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five
+volumes at the rate of one per day.  He tells Edward Fitzgerald that
+for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the
+battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.
+
+"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and
+wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of
+perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that
+distant countries are united with canals.  If a man was to compare the
+effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the
+spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed
+by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations,
+incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and
+mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of
+human beings."
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a
+sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was
+shot in a duel by Aaron Burr.  Although Nott had managed in some way to
+get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he
+entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat.  His wife
+sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap
+blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun and wove the wool,
+and made it into an overcoat for him.
+
+Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them.  Nor do they
+wait for facilities or favoring circumstances; they seize upon whatever
+is at hand, work out their problem, and master the situation.  A young
+man determined and willing will find a way or make one.  A Franklin
+does not require elaborate apparatus; he can bring electricity from the
+clouds with a common kite.  A Watt can make a model of the condensing
+steam-engine out of an old syringe used to inject the arteries of dead
+bodies previous to dissection.  A Dr. Black can discover latent heat
+with a pan of water and two thermometers.  A Newton can unfold the
+composition of light and the origin of colors with a prism, a lens, and
+a piece of pasteboard.  A Humphry Davy can experiment with kitchen pots
+and pans, and a Faraday can experiment on electricity by means of old
+bottles, in his spare minutes while a book-binder.  When science was in
+its cradle the Marquis of Worcester, an English nobleman, imprisoned in
+the Tower of London, was certainly not in a very good position to do
+anything for the world, but would not waste his time.  The cover of a
+vessel of hot water blown on before his eyes led to a series of
+observations, which he published later in a book called "Century of
+Inventions."  These observations were a sort of text-book on the power
+of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt
+afterward perfected.  A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on
+his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and
+the stars.
+
+Not in his day of bodily strength and political power, but blind,
+decrepit, and defeated with his party, Milton composed "Paradise Lost."
+
+Great men have found no royal road to their triumph.  It is always the
+old route, by way of industry and perseverance.
+
+The farmer boy, Elihu B. Washburn, taught school at ten dollars per
+month, and early learned the lesson that it takes one hundred cents to
+make a dollar.  In after years he fought "steals" in Congress, until he
+was called the "Watchdog of the Treasury."  From his long membership he
+became known as the "Father of the House."  He administered the oath to
+Schuyler Colfax as Speaker three times.  He recommended Grant as
+colonel of a regiment of volunteers.  The latter, when President,
+appointed him Secretary of State, and, later, Minister to France.
+During the reign of the Commune, the representatives of nearly all
+other foreign nations fled in dismay, but Washburn remained at his
+post.  Shells exploded close to his office, and fell all around it, but
+he did not leave even when Paris was in flames.  For a time he was
+really the minister of all foreign countries, in Paris; and represented
+Prussia for almost a year.  The Emperor William conferred upon him the
+Order of the Red Eagle, and gave him a jeweled star of great value.
+
+How could the poor boy, Elihu Burritt, working nearly all the daylight
+in a blacksmith's shop, get an education?  He had but one book in his
+library, and carried that in his hat.  But this boy with no chance
+became one of America's wonders.
+
+When teaching school, Garfield was very poor.  He tore his only blue
+jean trousers, but concealed the rents by pins until night, when he
+retired early that his boarding mistress might mend his clothes.  "When
+you get to be a United States Senator," said she, "no one will ask what
+kind of clothes you wore when teaching school."
+
+Although Michael Angelo made himself immortal in three different
+occupations, his fame might well rest upon his dome of St. Peter as an
+architect, upon his "Moses" as a sculptor, and upon his "Last Judgment"
+as a painter; yet we find by his correspondence now in the British
+Museum, that when he was at work on his colossal bronze statue of Pope
+Julius II., he was so poor that he could not have his younger brother
+come to visit him at Bologna, because he had but one bed in which he
+and three of his assistants slept together.
+
+"I was always at the bottom of my purse," said Zola, in describing the
+struggles of his early years of authorship.  "Very often I had not a
+sou left, and not knowing, either, where to get one.  I rose generally
+at four in the morning, and began to study after a breakfast consisting
+of one raw egg.  But no matter, those were good times.  After taking a
+walk along the quays, I entered my garret, and joyfully partaking of a
+dinner of three apples, I sat down to work.  I wrote, and I was happy.
+In winter I would allow myself no fire; wood was too expensive--only on
+f�te days was I able to afford it.  But I had several pipes of tobacco
+and a candle for three sous.  A three-sous candle, only think of it!
+It meant a whole night of literature to me."
+
+James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the "New York Daily
+Express," and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a
+store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of
+New England rum.  He was so eager to go to college that he started for
+Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was
+so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station
+when he went home.
+
+When Elias Howe, harassed by want and woe, was in London completing his
+first sewing-machine, he had frequently to borrow money to live on.  He
+bought beans and cooked them himself.  He also borrowed money to send
+his wife back to America.  He sold his first machine for five pounds,
+although it was worth fifty, and then he pawned his letters patent to
+pay his expenses home.
+
+The boy Arkwright begins barbering in a cellar, but dies worth a
+million and a half.  The world treated his novelties just as it treats
+everybody's novelties--made infinite objection, mustered all the
+impediments, but he snapped his fingers at their objections, and lived
+to become honored and wealthy.
+
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and
+persecution.  "Everywhere," says Heine, "that a great soul gives
+utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha."
+
+Nearly every great discovery or invention that has blessed mankind has
+had to fight its way to recognition, even against the opposition of the
+most progressive men.
+
+Even Sir Charles Napier fiercely opposed the introduction of steam
+power into the Royal Navy.  In the House of Commons, he exclaimed, "Mr.
+Speaker, when we enter Her Majesty's naval service and face the chances
+of war, we go prepared to be hacked in pieces, to be riddled by
+bullets, or to be blown to bits by shot and shell; but Mr. Speaker, we
+do not go prepared to be boiled alive."  He said this with tremendous
+emphasis.
+
+"Will any one explain how there can be a light without a wick?" asked a
+member of Parliament, when William Murdock, toward the close of the
+eighteenth century, said that coal gas would give a good light, and
+could be conveyed into buildings in pipes.  "Do you intend taking the
+dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" was the sneering question of even
+the great scientist, Humphry Davy.  Walter Scott ridiculed the idea of
+lighting London by "smoke," but he soon used it at Abbotsford, and Davy
+achieved one of his greatest triumphs by experimenting with gas until
+he had invented his safety lamp.
+
+Titian used to crush the flowers to get their color, and painted the
+white walls of his father's cottage in Tyrol with all sorts of
+pictures, at which the mountaineers gazed in wonder.
+
+"That boy will beat me one day," said an old painter as he watched a
+little fellow named Michael Angelo making drawings of pot and brushes,
+easel and stool, and other articles in the studio.  The barefoot boy
+did persevere until he had overcome every difficulty and become a
+master of his art.
+
+William H. Prescott was a remarkable example of what a boy with "no
+chance" can do.  While at college, he lost one eye by a hard piece of
+bread thrown during a "biscuit battle," then so common after meals;
+and, from sympathy, the other eye became almost useless.  But the boy
+had pluck and determination, and would not lead a useless life.  He set
+his heart upon being a historian, and turned all his energies in that
+direction.  By the aid of others' eyes, he spent ten years studying
+before he even decided upon a particular theme for his first book.
+Then he spent ten years more, poring over old archives and manuscripts,
+before he published his "Ferdinand and Isabella."  What a lesson in his
+life for young men!  What a rebuke to those who have thrown away their
+opportunities and wasted their lives!
+
+"Galileo with an opera-glass," said Emerson, "discovered a more
+splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since with the
+great telescopes.  Columbus found the new world in an undecked boat."
+
+Surroundings which men call unfavorable cannot prevent the unfolding of
+your powers.  From the plain fields and lowlands of Avon came the
+Shakespearean genius which has charmed the world.  From among the
+rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire sprang the greatest of American
+orators and statesmen, Daniel Webster.  From the crowded ranks of toil,
+and homes to which luxury is a stranger, have often come the leaders
+and benefactors of our race.  Indeed, when Christ came upon earth, His
+early abode was a place so poor and so much despised that men thought
+He could not be the Christ, asking, in utter astonishment, "Can any
+good thing come out of Nazareth?"
+
+"I once knew a little colored boy," said Frederick Douglass, "whose
+mother and father died when he was but six years old.  He was a slave,
+and had no one to care for him.  He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel,
+and in cold weather would crawl into a meal-bag head foremost, and
+leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm.  Often he would roast an
+ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he
+crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast
+in the fire and eat.  That boy did not wear pantaloons, as you do, but
+a tow-linen shirt.  Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to
+spell from an old Webster's spelling-book, and to read and write from
+posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him.
+He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known.  He became
+presidential elector, United States marshal, United States recorder,
+United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth.  He wore
+broadcloth, and didn't have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the
+table.  That boy was Frederick Douglass.  What was possible for me is
+possible for you.  Don't think because you are colored you can't
+accomplish anything.  Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge.  So
+long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the
+respect of your fellow-men."
+
+Where shall we find an illustration more impressive than in Abraham
+Lincoln, whose life, career, and death might be chanted by a Greek
+chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial
+theme of modern times?  Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of
+what real parentage we know not, reared in penury, squalor, with no
+gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird
+dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward,
+ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this
+remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity,
+raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the
+destiny of a nation.  The great leaders of his party were made to stand
+aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like
+Seward, and Chase, and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent
+to the rear, while this strange figure was brought by unseen hands to
+the front, and given the reins of power.
+
+The story is told of a man in London deprived of both legs and arms,
+who managed to write with his mouth and perform other things so
+remarkable as to enable him to earn a fair living.  He would lay
+certain sheets of paper together, pinning them at the corner to make
+them hold.  Then he would take a pen and write some verses; after which
+he would proceed to embellish the lines by many skillful flourishes.
+Dropping the pen from his mouth, he would next take up a needle and
+thread, also with his mouth, thread the needle, and make several
+stitches.  He also painted with a brush, and was in many other ways a
+wonderful man.  Instead of being a burden to his family he was the most
+important contributor to their welfare.
+
+Arthur Cavanagh, M. P., was born without arms or legs, yet it is said
+that he was a good shot, a skillful fisherman and sailor, and one of
+the best cross country riders in Ireland.  He was a good
+conversationalist, and an able member of Parliament.  He ate with his
+fork attached to his stump of an arm, and wrote holding his pen in his
+teeth.  In riding he held the bridle in his mouth, his body being
+strapped to the saddle.  He once lost his means of support in India,
+but went to work with his accustomed energy, and obtained employment as
+a carrier of dispatches.
+
+People thought it strange that Gladstone should appoint blind Henry
+Fawcett Postmaster-General of Great Britain; but never before did any
+one fill the office so well.
+
+John B. Herreshoff, of Bristol, R. I., although blind since he was
+fifteen years old, is the founder and head of one of the most noted
+shipbuilding establishments in the world.  He has superintended the
+construction of some of the swiftest torpedo boats and steam and
+sailing yachts afloat.  He frequently takes his turn at the wheel in
+sailing his vessels on trial trips.  He is aided greatly by his younger
+brother Nathaniel, but can plan vessels and conduct business without
+him.  After examining a vessel's hull or a good model of it, he will
+give detailed instructions for building another just like it, and will
+make a more accurate duplicate than can most boat-builders whose sight
+is perfect.
+
+The Rev. William H. Milburn, who lost his sight when a child, studied
+for the ministry, and was ordained before he attained his majority.  In
+ten years he traveled about 200,000 miles in missionary work.  He has
+written half a dozen books, among them a very careful history of the
+Mississippi Valley.  He has long been chaplain of the lower house of
+Congress.
+
+Blind Fanny Crosby, of New York, was a teacher of the blind for many
+years.  She has written nearly three thousand hymns, among which are
+"Pass Me not, O Gentle Saviour," "Rescue the Perishing," "Saviour more
+than Life to Me," and "Jesus keep Me near the Cross."
+
+Nor are these by any means the only examples of blind people now doing
+their full share of the world's work.  In the United States alone there
+are engaged in musical occupation one hundred and fifty blind piano
+tuners, one hundred and fifty blind teachers of music in schools for
+the blind, five hundred blind private teachers, one hundred blind
+church organists, fifteen or more blind composers and publishers of
+music, and several blind dealers in musical instruments.
+
+_There is no open door to the temple of success_.  Every one who enters
+makes his own door, which closes behind him to all others, not even
+permitting his own children to pass.
+
+Nearly forty years ago, on a rainy, dreary day in November, a young
+widow in Philadelphia sat wondering how she could feed and clothe three
+little ones left dependent by the death of her husband, a naval
+officer.  Happening to think of a box of which her husband had spoken,
+she opened it, and found therein an envelope containing directions for
+a code of colored light signals to be used at night on the ocean.  The
+system was not complete, but she perfected it, went to Washington, and
+induced the Secretary of the Navy to give it a trial.  An admiral soon
+wrote that the signals were good for nothing, although the idea was
+valuable.  For months and years she worked, succeeding at last in
+producing brilliant lights of different colors.  She was paid $20,000
+for the right to manufacture them in our navy.  Nearly all the blockade
+runners captured in the Civil War were taken by the aid of the Coston
+signals, which are also considered invaluable in the Life Saving
+Service.  Mrs. Coston introduced them into several European navies, and
+became wealthy.
+
+A modern writer says that it is one of the mysteries of our life that
+genius, that noblest gift of God to man, is nourished by poverty.  Its
+greatest works have been achieved by the sorrowing ones of the world in
+tears and despair.  Not in the brilliant salon, not in the tapestried
+library, not in ease and competence, is genius usually born and
+nurtured; but often in adversity and destitution, amidst the harassing
+cares of a straitened household, in bare and fireless garrets, with the
+noise of squalid children, in the turbulence of domestic contentions,
+and in the deep gloom of uncheered despair.  This is its most frequent
+birthplace, and amid scenes like these unpropitious, repulsive,
+wretched surroundings, have men labored, studied, and trained
+themselves, until they have at last emanated from the gloom of that
+obscurity the shining lights of their times; have become the companions
+of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an
+influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of
+intellectual legislation.
+
+Chauncey Jerome's education was limited to three months in the district
+school each year until he was ten, when his father took him into his
+blacksmith shop at Plymouth, Conn., to make nails.  Money was a scarce
+article with young Chauncey.  He once chopped a load of wood for one
+cent, and often chopped by moonlight for neighbors at less than a dime
+a load.  His father died when he was eleven, and his mother was forced
+to send Chauncey out, with tears in his eyes and a little bundle of
+clothes in his hand, to earn a living on a farm.  His new employer kept
+him at work early and late chopping down trees all day, his shoes
+sometimes full of snow, for he had no boots until he was nearly
+twenty-one.  At fourteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a
+carpenter, who gave him only board and clothes.  Several times during
+his apprenticeship he carried his tools thirty miles on his back to his
+work at different places.  After he had learned his trade he frequently
+walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back.  One day he
+heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to
+make two hundred clocks in one lot.  "He'll never live long enough to
+finish them," said one.  "If he should," said another, "he could not
+possibly sell so many.  The very idea is ridiculous."  Chauncey
+pondered long over this rumor, for it had long been his dream to become
+a great clock-maker.  He tried his hand at the first opportunity, and
+soon learned to make a wooden clock.  When he got an order to make
+twelve at twelve dollars apiece he thought his fortune was made.  One
+night he happened to think that a cheap clock could be made of brass as
+well as of wood, and would not shrink, swell, or warp appreciably in
+any climate.  He acted on the idea, and became the first great
+manufacturer of brass clocks.  He made millions at the rate of six
+hundred a day, exporting them to all parts of the globe.
+
+"The History of the English People" was written while J. R. Green was
+struggling against a mortal illness.  He had collected a vast store of
+materials, and had begun to write, when his disease made a sudden and
+startling progress, and his physicians said they could do nothing to
+arrest it.  In the extremity of ruin and defeat he applied himself with
+greater fidelity to his work.  The time that might still be left to him
+for work must henceforth be wrested, day by day, from the grasp of
+death.  The writing occupied five months, while from hour to hour and
+day to day his life was prolonged, his doctors said, by the sheer force
+of his own will and his inflexible determination to finish the "Making
+of England."  He lay, too weak to lift a book, or to hold a pen,
+dictating every word, sometimes through hours of intense suffering.
+Yet so conscientious was he that, driven by death as he was, the
+greater part of the book was rewritten five times.  When it was done he
+began the "Conquest of England," wrote it, reviewed it, and then,
+dissatisfied with it, rejected it all and began again.  As death laid
+its cold fingers on his heart, he said: "I still have some work to do
+that I know is good.  I will try to win but one week more to write it
+down."  It was not until he was actually dying that he said, "I can
+work no more."
+
+"What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered?"  Schiller
+produced his greatest tragedies in the midst of physical suffering
+almost amounting to torture.  Handel was never greater than when,
+warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress
+and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made
+his name immortal in music.  Mozart composed his great operas, and last
+of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a
+fatal disease.  Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy
+sorrow, when oppressed by almost total deafness.
+
+Perhaps no one ever battled harder to overcome obstacles which would
+have disheartened most men than Demosthenes.  He had such a weak voice,
+and such an impediment in his speech, and was so short of breath, that
+he could scarcely get through a single sentence without stopping to
+rest.  All his first attempts were nearly drowned by the hisses, jeers,
+and scoffs of his audiences.  His first effort that met with success
+was against his guardian, who had defrauded him, and whom he compelled
+to refund a part of his fortune.  He was so discouraged by his defeats
+that he determined to give up forever all attempts at oratory.  One of
+his auditors, however, believed the young man had something in him, and
+encouraged him to persevere.  He accordingly appeared again in public,
+but was hissed down as before.  As he withdrew, hanging his head in
+great confusion, a noted actor, Satyrus, encouraged him still further
+to try to overcome his impediment.  He stammered so much that he could
+not pronounce some of the letters at all, and his breath would give out
+before he could get through a sentence.  Finally, he determined to be
+an orator cost what it might.  He went to the seashore and practiced
+amid the roar of the breakers with small pebbles in his mouth, in order
+to overcome his stammering, and at the same time accustom himself to
+the hisses and tumults of his audience.  He overcame his short breath
+by practicing speaking while running up steep and difficult places on
+the shore.  His awkward gestures were also corrected by long and
+determined drill before a mirror.
+
+Disheartened by the expense of removing the troublesome seeds, Southern
+planters were seriously considering the abandonment of cotton culture.
+To clean a pound of cotton required the labor of a slave for a day.
+Eli Whitney, a young man from New England, teaching school in Georgia,
+saw the state of affairs, and determined to invent a machine to do the
+work.  He worked in secret for many months in a cellar, and at last
+made a machine which cleaned the cotton perfectly and rapidly.  Just as
+success crowned his long labor thieves broke into the cellar and stole
+his model.  He recovered the model, but the principle was stolen, and
+other machines were made without his consent.  In vain he tried to
+protect his right in the courts, for Southern juries would almost
+invariably decide against him.  He had started the South in a great
+industry, and added millions to her wealth, yet the courts united with
+the men who had infringed his patents to rob him of the reward of his
+ingenuity and industry.  At last he abandoned the whole thing in
+disgust, and turned his attention to making improvements in firearms,
+and with such success that he accumulated a fortune.
+
+Robert Collyer, who brought his bride in the steerage when he came to
+America at the age of twenty-seven, worked at the anvil nine years in
+Pennsylvania, and then became a preacher, soon winning national renown.
+
+A shrewd observer says of John Chinaman: "No sooner does he put his
+foot among strangers than he begins to work.  No office is too menial
+or too laborious for him.  He has come to make money, and he will make
+it.  His frugality requires but little: he barely lives, but he saves
+what he gets; commences trade in the smallest possible way, and is
+continually adding to his store.  The native scorns such drudgery, and
+remains poor; the Chinaman toils patiently on, and grows rich.  A few
+years pass by, and he has warehouses; becomes a contractor for produce;
+buys foreign goods by the cargo; and employs his newly imported
+countrymen, who have come to seek their fortune as he did.  He is not
+particularly scrupulous in matters of opinion.  He never meddles with
+politics, for they are dangerous and not profitable; but he will adopt
+any creed, and carefully follow any observances, if, by so doing, he
+can confirm or improve his position.  He thrives with the Spaniard, and
+works while the latter sleeps.  He is too quick for the Dutchman, and
+can smoke and bargain at the same time.  He has harder work with the
+Englishman, but still he is too much for him, and succeeds.  Climate
+has no effect on him: it cannot stop his hands, unless it kills him;
+and if it does, he dies in harness, battling for money till his last
+breath.  Whoever he may be, and in whatever position, whether in his
+own or a foreign country, he is diligent, temperate, and uncomplaining.
+He keeps the word he pledges, pays his debts, and is capable of noble
+and generous actions.  It has been customary to speak lightly of him,
+and to judge a whole people by a few vagabonds in a provincial seaport,
+whose morals and manners have not been improved by foreign society."
+
+Columbus was dismissed as a fool from court after court, but he pushed
+his suit against an incredulous and ridiculing world.  Rebuffed by
+kings, scorned by queens, he did not swerve a hair's breadth from the
+overmastering purpose which dominated his soul.  The words "New World"
+were graven upon his heart; and reputation, ease, pleasure, position,
+life itself if need be, must be sacrificed.  Threats, ridicule,
+ostracism, storms, leaky vessels, mutiny of sailors, could not shake
+his mighty purpose.
+
+You cannot keep a determined man from success.  Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way and he takes them for stepping-stones, and on them will
+climb to greatness.  Take away his money, and he makes spurs of his
+poverty to urge him on.  Cripple him, and he writes the Waverley
+Novels.  Lock him up in a dungeon, and he composes the immortal
+"Pilgrim's Progress."  Put him in a cradle in a log cabin in the
+wilderness of America, and in a few years you will find him in the
+Capitol at the head of the greatest nation on the globe.
+
+Would it were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that
+all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the
+result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, of common
+every-day industry!
+
+When Lavoisier the chemist asked that his execution might be postponed
+for a few days in order to ascertain the results of the experiments he
+was conducting in prison, the communists refused to grant the request,
+saying: "The Republic has no need of philosophers."  Dr. Priestley's
+house was burned and his chemical library destroyed by a mob shouting:
+"No philosophers," and he was forced to flee from his country.  Bruno
+was burned in Rome for revealing the heavens, and Versalius
+[Transcriber's note: Vesalius?] was condemned for dissecting the human
+body; but their names shall live as long as time shall last.  Kossuth
+was two years in prison at Buda, but he kept on working, undaunted.
+John Hunter said: "The few things I have been enabled to do have been
+accomplished under the greatest difficulties, and have encountered the
+greatest opposition."
+
+Roger Bacon, one of the profoundest thinkers the world has produced,
+was terribly persecuted for his studies in natural philosophy, yet he
+persevered and won success.  He was accused of dealing in magic, his
+books were burned in public, and he was kept in prison for ten years.
+Even our own revered Washington was mobbed in the streets because he
+would not pander to the clamor of the people and reject the treaty
+which Mr. Jay had arranged with Great Britain.  But he remained firm,
+and the people adopted his opinion.  The Duke of Wellington was mobbed
+in the streets of London and his windows were broken while his wife lay
+dead in the house; but the "Iron Duke" never faltered in his course, or
+swerved a hair's breadth from his purpose.
+
+William Phips, when a young man, heard some sailors on the street, in
+Boston, talking about a Spanish ship, wrecked off the Bahama Islands,
+which was supposed to have money on board.  Young Phips determined to
+find it.  He set out at once, and, after many hardships, discovered the
+lost treasure.  He then heard of another ship, wrecked off Port De La
+Plata many years before.  He set sail for England and importuned
+Charles II. for aid.  To his delight the king fitted up the ship Rose
+Algier for him.  He searched and searched for a long time in vain.  He
+had to return to England to repair his vessel.  James II. was then on
+the throne, and he had to wait for four years before he could raise
+money to return.  His crew mutinied and threatened to throw him
+overboard, but he turned the ship's guns on them.  One day an Indian
+diver went down for a curious sea plant and saw several cannon lying on
+the bottom.  They proved to belong to the wreck for which he was
+looking, sunk fifty years before.  He had nothing but dim traditions to
+guide him, but he returned to England with $1,500,000.  The King made
+him High Sheriff of New England, and he was afterward made Governor of
+Massachusetts Bay Colony.
+
+Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's
+Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket.  Joseph
+Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a
+druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons.  Dante and Descartes
+were soldiers.  Andrew Johnson was a tailor.  Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe,
+and Kirke White were butchers' sons.  Faraday was the son of a
+blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an
+apothecary.  Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a
+tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker.  The boy Herschel played
+the oboe for his meals.  Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose
+from the ranks.  His great industry gained for him the name of "The
+Indefatigable."  Soult served fourteen years before he was made a
+sergeant.  When made Foreign Minister of France he knew very little of
+geography, even.  Richard Cobden was a boy in a London warehouse.  His
+first speech in Parliament was a complete failure; but he was not
+afraid of defeat, and soon became one of the greatest orators of his
+day.  Seven shoemakers sat in Congress during the first century of our
+government: Roger Sherman, Henry Wilson, Gideon Lee, William Graham,
+John Halley, H. P. Baldwin, and Daniel Sheffey.
+
+A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.
+
+The man who has not fought his way up to his own loaf, and does not
+bear the scar of desperate conflict, does not know the highest meaning
+of success.
+
+The money acquired by those who have thus struggled upward to success
+is not their only, or indeed their chief reward.  When, after years of
+toil, of opposition, of ridicule, of repeated failure, Cyrus W. Field
+placed his hand upon the telegraph instrument ticking a message under
+the sea, think you that the electric thrill passed no further than the
+tips of his fingers?  When Thomas A. Edison demonstrated in Menlo Park
+that the electric light had at last been developed into a commercial
+success, do you suppose those bright rays failed to illuminate the
+inmost recesses of his soul?  Edward Everett said: "There are occasions
+in life in which a great mind lives years of enjoyment in a single
+moment.  I can fancy the emotion of Galileo when, first raising the
+newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand
+prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the
+moon.  It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of
+Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their
+hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through
+the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, beheld the shores of San
+Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself
+to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the
+stiffening fibres of the hemp cord of his kite, that he held the
+lightning in his grasp, like that when Leverrier received back from
+Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found."
+
+"Observe yon tree in your neighbor's garden," says Zanoni to Viola in
+Bulwer's novel.  "Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted.  Some
+wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the
+rock.  Choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and
+man, its life has been one struggle for the light.  You see how it has
+writhed and twisted,--how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has
+labored and worked, stem and branch, towards the clear skies at last.
+What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and
+circumstances--why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the
+vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open
+sunshine?  My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the
+struggle,--because the labor for the light won to the light at length.
+So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and
+of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven; this it is that
+gives knowledge to the strong and happiness to the weak."
+
+          "Each petty hand
+  Can steer a ship becalmed; but he that will
+  Govern her and carry her to her ends, must know
+  His tides, his currents; how to shift his sails;
+  What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;
+  What her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop them;
+  What strands, what shelves, what rocks to threaten her;
+  The forces and the natures of all winds,
+  Gusts, storms, and tempests; when her keel plows hell,
+  And deck knocks heaven; then to manage her
+  Becomes the name and office of a pilot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+USES OF OBSTACLES.
+
+Nature, when she adds difficulties, adds brains.--EMERSON.
+
+Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous
+difficulties.--SPURGEON.
+
+  The good are better made by ill,
+  As odors crushed are sweeter still.
+        ROGERS.
+
+  Aromatic plants bestow
+  No spicy fragrance while they grow;
+  But crushed or trodden to the ground,
+  Diffuse their balmy sweets around.
+        GOLDSMITH.
+
+As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.--YOUNG.
+
+There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum:
+force is always aggressive and crowds something.--HOLMES.
+
+The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the
+more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will
+be.--HORACE BUSHMILL.
+
+Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous
+circumstances would have lain dormant.--HORACE.
+
+For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity.--SIRACH.
+
+  Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe,
+  There's wit there ye'll get there, ye'll find no other where.
+        BURNS.
+
+Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens
+it.--HAZLITT.
+
+"Adversity is the prosperity of the great."
+
+No man ever worked his way in a dead calm.--JOHN NEAL.
+
+"Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
+
+
+"Many and many a time since," said Harriet Martineau, referring to her
+father's failure in business, "have we said that, but for that loss of
+money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of
+ladies with small means, sewing and economizing and growing narrower
+every year; whereas, by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own
+resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation,
+and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home; in
+short, have truly lived instead of vegetating."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN]
+
+  "Sculptor of souls, I lift to Thee
+    Encumbered heart and hands;
+  Spare not the chisel, set me free,
+    However dear the bands.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"I do believe God wanted a grand poem of that man," said George
+Macdonald of Milton, "and so blinded him that he might be able to write
+it."
+
+Two of the three greatest epic poets of the world were blind,--Homer
+and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if
+not altogether, blind.  It almost seems as though some great characters
+had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they would not
+dissipate their energy, but concentrate it all in one direction.
+
+"I have been beaten, but not cast down," said Thiers, after making a
+complete failure of his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies.  "I am
+making my first essay in arms.  In the tribune, as under fire, a defeat
+is as useful as a victory."
+
+A distinguished investigator in science said that when he encountered
+an apparently insuperable obstacle, he usually found himself upon the
+brink of some discovery.
+
+"Returned with thanks" has made many an author.  Failure often leads a
+man to success by arousing his latent energy, by firing a dormant
+purpose, by awakening powers which were sleeping.  Men of mettle turn
+disappointments into helps as the oyster turns into pearl the sand
+which annoys it.
+
+"Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of
+the storm wind is to the eagle,--a force against him that lifts him
+higher."
+
+A kite would not fly unless it had a string tying it down.  It is just
+so in life.  The man who is tied down by half a dozen blooming
+responsibilities and their mother will make a higher and stronger
+flight than the bachelor who, having nothing to keep him steady, is
+always floundering in the mud.  If you want to ascend in the world tie
+yourself to somebody.
+
+"It was the severe preparation for the subsequent harvest," said
+Pemberton Leigh, the eminent English lawyer, speaking of his early
+poverty and hard work.  "I learned to consider indefatigable labor as
+the indispensable condition of success, pecuniary independence as
+essential alike to virtue and happiness, and no sacrifice too great to
+avoid the misery of debt."
+
+When Napoleon's companions made sport of him on account of his humble
+origin and poverty he devoted himself entirely to books, and soon
+rising above them in scholarship, commanded their respect.  Soon he was
+regarded as the brightest ornament of the class.
+
+"To make his way at the bar," said an eminent jurist, "a young man must
+live like a hermit and work like a horse.  There is nothing that does a
+young lawyer so much good as to be half starved."
+
+Thousands of men of great native ability have been lost to the world
+because they have not had to wrestle with obstacles, and to struggle
+under difficulties sufficient to stimulate into activity their dormant
+powers.  No effort is too dear which helps us along the line of our
+proper career.
+
+Poverty and obscurity of origin may impede our progress, but it is only
+like the obstruction of ice or debris in the river temporarily forcing
+the water into eddies, where it accumulates strength and a mighty
+reserve which ultimately sweeps the obstruction impetuously to the sea.
+Poverty and obscurity are not insurmountable obstacles, but they often
+act as a stimulus to the naturally indolent, and develop a firmer fibre
+of mind, a stronger muscle and stamina of body.  If the germ of the
+seed has to struggle to push its way up through the stones and hard
+sod, to fight its way up to sunlight and air, and then to wrestle with
+storm and tempest, with snow and frost, the fibre of its timber will be
+all the tougher and stronger.
+
+"Do you wish to live without a trial?" asks a modern teacher.  "Then
+you wish to die but half a man.  Without trial you cannot guess at your
+own strength.  Men do not learn to swim on a table.  They must go into
+deep water and buffet the waves.  Hardship is the native soil of
+manhood and self-reliance.  Trials are rough teachers, but rugged
+schoolmasters make rugged pupils.  A man who goes through life
+prosperous, and comes to his grave without a wrinkle, is not half a
+man.  Difficulties are God's errands.  And when we are sent upon them
+we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.  We should reach after
+the highest good."
+
+"If you wish to rise," said Talleyrand, "make enemies."
+
+There is good philosophy in the injunction to love our enemies, for
+they are often our best friends in disguise.  They tell us the truth
+when friends flatter.  Their biting sarcasm and scathing rebuke are
+often mirrors which reveal us to ourselves.  These unkind stings and
+thrusts are spurs which urge us on to grander success and nobler
+endeavor.  Friends cover our faults and rarely rebuke; enemies drag out
+to the light all our weaknesses without mercy.  We dread these thrusts
+and exposures as we do the surgeon's knife, but are the better for
+them.  They reach depths before untouched, and we are led to resolve to
+redeem ourselves from scorn and inferiority.
+
+We are the victors of our opponents.  They have developed in us the
+very power by which we overcome them.  Without their opposition we
+could never have braced and anchored and fortified ourselves, as the
+oak is braced and anchored for its thousand battles with the tempests.
+Our trials, our sorrows, and our griefs develop us in a similar way.
+
+The man who has triumphed over difficulties bears the signs of victory
+in his face.  An air of triumph is seen in every movement.
+
+John Calvin, who made a theology for the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, was tortured with disease for many years, and so was Robert
+Hall.  The great men who have lifted the world to a higher level were
+not developed in easy circumstances, but were rocked in the cradle of
+difficulties and pillowed on hardships.
+
+"The gods look on no grander sight than an honest man struggling with
+adversity."
+
+"Then I must learn to sing better," said Anaximander, when told that
+the very boys laughed at his singing.  Strong characters, like the
+palm-tree, seem to thrive best when most abused.  Men who have stood up
+bravely under great misfortune for years are often unable to bear
+prosperity.  Their good fortune takes the spring out of their energy,
+as the torrid zone enervates races accustomed to a vigorous climate.
+Some people never come to themselves until baffled, rebuffed, thwarted,
+defeated, crushed, in the opinion of those around them.  Trials unlock
+their virtues; defeat is the threshold of their victory.
+
+It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle
+to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible; it is defeat that
+has made those heroic natures that are now in the ascendency, and that
+has given the sweet law of liberty instead of the bitter law of
+oppression.
+
+Difficulties call out great qualities, and make greatness possible.
+How many centuries of peace would have developed a Grant?  Few knew
+Lincoln until the great weight of the war showed his character.  A
+century of peace would never have produced a Bismarck.  Perhaps
+Phillips and Garrison would never have been known to history had it not
+been for slavery.
+
+"Will he not make a great painter?" was asked in regard to an artist
+fresh from his Italian tour.  "No, never," replied Northcote.  "Why
+not?"  "Because he has an income of six thousand pounds a year."  In
+the sunshine of wealth a man is, as a rule, warped too much to become
+an artist of high merit.  A drenching shower of adversity would
+straighten his fibres out again.  He should have some great thwarting
+difficulty to struggle against.
+
+The best tools receive their temper from fire, their edge from
+grinding; the noblest characters are developed in a similar way.  The
+harder the diamond, the more brilliant the lustre, and the greater the
+friction necessary to bring it out.  Only its own dust is hard enough
+to make this most precious stone reveal its full beauty.
+
+The spark in the flint would sleep forever but for friction; the fire
+in man would never blaze but for antagonism.  The friction which
+retards a train upon the track, robbing the engine of a fourth of its
+power, is the very secret of locomotion.  Oil the track, remove the
+friction, and the train will not move an inch.  The moment man is
+relieved of opposition or friction, and the track of his life is oiled
+with inherited wealth or other aids, that moment he often ceases to
+struggle and therefore ceases to grow.
+
+"It is this scantiness of means, this continual deficiency, this
+constant hitch, this perpetual struggle to keep the head above water
+and the wolf from the door, that keeps society from falling to pieces.
+Let every man have a few more dollars than he wants, and anarchy would
+follow."
+
+Suddenly, with much jarring and jolting, an electric car came to a
+standstill just in front of a heavy truck that was headed in an
+opposite direction.  The huge truck wheels were sliding uselessly round
+on the car tracks that were wet and slippery from rain.  All the urging
+of the teamster and the straining of the horses in vain,--until the
+motorman quietly tossed a shovelful of sand on the track under the
+heavy wheels, then the truck lumbered on its way.  "Friction is a very
+good thing," remarked a passenger.
+
+The philosopher Kant observes that a dove, inasmuch as the only
+obstacle it has to overcome is the resistance of the air, might suppose
+that if only the air were out of the way it could fly with greater
+rapidity and ease.  Yet if the air were withdrawn, and the bird should
+try to fly in a vacuum, it would fall instantly to the ground unable to
+fly at all.  The very element that offers the opposition to flying is
+at the same time the condition of any flight whatever.
+
+Rough seas and storms make sailors.  Emergencies make giant men.  But
+for our Civil War the names of its grand heroes would not be written
+among the greatest of our time.
+
+The effort or struggle to climb to a higher place in life has strength
+and dignity in it, and cannot fail to leave us stronger for the
+struggle, even though we miss the prize.
+
+From an aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out
+powers and virtues before unknown and suspected.  How often we see a
+young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a
+parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has
+knocked the props and crutches from under him.  The prison has roused
+the slumbering fire in many a noble mind.  "Robinson Crusoe" was
+written in prison.  The "Pilgrim's Progress" appeared in Bedford Jail.
+The "Life and Times" of Baxter, Eliot's "Monarchia of Man," and Penn's
+"No Cross, No Crown," were written by prisoners.  Sir Walter Raleigh
+wrote "The History of the World" during his imprisonment of thirteen
+years.  Luther translated the Bible while confined in the Castle of
+Wartburg.  For twenty years Dante worked in exile, and even under
+sentence of death.  His works were burned in public after his death;
+but genius will not burn.
+
+Take two acorns from the same tree, as nearly alike as possible; plant
+one on a hill by itself, and the other in the dense forest, and watch
+them grow.  The oak standing alone is exposed to every storm.  Its
+roots reach out in every direction, clutching the rocks and piercing
+deep into the earth.  Every rootlet lends itself to steady the growing
+giant, as if in anticipation of fierce conflict with the elements.
+Sometimes its upward growth seems checked for years, but all the while
+it has been expending its energy in pushing a root across a large rock
+to gain a firmer anchorage.  Then it shoots proudly aloft again,
+prepared to defy the hurricane.  The gales which sport so rudely with
+its wide branches find more than their match, and only serve still
+further to toughen every minutest fibre from pith to bark.
+
+The acorn planted in the deep forest shoots up a weak, slender sapling.
+Shielded by its neighbors, it feels no need of spreading its roots far
+and wide for support.
+
+Take two boys, as nearly alike as possible.  Place one in the country
+away from the hothouse culture and refinements of the city, with only
+the district school, the Sunday-school, and a few books.  Remove wealth
+and props of every kind; and, if he has the right kind of material in
+him, he will thrive.  Every obstacle overcome lends him strength for
+the next conflict.  If he falls, he rises with more determination than
+before.  Like a rubber ball, the harder the obstacle he meets the
+higher he rebounds.  Obstacles and opposition are but apparatus of the
+gymnasium in which the fibres of his manhood are developed.  He compels
+respect and recognition from those who have ridiculed his poverty.  Put
+the other boy in a Vanderbilt family.  Give him French and German
+nurses; gratify every wish.  Place him under the tutelage of great
+masters and send him to Harvard.  Give him thousands a year for
+spending money, and let him travel extensively.
+
+The two meet.  The city lad is ashamed of his country brother.  The
+plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner
+of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of
+the other.  The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no
+chance in life," and envies the city youth.  He thinks that it is a
+cruel Providence that places such a wide gulf between them.  They meet
+again as men, but how changed!  It is as easy to distinguish the
+sturdy, self-made man from the one who has been propped up all his life
+by wealth, position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder
+to tell the difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak
+and one from the sapling of the forest.  If you think there is no
+difference, place each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in
+a hurricane at sea.
+
+When God wants to educate a man, he does not send him to school to the
+Graces, but to the Necessities.  Through the pit and the dungeon Joseph
+came to a throne.  We are not conscious of the mighty cravings of our
+half divine humanity; we are not aware of the god within us until some
+chasm yawns which must be filled, or till the rending asunder of our
+affections forces us to become conscious of a need.  Paul in his Roman
+cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his
+prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of
+revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
+Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
+alone,--what failures they might all to themselves have seemed to be,
+yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
+humiliations!
+
+Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
+"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!"  "Tut,
+you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
+if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman."  Just so
+with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties that scare
+and keep out unworthy competitors.
+
+"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
+"If there were no difficulties, there would be no success.  In this
+necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
+advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations.  It has led
+to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."
+
+"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
+entering the Birmingham orchestra.  "Don't tell me what you like but
+what you don't like."
+
+John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
+professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
+their successes.
+
+"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
+way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
+"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
+satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
+discouragements.  But if they are properly met, they are not what they
+seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances.  There is no more
+helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."
+
+It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would
+have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
+continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
+will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to
+hear!
+
+It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote."  He was
+so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
+writing, and had to write on scraps of leather.  A rich Spaniard was
+asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his
+necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world
+rich."
+
+"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."
+
+"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless
+cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something,
+everything.  If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I
+would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she
+would be the greatest singer in Europe."
+
+"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
+Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is
+spoiled by the ease with which he composes."
+
+We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart
+covets.  Martin Luther did his greatest work, and built up his best
+character, while engaged in sharp controversy with the Pope.  Later in
+life his wife asks, "Doctor, how is it that whilst subject to Papacy we
+prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
+utmost coldness and very seldom?"
+
+When Lord Eldon was poor, Lord Thurlow withheld a promised
+commissionership of bankruptcy, saying that it was a favor not to give
+it then.  "What he meant was," said Eldon, "that he had learned I was
+by nature very indolent, and it was only want that could make me very
+industrious."
+
+Waters says that the struggle to obtain knowledge and to advance one's
+self in the world strengthens the mind, disciplines the faculties,
+matures the judgment, promotes self-reliance, and gives one
+independence of thought and force of character.
+
+"The gods in bounty work up storms about us," says Addison, "that give
+mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw out into
+practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth
+seasons and the calms of life."
+
+The hothouse plant may tempt a pampered appetite or shed a languid
+odor, but the working world gets its food from fields of grain and
+orchards waving in the sun and free air, from cattle that wrestle on
+the plains, from fishes that struggle with currents of river or ocean;
+its choicest perfumes from flowers that bloom unheeded, and in
+wind-tossed forests finds its timber for temples and for ships.
+
+"I do not see," says Emerson, "how any man can afford, for the sake of
+his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.
+It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.  Drudgery, calamity,
+exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.  The true
+scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by as a loss of
+power."
+
+Kossuth called himself "a tempest-tossed soul, whose eyes have been
+sharpened by affliction."
+
+Benjamin Franklin ran away, and George Law was turned out of doors.
+Thrown upon their own resources, they early acquired the energy and
+skill to overcome difficulties.
+
+As soon as young eagles can fly the old birds tumble them out and tear
+the down and feathers from their nest.  The rude and rough experience
+of the eaglet fits him to become the bold king of birds, fierce and
+expert in pursuing his prey.
+
+Boys who are bound out, crowded out, kicked out, usually "turn out,"
+while those who do not have these disadvantages frequently fail to
+"come out."
+
+"It was not the victories but the defeats of my life which have
+strengthened me," said the aged Sidenham Poyntz.
+
+Almost from the dawn of history, oppression has been the lot of the
+Hebrews, yet they have given the world its noblest songs, its wisest
+proverbs, its sweetest music.  With them persecution seems to bring
+prosperity.  They thrive where others would starve.  They hold the
+purse-strings of many nations.  To them hardship has been "like spring
+mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin,
+but will let the plant live."
+
+In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside the
+fort, crashing through a beautiful garden.  But from the ugly chasm
+there burst forth a spring of water which ever afterward flowed a
+living fountain.  From the ugly gashes which misfortunes and sorrows
+make in our hearts, perennial fountains of rich experience and new joys
+often spring.
+
+Don't lament and grieve over lost wealth.  The Creator may see
+something grand and mighty which even He cannot bring out as long as
+your wealth stands in the way.  You must throw away the crutches of
+riches and stand upon your own feet, and develop the long unused
+muscles of manhood.  God may see a rough diamond in you which only the
+hard hits of poverty can polish.
+
+God knows where the richest melodies of our lives are, and what drill
+and what discipline are necessary to bring them out.  The frost, the
+snows, the tempests, the lightnings, are the rough teachers that bring
+the tiny acorn to the sturdy oak.  Fierce winters are as necessary to
+it as long summers.  It is its half-century's struggle with the
+elements for existence, wrestling with the storm, fighting for its life
+from the moment that it leaves the acorn until it goes into the ship,
+that gives it value.  Without this struggle it would have been
+character-less, stamina-less, nerve-less, and its grain would have
+never been susceptible of high polish.  The most beautiful as well as
+the strongest woods are found not in tropical climates, but in the
+severe climates, where they have to fight the frosts and the winter's
+cold.
+
+Many a man has never found himself until he has lost his all.
+Adversity stripped him only to discover him.  Obstacles, hardships are
+the chisel and mallet which shape the strong life into beauty.  The
+rough ledge on the hillside complains of the drill, of the blasting
+powder which disturbs its peace of centuries: it is not pleasant to be
+rent with powder, to be hammered and squared by the quarryman.  But
+look again: behold the magnificent statue, the monument, chiseled into
+grace and beauty, telling its grand story of valor in the public square
+for centuries.
+
+The statue would have slept in the marble forever but for the blasting,
+the chiseling, and the polishing.  The angel of our higher and nobler
+selves would remain forever unknown in the rough quarries of our lives
+but for the blastings of affliction, the chiseling of obstacles, and
+the sand-papering of a thousand annoyances.
+
+Who has not observed the patience, the calm endurance, the sweet
+loveliness chiseled out of some rough life by the reversal of fortune
+or by some terrible affliction.
+
+How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood,
+have developed their greatest virtues, when the reverses of fortune
+have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had
+robbed them of all they held dear in life.  Often we cannot see the
+angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the
+blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and
+obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and
+beauty.
+
+Many a man has been ruined into salvation.  The lightning which smote
+his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him
+glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen.
+
+The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered possibilities in his
+nature of patience, endurance, and hope which he never dreamed he
+possessed before.
+
+"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by
+one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better
+too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
+skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This conflict with difficulty
+makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in
+all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial."
+
+Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their
+personality, and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances.
+You cannot keep them down.  Every obstacle seems only to add to their
+ability to get on.
+
+"Under different circumstances," says Castelar, "Savonarola would
+undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father, a man unknown to
+history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the
+human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to
+visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy
+which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his
+brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the
+splendor of immortality.  His hopes were centred in the woman he loved,
+his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family
+finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly
+on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come
+upon him, when in truth it was immortality."
+
+The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks.  It
+is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
+and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.
+
+The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a
+professorship in the Royal Academy.  When but ten years old he showed
+the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
+Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer.  Thorwaldsen's parents
+were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what
+their hands found to do, and ennobled their work.  They rose by being
+greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering,
+Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above
+rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning.  By being first-class barbers,
+tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power
+which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
+generals.
+
+Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties
+of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying
+their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious.  Neither
+do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and
+happiness.  The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the
+faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of
+the voyager.  The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to
+outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism
+worth a lifetime of softness and security.  A man upon whom continuous
+sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry
+and hard and close-grained.  Men have drawn from adversity the elements
+of greatness.  If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and
+sickest families within your knowledge.  The darker the setting, the
+brighter the diamond.  Don't run about and tell acquaintances that you
+have been unfortunate; people do not like to have unfortunate men for
+acquaintances.
+
+Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he
+produced his greatest works.  Schiller wrote his best books in great
+bodily suffering.  He was not free from pain for fifteen years.  Milton
+wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick.  "Who best
+can suffer," said he, "best can do."  Bunyan said that, if it were
+lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater
+comfort's sake.
+
+"Do you know what God puts us on our backs for?" asked Dr. Payson,
+smiling, as he lay sick in bed.  "No," replied the visitor.  "In order
+that we may look upward."  "I am not come to condole but to rejoice
+with you," said the friend, "for it seems to me that this is no time
+for mourning."  "Well, I am glad to hear that," said Dr. Payson, "it is
+not often I am addressed in such a way.  The fact is I never had less
+need of condolence, and yet everybody persists in offering it; whereas,
+when I was prosperous and well, and a successful preacher, and really
+needed condolence, they flattered and congratulated me."
+
+A German knight undertook to make an immense Aeolian harp by stretching
+wires from tower to tower of his castle.  When he finished the harp it
+was silent; but when the breezes began to blow he heard faint strains
+like the murmuring of distant music.  At last a tempest arose and swept
+with fury over his castle, and then rich and grand music came from the
+wires.  Ordinary experiences do not seem to touch some lives--to bring
+out any poetry, any higher manhood.
+
+Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand
+lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London,
+did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and
+mighty city.
+
+True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.
+
+"Every man who makes a fortune has been more than once a bankrupt, if
+the truth were known," said Albion Tourg�e.  "Grant's failure as a
+subaltern made him commander-in-chief, and for myself, my failure to
+accomplish what I set out to do led me to what I never had aspired to."
+
+The appeal for volunteers in the great battle of life, in exterminating
+ignorance and error, and planting high on an everlasting foundation the
+banner of intelligence and right, is directed to _you_.  Burst the
+trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope.  Place high thy
+standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.
+
+Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
+Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of
+a great character is one of its special necessities.  Many of our best
+poets
+
+  "Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
+  And learn in suffering what they teach in song."
+
+
+Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
+criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
+but nineteen years of age.  Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
+in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
+reached."  In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
+Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
+genius.  Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
+as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and
+abuse.
+
+This is the crutch age.  "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
+We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
+newspapers, magazines.  Our thinking is done for us.  Our problems are
+all worked out in "explanations" and "keys."  Our boys are too often
+tutored through college with very little study.  "Short roads" and
+"abridged methods" are characteristic of the century.  Ingenious
+methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college
+course.  Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
+Self-help and self-reliance are getting old fashioned.  Nature, as if
+conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her
+wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and
+emancipate him from Eden's curse.
+
+But do not misinterpret her edict.  She emancipates from the lower only
+to call to the higher.  She does not bid the world go and play while
+she does the work.  She emancipates the muscles only to employ the
+brain and heart.
+
+The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not
+developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on
+trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying
+climate and on a stubborn soil.  It is no chance that returns to the
+Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily
+toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England
+with its granite and ice rich.  It is rugged necessity, it is the
+struggle to obtain, it is poverty the priceless spur, that develops the
+stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism.  Labor found
+the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.
+
+As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble
+block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human
+being.  The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has
+little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay.  The sculptor will
+chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel.  Nature will
+chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities.  She
+will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let
+us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways,
+if she can develop a little character.  Everything must give way to
+that.  Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing,
+_manhood is everything_.
+
+Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a _man_, Nature is after.
+In every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure
+which stands out boldly beyond everything else.  Every other idea or
+figure on the canvas is subordinate to it, but pointing to the central
+idea, finds its true expression there.  So in the vast universe of God,
+every object of creation is but a guideboard with an index-finger
+pointing to the central figure of the created universe--Man.  Nature
+writes this thought upon every leaf, she thunders it in every creation.
+It is exhaled from every flower; it twinkles in every star.
+
+Oh, what price will Nature not pay for a man!  Ages and aeons were
+nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or to make his
+existence possible.  She has rifled the centuries for his development,
+and placed the universe at his disposal.  The world is but his
+kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the
+unseen universe.  Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a
+perfect type of her grandest creation.  To do this she must induce him
+to fight his way up to his own loaf.  She never allows him once to lose
+sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the
+man.  The moment we put our hand upon that which looks so attractive at
+a distance, and which we struggled so hard to reach, Nature robs it of
+its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive.
+
+"Life," says a philosopher, "refuses to be so adjusted as to eliminate
+from it all strife and conflict and pain.  There are a thousand tasks
+that, in larger interests than ours, must be done, whether we want them
+or no.  The world refuses to walk upon tiptoe, so that we may be able
+to sleep.  It gets up very early and stays up very late, and all the
+while there is the conflict of myriads of hammers and saws and axes
+with the stubborn material that in no other way can be made to serve
+its use and do its work for man.  And then, too, these hammers and axes
+are not wielded without strain or pang, but swung by the millions of
+toilers who labor with their cries and groans and tears.  Nay, our
+temple-building, whether it be for God or man, exacts its bitter toll,
+and fills life with cries and blows.  The thousand rivalries of our
+daily business, the fiercer animosities when we are beaten, the even
+fiercer exultation when we have beaten, the crashing blows of disaster,
+the piercing scream of defeat,--these things we have not yet gotten rid
+of, nor in this life ever will.  Why should we wish to get rid of them?
+We are here, my brother, to be hewed and hammered and planed in God's
+quarry and on God's anvil for a nobler life to come."  Only the muscle
+that is used is developed.
+
+The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and
+disappointments, who takes them just for what they are, lessons, and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, is the true hero.
+
+  There is a strength
+  Deep bedded in our hearts of which we reck
+  But little, till the shafts of heaven have pierced
+  Its fragile dwelling.  Must not earth be rent
+  Before her gems are found?
+        MRS. HEMANS.
+
+  "If what shone afar so grand
+  Turns to ashes in the hand,
+  On again, the virtue lies
+  In the struggle, not the prize."
+
+  "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+    Daily his own heart he eats;
+  Chambers of the great are jails,
+    And head-winds right for royal sails."
+
+          "So many great
+  Illustrious spirits have conversed with woe,
+  Have in her school been taught, as are enough
+  To consecrate distress, and make ambition
+  Even wish the frown beyond the smile of fortune."
+
+  Then welcome each rebuff,
+  That turns earth's smoothness rough,
+  Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go.
+        BROWNING.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ONE UNWAVERING AIM.
+
+  Life is an arrow--therefore you must know
+  What mark to aim at, how to use the bow--
+  Then draw it to the head and let it go.
+        HENRY VAN DYKE.
+
+The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the
+aptitude and perseverance to attain it.--GOETHE.
+
+Concentration alone conquers.--C. BUXTON.
+
+"He who follows two hares is sure to catch neither."
+
+"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
+
+Let every one ascertain his special business and calling, and then
+stick to it if he would be successful.--FRANKLIN.
+
+"Digression is as dangerous as stagnation in the career of a young man
+in business."
+
+Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows
+unconsciously into genius.--BULWER.
+
+Genius is intensity.--BALZAC.
+
+
+"Why do you lead such a solitary life?" asked a friend of Michael
+Angelo.  "Art is a jealous mistress," replied the artist; "she requires
+the whole man."  During his labors at the Sistine Chapel, according to
+Disraeli, he refused to meet any one, even at his own house.
+
+"That day we sailed westward, which was our course," were the simple
+but grand words which Columbus wrote in his journal day after day.
+Hope might rise and fall, terror and dismay might seize upon the crew
+at the mysterious variations of the compass, but Columbus, unappalled,
+pushed due west and nightly added to his record the above words.
+
+"Cut an inch deeper," said a member of the Old Guard to the surgeon
+probing his wound, "and you will find the Emperor,"--meaning his heart.
+By the marvelous power of concentrated purpose Napoleon had left his
+name on the very stones of the capital, had burned it indelibly into
+the heart of every Frenchman, and had left it written in living letters
+all over Europe.  France to-day has not shaken off the spell of that
+name.  In the fair city on the Seine the mystic "N" confronts you
+everywhere.
+
+Oh, the power of a great purpose to work miracles!  It has changed the
+face of the world.  Napoleon knew that there were plenty of great men
+in France, but they did not know the might of the unwavering aim by
+which he was changing the destinies of Europe.  He saw that what was
+called the "balance of power" was only an idle dream; that, unless some
+master-mind could be found which was a match for events, the millions
+would rule in anarchy.  His iron will grasped the situation; and like
+William Pitt, he did not loiter around balancing the probabilities of
+failure or success, or dally with his purpose.  There was no turning to
+the right nor to the left; no dreaming away time, nor building
+air-castles; but one look and purpose, forward, upward and onward,
+straight to his goal.  He always hit the bull's-eye.  His great success
+in war was due largely to his definiteness of aim.  He was like a great
+burning-glass, concentrating the rays of the sun upon a single spot; he
+burned a hole wherever he went.  The secret of his power lay in his
+ability to concentrate his forces upon a single point.  After finding
+the weak place in the enemy's ranks, he would mass his men and hurl
+them like an avalanche upon the critical point, crowding volley upon
+volley, charge upon charge, till he made a breach.  What a lesson of
+the power of concentration there is in this man's life!  He was able to
+focus all his faculties upon the smallest detail, as well as upon an
+empire.  But, alas!  Napoleon was himself defeated by violation of his
+own tactics,--the constantly repeated crushing force of heavy
+battalions upon one point.
+
+To succeed to-day a man must concentrate all the faculties of his mind
+upon one unwavering aim, and have a tenacity of purpose which means
+death or victory.  Every other inclination which tempts him from his
+aim must be suppressed.
+
+New Jersey has many ports, but they are so shallow and narrow that the
+shipping of the entire state amounts to but little.  On the other hand,
+New York has but one ocean port, and yet it is so broad, deep, and
+grand, that it leads America in its enormous shipping trade.  She sends
+her vessels into every port of the world, while the ships of her
+neighbor are restricted to local voyages.
+
+A man may starve on a dozen half-learned trades or occupations; he may
+grow rich and famous upon one trade thoroughly mastered, even though it
+be the humblest.
+
+Even Gladstone, with his ponderous yet active brain, says he cannot do
+two things at once; he throws his entire strength upon whatever he
+does.  The intensest energy characterizes everything he undertakes,
+even his recreation.  If such concentration of energy is necessary for
+the success of a Gladstone, what can we common mortals hope to
+accomplish by "scatteration?"
+
+All great men have been noted for their power of concentration which
+makes them oblivious of everything outside their aim.  Victor Hugo
+wrote his "Notre Dame" during the revolution of 1830, while the bullets
+were whistling across his garden.  He shut himself up in one room,
+locking his clothes up, lest they should tempt him to go out into the
+street, and spent most of that winter wrapped in a big gray comforter,
+pouring his very life into his work.
+
+Genius is intensity.  Abraham Lincoln possessed such power of
+concentration that he could repeat quite correctly a sermon to which he
+had listened in his boyhood.  Dr. O. W. Holmes, when an Andover
+student, riveted his eyes on the book he was studying as though he were
+reading a will that made him heir to a million.
+
+A New York sportsman, in answer to an advertisement, sent twenty-five
+cents for a sure receipt to prevent a shotgun from scattering, and
+received the following; "Dear Sir: To keep a gun from scattering put in
+but a single shot."
+
+It is the men who do one thing in this world who come to the front.
+Who is the favorite actor?  It is a Jefferson, who devotes a lifetime
+to a "Rip Van Winkle," a Booth, an Irving, a Kean, who plays one
+character until he can play it better than any other man living, and
+not the shallow players who impersonate all parts.  It is the man who
+never steps outside of his specialty or dissipates his individuality.
+It is an Edison, a Morse, a Bell, a Howe, a Stephenson, a Watt.  It is
+Adam Smith, spending ten years on the "Wealth of Nations."  It is
+Gibbon, giving twenty years to his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire."  It is a Hume, writing thirteen hours a day on his "History of
+England."  It is a Webster, spending thirty-six years on his
+dictionary.  It is a Bancroft, working twenty-six years on his "History
+of the United States."  It is a Field, crossing the ocean fifty times
+to lay a cable, while the world ridicules.  It is a Newton, writing his
+"Chronology of Ancient Nations" sixteen times.  It is a Grant, who
+proposes to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  These
+are the men who have written their names prominently in the history of
+the world.
+
+A one-talent man who decides upon a definite object accomplishes more
+than the ten-talent man who scatters his energies and never knows
+exactly what he will do.  The weakest living creature, by concentrating
+his powers upon one thing, can accomplish something; the strongest, by
+dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.  Drop after
+drop, continually falling, wears a passage through the hardest rock.
+The hasty tempest, as Carlyle points out, rushes over it with hideous
+uproar and leaves no trace behind.
+
+A great purpose is cumulative; and, like a great magnet, it attracts
+all that is kindred along the stream of life.
+
+A Yankee can splice a rope in many different ways; an English sailor
+only knows one way, but that is the best one.  It is the one-sided man,
+the sharp-edged man, the man of single and intense purpose, the man of
+one idea, who turns neither to the right nor to the left, though a
+paradise tempt him, who cuts his way through obstacles and forges to
+the front.  The time has gone forever when a Bacon can span universal
+knowledge; or when, absorbing all the knowledge of the times, a Dante
+can sustain arguments against fourteen disputants in the University of
+Paris, and conquer in them all.  The day when a man can successfully
+drive a dozen callings abreast is a thing of the past.  Concentration
+is the keynote of the century.
+
+Scientists estimate that there is energy enough in less than fifty
+acres of sunshine to run all the machinery in the world, if it could be
+concentrated.  But the sun might blaze out upon the earth forever
+without setting anything on fire; although these rays focused by a
+burning-glass would melt solid granite, or even change a diamond into
+vapor.  There are plenty of men who have ability enough; the rays of
+their faculties, taken separately, are all right, but they are
+powerless to collect them, to bring them all to bear upon a single
+spot.  Versatile men, universal geniuses, are usually weak, because
+they have no power to concentrate their talents upon one point, and
+this makes all the difference between success and failure.
+
+Chiseled upon the tomb of a disappointed, heart-broken king, Joseph II.
+of Austria, in the Royal Cemetery at Vienna, a traveler tells us, is
+this epitaph: "Here lies a monarch who, with the best of intentions,
+never carried out a single plan."
+
+Sir James Mackintosh was a man of remarkable ability.  He excited in
+every one who knew him the greatest expectations.  Many watched his
+career with much interest, expecting that he would dazzle the world.
+But there was no purpose in his life.  He had intermittent attacks of
+enthusiasm for doing great things, but his zeal all evaporated before
+he could decide what to do.  This fatal defect in his character kept
+him balancing between conflicting motives; and his whole life was
+almost thrown away.  He lacked power to choose one object and persevere
+with a single aim, sacrificing every interfering inclination.  He
+vacillated for weeks trying to determine whether to use "usefulness" or
+"utility" in a composition.
+
+One talent utilized in a single direction will do infinitely more than
+ten talents scattered.  A thimbleful of powder behind a ball in a rifle
+will do more execution than a carload of powder unconfined.  The
+rifle-barrel is the purpose that gives direct aim to the powder, which
+otherwise, no matter how good it might be, would be powerless.  The
+poorest scholar in school or college often, in practical life, far
+outstrips the class leader or senior wrangler, simply because what
+little ability he has he employs for a definite object, while the
+other, depending upon his general ability and brilliant prospects,
+never concentrates his powers.
+
+"A sublime self-confidence," says E. P. Whipple, "springing not from
+self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his
+object, lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, and
+communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: RICHARD ARKWRIGHT]
+
+What a sublime spectacle is that of a man going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles which
+dishearten others, as though they were stepping-stones.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It is fashionable to ridicule the man of one idea, but the men who have
+changed the front of the world have been men of a single aim.  No man
+can make his mark on this age of specialties who is not a man of one
+idea, one supreme aim, one master passion.  The man who would make
+himself felt on this bustling planet, who would make a breach in the
+compact conservatism of our civilization, must play all his guns on one
+point.  A wavering aim, a faltering purpose, has no place in the
+nineteenth century.  "Mental shiftlessness" is the cause of many a
+failure.  The world is full of unsuccessful men who spend their lives
+letting empty buckets down into empty wells.
+
+"Mr. A. often laughs at me," said a young American chemist, "because I
+have but one idea.  He talks about everything, aims to excel in many
+things; but I have learned that, if I ever wish to make a breach, I
+must play my guns continually upon one point."  This great chemist,
+when an obscure schoolmaster, used to study by the light of a pine knot
+in a log cabin.  Not many years later he was performing experiments in
+electro-magnetism before English earls, and subsequently he was at the
+head of one of the largest scientific institutes of this country.  This
+man was the late Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution,
+Washington.
+
+Douglas Jerrold once knew a man who was familiar with twenty-four
+languages but could not express a thought in one of them.
+
+We should guard against a talent which we cannot hope to practice in
+perfection, says Goethe.  Improve it as we may, we shall always, in the
+end, when the merit of the matter has become apparent to us, painfully
+lament the loss of time and strength devoted to such botching.  An old
+proverb says: "The master of one trade will support a wife and seven
+children, and the master of seven will not support himself."
+
+_It is the single aim that wins_.  Men with monopolizing ambitions
+rarely live in history.  They do not focus their powers long enough to
+burn their names indelibly into the roll of honor.  Edward Everett,
+even with his magnificent powers, disappointed the expectations of his
+friends.  He spread himself over the whole field of knowledge and
+elegant culture; but the mention of the name of Everett does not call
+up any one great achievement as does that of names like Garrison and
+Phillips.  Voltaire called the Frenchman La Harpe an oven which was
+always heating, but which never cooked anything.  Hartley Coleridge was
+splendidly endowed with talent, like Sir James Mackintosh, but there
+was one fatal lack in his character--he had no definite purpose, and
+his life was a failure.  Unstable as water, he could not excel.
+Southey, his uncle, says:
+
+"Coleridge has two left hands."  He was so morbidly shy from living
+alone in his dreamland that he could not open a letter without
+trembling.  He would often rally from his purposeless life, and resolve
+to redeem himself from the oblivion he saw staring him in the face;
+but, like Mackintosh, he remained a man of promise merely to the end of
+his life.
+
+The world always makes way for the man with a purpose in him, like
+Bismarck or Grant.  Look at Rufus Choate, concentrating all his
+attention first on one juryman, then on another, going back over the
+whole line again and again, until he has burned his arguments into
+their souls; until he has hypnotized them with his purpose; until they
+see with his eyes, think his thoughts, feel his sensations.  He never
+stopped until he had projected his mind into theirs, and permeated
+their lives with his individuality.  There was no escape from his
+concentration of purpose, his persuasive rhetoric, his convincing
+logic.  "Carry the jury at all hazards," he used to say to young
+lawyers; "move heaven and earth to carry the jury, and then fight it
+out with the judge on the law questions as best you can."
+
+The man who succeeds has a programme.  He fixes his course and adheres
+to it.  He lays his plans and executes them.  He goes straight to his
+goal.  He is not pushed this way and that every time a difficulty is
+thrown in his path; if he can't get over it he goes through it.
+Constant and steady use of the faculties under a central purpose gives
+strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end
+only weakens them.  The mind must be focused on a definite end, or,
+like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself to pieces.
+
+This age of concentration calls, not for educated men merely, not for
+talented men, not for geniuses, not for jacks-of-all-trades, but for
+men who are trained to do one thing as well as it can be done.
+Napoleon could go through the drill of his soldiers better than any one
+of his men.
+
+_Stick to your aim_.  The constant changing of one's occupation is
+fatal to all success.  After a young man has spent five or six years in
+a dry goods store, he concludes that he would rather sell groceries,
+thereby throwing away five years of valuable experience which will be
+of very little use to him in the grocery business; and so he spends a
+large part of his life drifting around from one kind of employment to
+another, learning part of each, but all of none, forgetting that
+experience is worth more to him than money, and that the years devoted
+to learning his trade or occupation are the most valuable.
+Half-learned trades, no matter if a man has twenty, will never give him
+a good living, much less a competency, while wealth is absolutely out
+of the question.
+
+How many young men fail to reach the point of efficiency in one line of
+work before they get discouraged and venture into something else.  How
+easy to see the thorns in one's own profession or vocation, and only
+the roses in that of another.  A young man in business, for instance,
+seeing a physician riding about town in his carriage, visiting his
+patients, imagines that a doctor must have an easy, ideal life, and
+wonders that he himself should have embarked in an occupation so full
+of disagreeable drudgery and hardships.  He does not know of the years
+of dry, tedious study which the physician has consumed, the months and
+perhaps years of waiting for patients, the dry detail of anatomy, the
+endless names of drugs and technical terms.
+
+Scientists tell us that there is nothing in nature so ugly and
+disagreeable but intense light will make it beautiful.  The complete
+mastery of one profession will render even the driest details
+interesting.  The consciousness of thorough knowledge, the habit of
+doing everything to a finish, gives a feeling of strength, of
+superiority, which takes the drudgery out of an occupation.  The more
+completely we master a vocation the more thoroughly we enjoy it.  In
+fact, the man who has found his place and become master in it could
+scarcely be induced, even though he be a farmer, or a carpenter, or
+grocer, to exchange places with a governor or congressman.  To be
+successful is to _find your sphere and fill it, to get into your place
+and master it_.
+
+There is a sense of great power in a vocation after a man has reached
+the point of efficiency in it, the point of productiveness, the point
+where his skill begins to tell and bring in returns.  Up to this point
+of efficiency, while he is learning his trade, the time seems to have
+been almost thrown away.  But he has been storing up a vast reserve of
+knowledge of detail, laying foundations, forming his acquaintances,
+gaining his reputation for truthfulness, trustworthiness, and
+integrity, and in establishing his credit.  When he reaches this point
+of efficiency, all the knowledge and skill, character, influence, and
+credit thus gained come to his aid, and he soon finds that in what
+seemed almost thrown away lies the secret of his prosperity.  The
+credit he established as a clerk, the confidence, the integrity, the
+friendships formed, he finds equal to a large capital when he starts
+out for himself and takes the highway to fortune; while the young man
+who half learned several trades, and got discouraged and stopped just
+short of the point of efficiency, just this side of success, is a
+failure because he didn't go far enough; he did not press on to the
+point at which his acquisition would have been profitable.
+
+In spite of the fact that nearly all very successful men have made a
+life work of one thing, we see on every hand hundreds of young men and
+women flitting about from occupation to occupation, trade to trade, in
+one thing to-day and another to-morrow,--just as though they could go
+from one thing to another by turning a switch, as if they could run as
+well on another track as on the one they have left, regardless of the
+fact that no two careers have the same gauge, that every man builds his
+own road upon which another's engine cannot run either with speed or
+safety.  This fickleness, this disposition to shift about from one
+occupation to another, seems to be peculiar to American life, so much
+so that, when a young man meets a friend whom he has not seen for some
+time, the commonest question to ask is, "What are you doing now?"
+showing the improbability or uncertainty that he is doing to-day what
+he was doing when they last met.
+
+Some people think that if they "keep everlastingly at it" they will
+succeed, but this is not so.  Working without a plan is as foolish as
+going to sea without a compass.  A ship which has broken its rudder in
+mid-ocean may "keep everlastingly at it," may keep on a full head of
+steam, driving about all the time, but it never arrives anywhere, it
+never reaches any port unless by accident, and if it does find a haven,
+its cargo may not be suited to the people, the climate, or conditions
+among which it has accidentally drifted.  The ship must be directed to
+a definite port, for which its cargo is adapted, and where there is a
+demand for it, and it must aim steadily for that port through sunshine
+and storm, through tempest and fog.  So a man who would succeed must
+not drift about rudderless on the ocean of life.  He must not only
+steer straight toward his destined port when the ocean is smooth, when
+the currents and winds serve, but he must keep his course in the very
+teeth of the wind and the tempest, and even when enveloped in the fogs
+of disappointment and mists of opposition.  The Cunarders do not stop
+for fogs or storms; they plow straight through the rough seas with only
+one thing in view, their destined port, and no matter what the weather
+is, no matter what obstacles they encounter, their arrival in port can
+be predicted to within a few hours.  It is practically certain, too,
+that the ship destined for Boston will not turn up at Fort Sumter or at
+Sandy Hook.
+
+On the prairies of South America there grows a flower that always
+inclines in the same direction.  If a traveler loses his way and has
+neither compass nor chart, by turning to this flower he will find a
+guide on which he can implicitly rely; for no matter how the rains
+descend or the winds blow, its leaves point to the north.  So there are
+many men whose purposes are so well known, whose aims are so constant,
+that no matter what difficulties they may encounter, or what opposition
+they may meet, you can tell almost to a certainty where they will come
+out.  They may be delayed by head winds and counter currents, but they
+will _always head for the port_ and will steer straight towards the
+harbor.  You know to a certainty that whatever else they may lose, they
+will not lose their compass or rudder.
+
+Whatever may happen to a man of this stamp, even though his sails may
+be swept away and his mast stripped to the deck, though he may be
+wrecked by the storms of life, the needle of his compass will still
+point to the North Star of his hope.  Whatever comes, his life will not
+be purposeless.  Even a wreck that makes its port is a greater success
+than a full-rigged ship with all its sails flying, with every mast and
+rope intact; which merely drifts into an accidental harbor.
+
+To fix a wandering life and give it direction is not an easy task, but
+a life which has no definite aim is sure to be frittered away in empty
+and purposeless dreams.  "Listless triflers," "busy idlers,"
+"purposeless busybodies," are seen everywhere.  A healthy, definite
+purpose is a remedy for a thousand ills which attend aimless lives.
+Discontent, dissatisfaction, flee before a definite purpose.  An aim
+takes the drudgery out of life, scatters doubts to the winds, and
+clears up the gloomiest creeds.  What we do without a purpose
+begrudgingly, with a purpose becomes a delight, and no work is well
+done nor healthily done which is not enthusiastically done.  It is just
+that added element which makes work immortal.
+
+Mere energy is not enough, it must be concentrated on some steady,
+unwavering aim.  What is more common than "unsuccessful geniuses," or
+failures with "commanding talents"?  Indeed, "unrewarded genius" has
+become a proverb.  Every town has unsuccessful educated and talented
+men.  But education is of no value, talent is worthless, unless it can
+do something, achieve something.  Men who can do something at
+everything, and a very little at anything, are not wanted in this age.
+In Paris, a certain Monsieur Kenard announced himself as a "public
+scribe, who digests accounts, explains the language of flowers, and
+sells fried potatoes."  Jacks-at-all-trades are at war with the genius
+of the times.
+
+What this age wants is young men and women who can do one thing without
+losing their identity or individuality, or becoming narrow, cramped, or
+dwarfed.  Nothing can take the place of an all-absorbing purpose;
+education will not, genius will not, talent will not, industry will
+not, will-power will not.  The purposeless life must ever be a failure.
+What good are powers, faculties, unless we can use them for a purpose?
+What good would a chest of tools do a carpenter unless he could use
+them?  A college education, a head full of knowledge, are worth little
+to the men who cannot use them to some definite end.
+
+The man without a purpose never leaves his mark upon the world.  He has
+no individuality; he is absorbed in the mass, lost in the crowd, weak,
+wavering, incompetent.  His outlines of individuality and angles of
+character have been worn off, planed down to suit the common thought
+until he has, as a man, been lost in the throng of humanity.
+
+"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself
+to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle
+spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity."
+
+What a great directness of purpose may be traced in the career of Pitt,
+who lived--ay, and died--for the sake of political supremacy.  From a
+child, the idea was drilled into him that he must accomplish a public
+career worthy of his illustrious father.  Even from boyhood he bent all
+his energy to this one great purpose.  He went straight from college to
+the House of Commons.  In one year he was Chancellor of the Exchequer;
+two years later he was Prime Minister of England, and reigned virtually
+king for a quarter of a century.  He was utterly oblivious of
+everything outside his aim; insensible to the claims of love, art,
+literature, living and steadily working for the sole purpose of
+wielding the governing power of the nation.  His whole soul was
+absorbed in the overmastering passion for political power.
+
+"Consider, my lord," said Rowland Hill to the Prime Minister of
+England, "that a letter to Ireland and the answer back would cost
+thousands upon thousands of my affectionate countrymen more than a
+fifth of their week's wages.  If you shut the post office to them,
+which you do now, you shut out warm hearts and generous affections from
+home, kindred, and friends."  The lad learned that it cost to carry a
+letter from London to Edinburgh, four hundred and four miles, one
+eighteenth of a cent, while the government charged for a simple folded
+sheet of paper twenty-eight cents, and twice as much if there was the
+smallest inclosure.  Against the opposition and contempt of the
+post-office department he at length carried his point, and on January
+10, 1840, penny postage was established throughout Great Britain.  Mr.
+Hill was chosen to introduce the system, at a salary of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year.  His success was most encouraging, but at the end of two
+years a Tory minister dismissed him without paying for his services, as
+agreed.  The public was indignant, and at once contributed sixty-five
+thousand dollars; and, at the request of Queen Victoria, Parliament
+voted him one hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars a year
+for life.
+
+Christ knew that one affection rules in man's life when he said, "No
+man can serve two masters."  One affection, one object, will be supreme
+in us.  Everything else will be neglected and done with half a heart.
+One may have subordinate plans, but he can have but one supreme aim,
+and from this aim all others will take their character.
+
+It is a great purpose which gives meaning to life, it unifies all our
+powers, binds them together in one cable; makes strong and united what
+was weak, separated, scattered.
+
+"Painting is my wife and my works are my children," replied Michael
+Angelo when asked why he did not marry.
+
+"Smatterers" are weak and superficial.  Of what use is a man who knows
+a little of everything and not much of anything?  It is the momentum of
+constantly repeated acts that tells the story.  "Let thine eyes look
+straight before thee.  Ponder the path of thy feet and let all thy ways
+be established.  Turn not to the right hand nor to the left."  One
+great secret of St. Paul's power lay in his strong purpose.  Nothing
+could daunt him, nothing intimidate.  The Roman Emperor could not
+muzzle him, the dungeon could not appall him, no prison suppress him,
+obstacles could not discourage him.  "This one thing I do" was written
+all over his work.  The quenchless zeal of his mighty purpose burned
+its way down through the centuries, and its contagion will never cease
+to fire the hearts of men.
+
+"Try and come home somebody," said the fond mother to Gambetta as she
+sent him off to Paris to school.  Poverty pinched this lad hard in his
+little garret study and his clothes were shabby, but what of that?  He
+had made up his mind to get on in the world.  For years this youth was
+chained to his desk and worked like a hero.  At last his opportunity
+came.  Jules Favre was to plead a great cause on a certain day; but,
+being ill, he chose this young man, absolutely unknown, rough and
+uncouth, to take his place.  For many years Gambetta had been preparing
+for such an opportunity, and he was equal to it, for he made one of the
+greatest speeches that up to that time had ever been made in France.
+That night all the papers in Paris were sounding the praises of this
+ragged, uncouth Bohemian, and soon all France recognized him as the
+Republican leader.  This sudden rise was not due to luck or accident.
+He had been steadfastly working and fighting his way up against
+opposition and poverty for just such an occasion.  Had he not been
+equal to it, it would only have made him ridiculous.  What a stride;
+yesterday, poor and unknown, living in a garret, to-day, deputy elect,
+in the city of Marseilles, and the great Republican leader!  The
+gossipers of France had never heard his name before.  He had been
+expelled from the priest-making seminary as totally unfit for a priest
+and an utterly undisciplinable character.  In two weeks, this ragged
+son of an Italian grocer arose in the Chamber, and moved that the
+Napoleon dynasty be disposed of and the Republic be declared
+established.
+
+When Louis Napoleon had been defeated at Sedan and had delivered his
+sword to William of Prussia, and when the Prussian army was marching on
+Paris, the brave Gambetta went out of the besieged city in a balloon
+barely grazed by the Prussian guns, landed in Amiens, and by almost
+superhuman skill raised three armies of 800,000 men, provided for their
+maintenance, and directed their military operations.  A German officer
+said, "This colossal energy is the most remarkable event of modern
+history, and will carry down Gambetta's name to remote posterity."
+This youth who was poring over his books in an attic while other youths
+were promenading the Champs �lys�es, although but thirty-two years old,
+was now virtually dictator of France, and the greatest orator in the
+Republic.  What a striking example of the great reserve of personal
+power, which, even in dissolute lives, is sometimes called out by a
+great emergency or sudden sorrow, and ever after leads the life to
+victory!  When Gambetta found that his first speech had electrified all
+France, his great reserve rushed to the front, he was suddenly weaned
+from dissipation, and resolved to make his mark in the world.  Nor did
+he lose his head in his quick leap into fame.  He still lived in the
+upper room in the musty Latin quarter, and remained a poor man, without
+stain of dishonor, though he might easily have made himself a
+millionaire.  When Gambetta died the "Figaro" said, "The Republic has
+lost its greatest man."  American boys should study this great man, for
+he loved our country, and made our Republic the pattern for France.
+
+There is no grander sight in the world than that of a young man fired
+with a great purpose, dominated by one unwavering aim.  He is bound to
+win; the world stands one side and lets him pass; it always makes way
+for the man with a will in him.  He does not have one half the
+opposition to overcome that the undecided, purposeless man has who,
+like driftwood, runs against all sorts of snags to which he must yield,
+because he has no momentum to force them out of his way.  What a
+sublime spectacle it is to see a youth going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles, which
+dishearten others, as though they were but stepping-stones!  Defeat,
+like a gymnasium, only gives him new power; opposition only doubles his
+exertions, dangers only increase his courage.  No matter what comes to
+him, sickness, poverty, disaster, he never turns his eye from his goal.
+
+"Duos qui sequitur lepores, neutrum capit."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+SOWING AND REAPING.
+
+Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that
+shall he also reap.--GALATIANS.
+
+Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a
+character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.--G. D. BOARDMAN.
+
+Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.--POPE.
+
+How use doth breed a habit in a man.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  All habits gather, by unseen degrees,
+  As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
+        DRYDEN.
+
+Infinite good comes from good habits which must result from the common
+influence of example, intercourse, knowledge, and actual
+experience--morality taught by good morals.--PLATO.
+
+The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt till they are
+too strong to be broken.--SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+
+Man is first startled by sin; then it becomes pleasing, then easy, then
+delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed.  Then man is
+impenitent, then obstinate, then he is damned.--JEREMY TAYLOR.
+
+"Rogues differ little.  Each began as a disobedient son."
+
+In the great majority of things, habit is a greater plague than ever
+afflicted Egypt.--JOHN FOSTER.
+
+You cannot in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to
+be true if the habit of your life has been insincere.--F. W. ROBERTSON.
+
+  The tissue of the life to be,
+    We weave with colors all our own;
+  And in the field of destiny,
+    We reap as we have sown.
+        WHITTIER.
+
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, you will now consider your verdict," said the
+great lawyer, Lord Tenterden, as he roused from his lethargy a moment,
+and then closed his eyes forever.  "T�te d'arm�e" (head of the army),
+murmured Napoleon faintly; and then, "on the wings of a tempest that
+raged with unwonted fury, up to the throne of the only power that
+controlled him while he lived, went the fiery soul of that wonderful
+warrior."  "Give Dayrolles a chair," said the dying Chesterfield with
+his old-time courtesy, and the next moment his spirit spread its wings.
+"Young man, keep your record clean," thrilled from the lips of John B.
+Gough as he sank to rise no more.  What power over the mind of man is
+exercised by the dominant idea of his life "that parts not quite with
+parting breath!"  It has shaped his purpose throughout his earthly
+career, and he passes into the Great Unknown, moving in the direction
+of his ideal; impelled still, amid the utter retrocession of the vital
+force, by all the momentum resulting from his weight of character and
+singleness of aim.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: VICTOR HUGO]
+
+"Every one is the son of his own works."
+
+"Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working
+universe: it is seed-grain that cannot die."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+ "It is a beautiful arrangement in the mental and
+moral economy of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty
+may, by frequent repetitions, become a habit, and the habit of stern
+virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around the neck like a wreath
+of flowers."
+
+Cholera appeared mysteriously in Toulon, and, after a careful
+examination, the medical inspectors learned that the first victims were
+two sailors on the Montebello, a government transport, long out of
+service, anchored at the entrance to the port.  For many years the
+vessel had been used for storing old, disused military equipments.
+Some of these had belonged to French soldiers who had died before
+Sebastopol.  The doctors learned that the two poor sailors were seized,
+suddenly and mortally, a few days after displacing a pile of equipments
+stored deep in the hold of the Montebello.  The cholera of Toulon came
+in a direct line from the hospital of Varna.  It went to sleep,
+apparently gorged, on a heap of the cast-off garments of its victims,
+to awaken thirty years later to victorious and venomous life.
+
+Professor Bonelli, of Turin, punctured an animal with the tooth of a
+rattlesnake.  The head of this serpent had lain in a dry state for
+sixteen years exposed to the air and dust, and, moreover, had
+previously been preserved more than thirty years in spirits of wine.
+To his great astonishment an hour afterward the animal died.  So
+habits, good or bad, that have been lost sight of for years will spring
+into a new life to aid or injure us at some critical moment, as kernels
+of wheat which had been clasped in a mummy's hand four thousand years
+sprang into life when planted.  They only awaited moisture, heat,
+sunlight, and air to develop them.
+
+In Jefferson's play, Rip Van Winkle, after he had "sworn off," at every
+invitation to drink said, "Well, this time don't count."  True, as
+Professor James says, he may not have counted it, as thousands of
+others have not counted it, and a kind heaven may not count it, but it
+is being counted none the less.  Down among his nerve cells and fibres
+the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes.  Nothing we ever do is in
+strict scientific literalness wiped out.  There is a tendency in the
+nervous system to repeat the same mode of action at regularly recurring
+intervals.  Dr. Combe says that all nervous diseases have a marked
+tendency to observe regular periods.  "If we repeat any kind of mental
+effort at the same hour daily, we at length find ourselves entering
+upon it without premeditation when the time approaches."
+
+"The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our
+ally instead of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our
+acquisition, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.  For this
+we must make automatic and habitual, as soon as possible, as many
+useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that
+are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard against the
+plague."
+
+The nervous system is a living phonograph, infinitely more marvelous
+than that of Edison.  No sound, however feeble, however slight, can
+escape being recorded in its wonderful mechanism.  Although the
+molecules of this living machine may all be entirely changed many times
+during a lifetime, yet these impressions are never erased or lost.
+They become forever fixed in the character.  Like Rip Van Winkle, the
+youth may say to himself, I will do this just once "just to see what it
+is like," no one will ever know it, and "I won't count this time."  The
+country youth says it when he goes to the city.  The young man says it
+when he drinks "just to be social."  Americans, who are good church
+people at home, say it when in Paris and Vienna.  Yes, "just to see
+what it is like" has ruined many a noble life.  Many a man has lost his
+balance and fallen over the precipice into the sink of iniquity while
+just attempting "to see what it was like."  "If you have been pilot on
+these waters twenty-five years," said a young man to the captain of a
+steamer, "you must know every rock and sandbank in the river."  "No, I
+don't, but I know where the deep water is."
+
+Just one little lie to help me out of this difficulty; "I won't count
+this."  Just one little embezzlement; no one will know it, and I can
+return the money before it will be needed.  Just one little indulgence;
+I won't count it, and a good night's sleep will make me all right
+again.  Just one small part of my work slighted; it won't make any
+great difference, and, besides, I am usually so careful that a little
+thing like this ought not to be counted.
+
+But, my young friend, it will be counted, whether you will or not; the
+deed has been recorded with an iron pen, even to the smallest detail.
+The Recording Angel is no myth; it is found in ourselves.  Its name is
+Memory, and it holds everything.  We think we have forgotten thousands
+of things until mortal danger, fever, or some other great stimulus
+reproduces them to the consciousness with all the fidelity of
+photographs.  Sometimes all one's past life will seem to pass before
+him in an instant; but at all times it is really, although
+unconsciously, passing before him in the sentiments he feels, in the
+thoughts he thinks, in the impulses that move him apparently without
+cause.
+
+  "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
+  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
+
+
+In a fable one of the Fates spun filaments so fine that they were
+invisible, and she became a victim of her cunning, for she was bound to
+the spot by these very threads.
+
+Father Schoenmaker, missionary to the Indians, tried for years to
+implant civilization among the wild tribes.  After fifteen years' labor
+he induced a chief to lay aside his blanket, the token of savagery; but
+he goes on to say, "It took fifteen years to get it off, and just
+fifteen minutes to get it on him again."
+
+Physiologists say that dark-colored stripes similar to those on the
+zebra reappear, after a hundred or a thousand generations, on the legs
+and shoulders of horses, asses, and mules.  Large birds on sea islands
+where there are no beasts to molest them lose the power of flight.
+
+After a criminal's head had been cut off his breast was irritated, and
+he raised his hands several times as if to brush away the exciting
+cause.  It was said that the cheek of Charlotte Corday blushed on being
+struck by a rude soldier after the head had been severed from the body.
+
+Humboldt found in South America a parrot which was the only living
+creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe.  The
+bird retained the habit of speech after his teachers had died.
+
+Caspar Hauser was confined, probably from birth, in a dungeon where no
+light or sound from the outer world, could reach him.  At seventeen he
+was still a mental infant, crying and chattering without much apparent
+intelligence.  When released, the light was disagreeable to his eyes;
+and, after the babbling youth had been taught to speak a few words, he
+begged to be taken back to the dungeon.  Only cold and dismal silence
+seemed to satisfy him.  All that gave pleasure to others gave his
+perverted senses only pain.  The sweetest music was a source of anguish
+to him, and he could eat only his black crust without violent vomiting.
+
+Deep in the very nature of animate existence is that principle of
+facility and inclination, acquired by repetition, which we call habit.
+Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts.  In spite of the
+protests of his weakened will the trained nerves continue to repeat the
+acts even when the doer abhors them.  What he at first chooses, at last
+compels.  Man is as irrevocably chained to his deeds as the atoms are
+chained by gravitation.  You can as easily snatch a pebble from
+gravitation's grasp as you can separate the minutest act of life from
+its inevitable effect upon character and destiny.  "Children may be
+strangled," says George Eliot, "but deeds never, they have an
+indestructible life."  The smirched youth becomes the tainted man.
+
+Practically all the achievements of the human race are but the
+accomplishments of habit.  We speak of the power of Gladstone to
+accomplish so much in a day as something marvelous; but when we analyze
+that power we find it composed very largely of the results of habit.
+His mighty momentum has been rendered possible only by the law of the
+power of habit.  He is now a great bundle of habits, which all his life
+have been forming.  His habit of industry no doubt was irksome and
+tedious at first, but, practiced so conscientiously and persistently,
+it has gained such momentum as to astonish the world.  His habit of
+thinking, close, persistent, and strong, has made him a power.  He
+formed the habit of accurate, keen observation, allowing nothing to
+escape his attention, until he could observe more in half a day in
+London than a score of men who have eyes but see not.  Thus he has
+multiplied himself many times.  By this habit of accuracy he has
+avoided many a repetition; and so, during his lifetime, he has saved
+years of precious time, which many others, who marvel at his
+achievements, have thrown away.
+
+Gladstone early formed the habit of cheerfulness, of looking on the
+bright side of things, which, Sydney Smith says, "is worth a thousand
+pounds a year."  This again has saved him enormous waste of energy, as
+he tells us he has never yet been kept awake a single hour by any
+debate or business in Parliament.  This loss of energy has wasted years
+of many a useful life, which might have been saved by forming the
+economizing habit of cheerfulness.
+
+The habit of happy thought would transform the commonest life into
+harmony and beauty.  The will is almost omnipotent to determine habits
+which virtually are omnipotent.  The habit of directing a firm and
+steady will upon those things which tend to produce harmony of thought
+would produce happiness and contentment even in the most lowly
+occupations.  The will, rightly drilled, can drive out all discordant
+thoughts, and produce a reign of perpetual harmony.  Our trouble is
+that we do not half will.  After a man's habits are well set, about all
+he can do is to sit by and observe which way he is going.  Regret it as
+he may, how helpless is a weak man bound by the mighty cable of habit,
+twisted from the tiny threads of single acts which he thought were
+absolutely within his control!
+
+Drop a stone down a precipice.  By the law of gravitation it sinks with
+rapidly increasing momentum.  If it falls sixteen feet the first
+second, it will fall forty-eight feet the next second, and eighty feet
+the third second, and one hundred and forty-four feet the fifth second,
+and if it falls for ten seconds it will in the last second rush through
+three hundred and four feet till earth stops it.  Habit is cumulative.
+After each act of our lives we are not the same person as before, but
+quite another, better or worse, but not the same.  There has been
+something added to, or deducted from, our weight of character.
+
+"There is no fault nor folly of my life," said Ruskin; "that does not
+rise against me and take away my joy, and shorten my power of
+possession, of sight, of understanding; and every past effort of my
+life, every gleam of righteousness or good in it, is with me now to
+help me in my grasp of this hour and its vision."
+
+"Many men of genius have written worse scrawls than I do," said a boy
+at Rugby when his teacher remonstrated with him for his bad penmanship;
+"it is not worth while to worry about so trivial a fault."  Ten years
+later, when he had become an officer in the Crimea, his illegible copy
+of an order caused the loss of many brave men.
+
+"Resist beginning" was an ancient motto which is needed in our day.
+The folly of the child becomes the vice of the youth, and then the
+crime of the man.
+
+In 1880 one hundred and forty-seven of the eight hundred and
+ninety-seven inmates of Auburn State Prison were there on a second
+visit.  What brings the prisoner back the second, third, or fourth
+time?  It is habit which drives him on to commit the deed which his
+heart abhors and which his very soul loathes.  It is the momentum made
+up from a thousand deviations from the truth and right, for there is a
+great difference between going just right and a little wrong.  It is
+the result of that mysterious power which the repeated act has of
+getting itself repeated again and again.
+
+When a woman was dying from the effects of her husband's cruelty and
+debauchery from drink she asked him to come to her bedside, and pleaded
+with him again for the sake of their children to drink no more.
+Grasping his hand with her thin, long fingers, she made him promise
+her: "Mary, I will drink no more till I take it out of this hand which
+I hold in mine."  That very night he poured out a tumbler of brandy,
+stole into the room where she lay cold in her coffin, put the tumbler
+into her withered hand, and then took it out and drained it to the
+bottom.  John B. Gough told this as a true story.  How powerless a man
+is in the presence of a mighty habit, which has robbed him of
+will-power, of self-respect, of everything manly, until he becomes its
+slave!
+
+Walpole tells of a gambler who fell at the table in a fit of apoplexy,
+and his companions began to bet upon his chances of recovery.  When the
+physician came they refused to let him bleed the man because they said
+it would affect the bet.  When President Garfield was hanging between
+life and death men bet heavily upon the issue, and even sold pools.
+
+No disease causes greater horror or dread than cholera; yet when it is
+once fastened upon a victim he is perfectly indifferent, and wonders at
+the solicitude of his friends.  His tears are dried; he cannot weep if
+he would.  His body is cold and clammy and feels like dead flesh, yet
+he tells you he is warm, and calls for ice water.  Have you never seen
+similar insensibility to danger in those whose habits are already
+dragging them to everlasting death?
+
+Etherized by the fascinations of pleasure, we are often unconscious of
+pain while the devil amputates the fingers, the feet and hands, or even
+the arms and legs of our character.  But oh, the anguish that visits
+the sad heart when the lethe passes away, and the soul becomes
+conscious of virtue sacrificed, of manhood lost.
+
+The leper is often the last to suspect his danger, for the disease is
+painless in its early stages.  A leading lawyer and public official in
+the Sandwich Islands once overturned a lighted lamp on his hand, and
+was surprised to find that it caused no pain.  At last it dawned upon
+his mind that he was a leper.  He resigned his offices and went to the
+leper's island, where he died.  So sin in its early stages is not only
+painless but often even pleasant.
+
+The hardening, deadening power of depraving habits and customs was
+strikingly illustrated by the Romans.
+
+Under Nero, the taste of the people had become so debauched and morbid
+that no mere representation of tragedy would satisfy them.  Their
+cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of "a refined, delicate,
+aesthetic age," demanded that the heroes should actually be killed on
+the stage.  The debauched and sanguinary Romans reckoned life worthless
+without the most thrilling experiences of horror or delight.  Tragedy
+must be genuine bloodshed, comedy, actual shame.  When "The
+Conflagration" was represented on the stage they demanded that a house
+be actually burned and the furniture plundered.  When "Laureolus" was
+played they demanded that the actor be really crucified and mangled by
+a bear, and he had to fling himself down and deluge the stage with his
+own blood.  Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in
+very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull, and Orpheus be torn to
+pieces by a real bear, and Icarus was compelled to fly, even though it
+was known he would be dashed to death.  When the heroism of "Mucius
+Scaevola" was represented, a real criminal was compelled to thrust his
+hand into the flame without a murmur, and stand motionless while it was
+being burned.  Hercules was compelled to ascend the funeral pyre, and
+there be burned alive.  The poor slaves and criminals were compelled to
+play their parts heroically until the flames enveloped them.
+
+The pirate Gibbs, who was executed in New York, said that when he
+robbed the first vessel his conscience made a hell in his bosom; but
+after he had sailed for years under the black flag, he could rob a
+vessel and murder all the crew, and lie down and sleep soundly.  A man
+may so accustom himself to error as to become its most devoted slave,
+and be led to commit the most fearful crimes in order to defend it, or
+to propagate it.
+
+When Gordon, the celebrated California stage-driver, was dying, he put
+his foot out of the bed and swung it to and fro.  When asked why he did
+so, he replied, "I am on the down grade and cannot get my foot on the
+brake."
+
+In our great museums you see stone slabs with the marks of rain that
+fell hundreds of years before Adam lived, and the footprint of some
+wild bird that passed across the beach in those olden times.  The
+passing shower and the light foot left their prints on the soft
+sediment; then ages went on, and the sediment hardened into stone; and
+there the prints remain, and will remain forever.  So the child, so
+soft, so susceptible to all impressions, so joyous to receive new
+ideas, treasures them all up, gathers them all into itself, and retains
+them forever.
+
+A tribe of Indians attacked a white settlement and murdered the few
+inhabitants.  A woman of the tribe, however, carried away a very young
+infant, and reared it as her own.  The child grew up with the Indian
+children, different in complexion, but like them in everything else.
+To scalp the greatest possible number of enemies was, in his view, the
+most glorious thing in the world.  While he was still a youth he was
+seen by some white traders, and by them conducted back to civilized
+life.  He showed great relish for his new life, and especially a strong
+desire for knowledge and a sense of reverence which took the direction
+of religion, so that he desired to become a clergyman.  He went through
+his college course with credit, and was ordained.  He fulfilled his
+function well, and appeared happy and satisfied.  After a few years he
+went to serve in a settlement somewhere near the seat of war which was
+then going on between Britain and the United States, and before long
+there was fighting not far off.  He went forth in his usual
+dress--black coat and neat white shirt and neckcloth.  When he returned
+he was met by a gentleman of his acquaintance, who was immediately
+struck by an extraordinary change in the expression of his face and the
+flush on his cheek, and also by his unusually shy and hurried manner.
+After asking news of the battle the gentleman observed, "But you are
+wounded?"  "No."  "Not wounded!  Why, there is blood upon the bosom of
+your shirt!"  The young man quickly crossed his hands firmly upon his
+breast; and his friend, supposing that he wished to conceal a wound
+which ought to be looked to, pulled open his shirt, and saw--what made
+the young man let fall his hands in despair.  From between his shirt
+and his breast the friend took out--a bloody scalp!  "I could not help
+it," said the poor victim of early habits, in an agonized voice.  He
+turned and ran, too swiftly to be overtaken, betook himself to the
+Indians, and never more appeared among the whites.
+
+An Indian once brought up a young lion, and finding him weak and
+harmless, did not attempt to control him.  Every day the lion gained in
+strength and became more unmanageable, until at last, when excited by
+rage, he fell upon his master and tore him to pieces.  So what seemed
+to be an "innocent" sin has grown until it strangled him who was once
+its easy master.
+
+Beware of looking at sin, for at each view it is apt to become better
+looking.
+
+Habit is practically, for a middle-aged person, fate; for is it not
+practically certain that what I have done for twenty years I shall
+repeat to-day?  What are the chances for a man who has been lazy and
+indolent all his life starting in to-morrow morning to be industrious;
+or a spendthrift, frugal; a libertine, virtuous; a profane,
+foul-mouthed man, clean and chaste?
+
+A Grecian flute-player charged double fees for pupils who had been
+taught by inferior masters, on the ground that it was much harder to
+undo than to form habits.
+
+Habit tends to make us permanently what we are for the moment.  We
+cannot possibly hear, see, feel, or experience anything which is not
+woven in the web of character.  What we are this minute and what we do
+this minute, what we think this minute, will be read in the future
+character as plainly as words spoken into the phonograph can be
+reproduced in the future.
+
+"The air itself," says Babbage, "is one vast library on whose pages are
+written forever all that man has ever said, whispered, or done."  Every
+sin you ever committed becomes your boon companion.  It rushes to your
+lips every time you speak, and drags its hideous form into your
+imagination every time you think.  It throws its shadow across your
+path whichever way you turn.  Like Banquo's ghost, it will not down.
+You are fastened to it for life, and it will cling to you in the vast
+forever.  Do you think yourself free?  You are a slave to every sin you
+ever committed.  They follow your pen and work their own character into
+every word you write.
+
+Rectitude is only the confirmed habit of doing what is right.  Some men
+cannot tell a lie: the habit of truth telling is fixed, it has become
+incorporated with their nature.  Their characters bear the indelible
+stamp of veracity.  You and I know men whose slightest word is
+unimpeachable; nothing could shake our confidence in them.  There are
+other men who cannot speak the truth: their habitual insincerity has
+made a twist in their characters, and this twist appears in their
+speech.
+
+"I never in my life committed more than one act of folly," said
+Rulhi�re one day in the presence of Talleyrand.  "But where will it
+end?" inquired the latter.  It was lifelong.  One mistake too many
+makes all the difference between safety and destruction.
+
+How many men would like to go to sleep beggars and wake up Rothschilds
+or Astors?  How many would fain go to bed dunces and wake up Solomons?
+You reap what you have sown.  Those who have sown dunce-seed,
+vice-seed, laziness-seed, always get a crop.  They that sow the wind
+shall reap the whirlwind.
+
+Habit, like a child, repeats whatever is done before it.  Oh, the power
+of a repeated act to get itself repeated again and again!  But, like
+the wind, it is a power which we can use to force our way in its very
+teeth as does the ship, and thus multiply our strength, or we can drift
+with it without exertion upon the rocks and shoals of destruction.
+
+What a great thing it is to "start right" in life.  Every young man can
+see that the first steps lead to the last, with all except his own.
+No, his little prevarications and dodgings will not make him a liar,
+but he can see that they surely will in John Smith's case.  He can see
+that others are idle and on the road to ruin, but cannot see it in his
+own case.
+
+There is a wonderful relation between bad habits.  They all belong to
+the same family.  If you take in one, no matter how small or
+insignificant it may seem, you will soon have the whole.  A man who has
+formed the habit of laziness or idleness will soon be late at his
+engagements; a man who does not meet his engagements will dodge,
+apologize, prevaricate, and lie.  I have rarely known a perfectly
+truthful man who was always behind time.
+
+You have seen a ship out in the bay swinging with the tide and the
+waves; the sails are all up, and you wonder why it does not move, but
+it cannot, for down beneath the water it is anchored.  So we often see
+a young man apparently well equipped, well educated, and we wonder that
+he does not advance toward manhood and character.  But, alas! we find
+that he is anchored to some secret vice, and he can never advance until
+he cuts loose.
+
+  "The first crime past compels us into more,
+  And guilt grows _fate_ that was but _choice_ before."
+
+  "Small habits, well pursued betimes,
+  May reach the dignity of crimes."
+
+
+Thousands can sympathize with David when he cried, "My sins have taken
+such hold upon me that I am not able to look up; my heart faileth me."
+Like the damned spot of blood on Lady Macbeth's hand, these foul spots
+on the imagination will not out.  What a penalty nature exacts for
+physical sins.  The gods are just, and "of our pleasant vices make
+instruments to plague us."
+
+Plato wrote over his door, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter
+here."  The greatest value of the study of the classics and mathematics
+comes from the habits of accurate and concise thought which it induces.
+The habit-forming portion of life is the dangerous period, and we need
+the discipline of close application to hold us outside of our studies.
+
+Washington at thirteen wrote one hundred and ten maxims of civility and
+good behavior, and was most careful in the formation of all habits.
+Franklin, too, devised a plan of self-improvement and character
+building.  No doubt the noble characters of these two men, almost
+superhuman in their excellence, are the natural result of their early
+care and earnest striving towards perfection.
+
+Fielding, describing a game of cards between Jonathan Wild, of
+pilfering propensities, and a professional gambler, says: "Such was the
+power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr.
+Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he
+knew they were empty; nor could the count abstain from palming a card,
+though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."
+
+"Habit," says Montaigne, "is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.
+She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of
+her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
+aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
+tyrannic countenance against which we have no more the courage nor the
+power so much as to lift up our eyes."  It led a New York man actually
+to cut off his hand with a cleaver under a test of what he would resort
+to, to get a glass of whiskey.  It has led thousands of nature's
+noblemen to drunkards' and libertines' graves.
+
+Gough's life is a startling illustration of the power of habit, and of
+the ability of one apparently a hopeless slave to break his fetters and
+walk a free man in the sunlight of heaven.  He came to America when
+nine years old.  Possessed of great powers of song, of mimicry, and of
+acting, and exceedingly social in his tastes, a thousand temptations
+
+  "Widened and strewed with flowers the way
+        Down to eternal ruin."
+
+
+"I would give this right hand to redeem those terrible seven years of
+dissipation and death," he would often say in after years when, with
+his soul still scarred and battered from his conflict with blighting
+passion, he tearfully urged young men to free themselves from the
+chains of bestial habits.
+
+In the laboratory of Faraday a workman one day knocked into a jar of
+acid a silver cup; it disappeared, was eaten up by the acid, and could
+not be found.  The question came up whether it could ever be found.
+The great chemist came in and put certain chemicals into the jar, and
+every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom.  The mass
+was then sent to a silversmith, and the cup restored.  So a precious
+youth who has fallen into the sink of iniquity, lost, dissolved in sin,
+can only be restored by the Great Chemist.
+
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.  "Out
+of a church of twenty-seven hundred members, I have never had to
+exclude a single one who was received while a child," said Spurgeon.
+It is the earliest sin that exercises the most influence for evil.
+
+Benedict Arnold was the only general in the Revolution that disgraced
+his country.  He had great military talent, wonderful energy, and a
+courage equal to any emergency.  But Arnold _did not start right_.
+Even when a boy he was despised for his cruelty and his selfishness.
+He delighted in torturing insects and birds that he might watch their
+sufferings.  He scattered pieces of glass and sharp tacks on the floor
+of the shop he was tending, to cut the feet of the barefooted boys.
+Even in the army, in spite of his bravery, the soldiers hated him, and
+the officers dared not trust him.
+
+  Let no man trust the first false step
+  Of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice,
+  Whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
+        YOUNG
+
+
+Years ago there was a district lying near Westminster Abbey, London,
+called the "Devil's Acre,"--a school for vicious habits, where
+depravity was universal; where professional beggars were fitted with
+all the appliances of imposture; where there was an agency for the hire
+of children to be carried about by forlorn widows and deserted wives,
+to move the compassion of street-giving benevolence; where young
+pickpockets were trained in the art and mystery which was to conduct
+them in due course to an expensive voyage for the good of their country
+to Botany Bay.
+
+Victor Hugo describes a strange association of men in the seventeenth
+century who bought children and distorted and made monstrosities of
+them to amuse the nobility with; and in cultured Boston there is an
+association of so-called "respectable men," who have opened thousands
+of "places of business" for deforming men, women, and children's souls.
+But we deform ourselves with agencies so pleasant that we think we are
+having a good time, until we become so changed and enslaved that we
+scarcely recognize ourselves.  Vice, the pleasant guest which we first
+invited into our heart's parlor, becomes vulgarly familiar, and
+intrenches herself deep in our very being.  We ask her to leave, but
+she simply laughs at us from the hideous wrinkles she has made in our
+faces, and refuses to go.  Our secret sins defy us from the hideous
+furrows they have cut in our cheeks.  Each impure thought has chiseled
+its autograph deep into the forehead, too deep for erasure, and the
+glassy, bleary eye adds its testimony to our ruined character.
+
+The devil does not apply his match to the hard coal; but he first
+lights the shavings of "innocent sins," and the shavings the wood, and
+the wood the coal.  Sin is gradual.  It does not break out on a man
+until it has long circulated through his system.  Murder, adultery,
+theft, are not committed in deed until they have been committed in
+thought again and again.
+
+"Don't write there," said a man to a boy who was writing with a diamond
+pin on a pane of glass in the window of a hotel.  "Why not?" inquired
+the boy.  "Because you can't rub it out."  Yet the glass might have
+been broken and all trace of the writing lost, but things written upon
+the human soul can never be removed, for the tablet is immortal.
+
+"In all the wide range of accepted British maxims," said Thomas Hughes,
+"there is none, take it all in all, more thoroughly abominable than
+this one, as to the sowing of wild oats.  Look at it on what side you
+will, and I defy you to make anything but a devil's maxim of it.  What
+man, be he young, old, or middle-aged, sows, that, and nothing else,
+shall he reap.  The only thing to do with wild oats is to put them
+carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to
+dust, every seed of them.  If you sow them, no matter in what ground,
+up they will come with long, tough roots and luxuriant stalks and
+leaves, as sure as there is a sun in heaven.  The devil, too, whose
+special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody
+else, will have to reap them."
+
+  We scatter seeds with careless hand,
+  And dream we ne'er shall see them more;
+  But for a thousand years
+  Their fruit appears,
+  In weeds that mar the land.
+        JOHN KEBLE.
+
+
+Theodora boasted that she could draw Socrates' disciples away from him.
+"That may be," said the philosopher, "for you lead them down an easy
+descent whereas I am forcing them to mount to virtue--an arduous ascent
+and unknown to most men."
+
+"When I am told of a sickly student," said Daniel Wise, "that he is
+'studying himself to death,' or of a feeble young mechanic, or clerk,
+that his hard work is destroying him, I study his countenance, and
+there, too often, read the real, melancholy truth in his dull, averted,
+sunken eye, discolored skin, and timid manner.  These signs proclaim
+that the young man is in some way violating the laws of his physical
+nature.  He is secretly destroying himself.  Yet, say his unconscious
+and admiring friends, 'He is falling a victim to his own diligence!'
+Most lame and impotent conclusion!  He is sapping the very source of
+life, and erelong will be a mind in ruins or a heap of dust.  Young
+man, beware of his example!  'Keep thyself pure;' observe the laws of
+your physical nature, and the most unrelaxing industry will never rob
+you of a month's health, nor shorten the thread of your life; for
+industry and health are companions, and long life is the heritage of
+diligence."
+
+  "How shall I a habit break?"
+  As you did that habit make.
+  As you gathered, you must lose;
+  As you yielded, now refuse.
+  Thread by thread the strands we twist
+  Till they bind us neck and wrist.
+  Thread by thread the patient hand
+  Must untwine ere free we stand.
+  As we builded, stone by stone,
+  We must toil, unhelped, alone,
+  Till the wall is overthrown.
+
+  But remember, as we try,
+  Lighter every test goes by;
+  Wading in, the stream grows deep
+  Toward the centre's downward sweep;
+  Backward turn, each step ashore
+  Shallower is than that before.
+
+  Ah, the precious years we waste
+  Leveling what we raised in haste;
+  Doing what must be undone,
+  Ere content or love be won!
+  First across the gulf we cast
+  Kite-borne threads till lines are passed,
+  And habit builds the bridge at last.
+        JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SELF-HELP.
+
+I learned that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to
+help any other man.--PESTALOZZI.
+
+What I am I have made myself.--HUMPHRY DAVY.
+
+Be sure, my son, and remember that the best men always make
+themselves.--PATRICK HENRY.
+
+  Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
+  Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
+        BYRON.
+
+God gives every bird its food, but he does not throw it into the
+nest.--J. G. HOLLAND.
+
+Never forget that others will depend upon you, and that you cannot
+depend upon them.--DUMAS, FILS.
+
+Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to
+Heaven.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+The best education in the world is that got by struggling to obtain a
+living.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+
+Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and
+one, more important, which he gives himself.--GIBBON.
+
+What the superior man seeks is in himself: what the small man seeks is
+in others.--CONFUCIUS.
+
+  Who waits to have his task marked out,
+  Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.
+        LOWELL.
+
+  In battle or business, whatever the game,
+  In law, or in love, it's ever the same:
+  In the struggle for power, or scramble for pelf,
+  Let this be your motto, "Rely on yourself."
+        SAXE.
+
+  Let every eye negotiate for itself,
+  And trust no agent.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+"Colonel Crockett makes room for himself!" exclaimed a backwoods
+congressman in answer to the exclamation of the White House usher to
+"Make room for Colonel Crockett!"  This remarkable man was not afraid
+to oppose the head of a great nation.  He preferred being right to
+being president.  Though rough, uncultured, and uncouth, Crockett was a
+man of great courage and determination.
+
+Garfield was the youngest member of the House of Representatives when
+he entered, but he had not been in his seat sixty days before his
+ability was recognized and his place conceded.  He stepped to the front
+with the confidence of one who belonged there.  He succeeded because
+all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and
+because when once in the front he played his part with an intrepidity
+and a commanding ease that were but the outward evidences of the
+immense reserves of energy on which it was in his power to draw.
+
+[Illustration: James A. Garfield (missing from book)]
+
+"Take the place and attitude which belong to you," says Emerson, "and
+all men acquiesce.  The world must be just.  It leaves every man with
+profound unconcern to set his own rate."
+
+Grant was no book soldier.  Some of his victories were contrary to all
+instructions in military works.  He did not dare to disclose his plan
+to invest Vicksburg, and he even cut off all communication on the
+Mississippi River for seven days that no orders could reach him from
+General Halleck, his superior officer; for he knew that Halleck went by
+books, and he was proceeding contrary to all military theories.  He was
+making a greater military history than had ever been written up to that
+time.  He was greater than all books of tactics.  The consciousness of
+power is everything.  That man is strongest who owes most to himself.
+
+"Man, it is within yourself," says Pestalozzi, "it is in the inner
+sense of your power that resides nature's instrument for your
+development."
+
+Richard Arkwright, the thirteenth child, in a hovel, with no education,
+no chance, gave his spinning model to the world, and put a sceptre in
+England's right hand such as the queen never wielded.
+
+"A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources
+virtually has them," says Livy.
+
+Solario, a wandering gypsy tinker, fell deeply in love with the
+daughter of the painter Coll' Antonio del Fiore, but was told that no
+one but a painter as good as the father should wed the maiden.  "Will
+you give me ten years to learn to paint, and so entitle myself to the
+hand of your daughter?"  Consent was given, Coll' Antonio thinking that
+he would never be troubled further by the gypsy.  About the time that
+the ten years were to end the king's sister showed Coll' Antonio a
+Madonna and Child, which the painter extolled in terms of the highest
+praise.  Judge of his surprise on learning that Solario was the artist.
+But later, his son-in-law surprised him even more by his rare skill.
+
+Louis Philippe said he was the only sovereign in Europe fit to govern,
+for he could black his own boots.
+
+When asked to name his family coat-of-arms, a self-made President of
+the United States replied, "A pair of shirtsleeves."
+
+"Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify," said James A. Garfield;
+"but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young
+man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for
+himself.  In all my acquaintance I have never known a man to be drowned
+who was worth the saving."
+
+It is not the men who have inherited most, except it be in nobility of
+soul and purpose, who have risen highest; but rather the men with no
+"start" who have won fortunes, and have made adverse circumstances a
+spur to goad them up the steep mount, where
+
+  "Fame's proud temple shines afar."
+
+To such men, every possible goal is accessible, and honest ambition has
+no height that genius or talent may tread, which has not felt the
+impress of their feet.
+
+You may leave your millions to your son, but have you really given him
+anything?  You cannot transfer the discipline, the experience, the
+power which the acquisition has given you; you cannot transfer the
+delight of achieving, the joy felt only in growth, the pride of
+acquisition, the character which trained habits of accuracy, method,
+promptness, patience, dispatch, honesty of dealing, politeness of
+manner have developed.  You cannot transfer the skill, sagacity,
+prudence, foresight, which lie concealed in your wealth.  It meant a
+great deal for you, but means nothing to your heir.  In climbing to
+your fortune, you developed the muscle, stamina, and strength which
+enabled you to maintain your lofty position, to keep your millions
+intact.  You had the power which comes only from experience, and which
+alone enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height.  Your fortune was
+experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it
+will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him.  It
+was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to
+you and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction,
+lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance.  You have taken the priceless
+spur--necessity--away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly
+all the great achievements in the history of the world.
+
+You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son
+might begin where you left off.  You thought to spare him the drudgery,
+the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meagre
+education, which you had on the old farm.  But you have put a crutch
+into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the
+incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self-discipline
+and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no
+great character is ever possible.  His enthusiasm will evaporate, his
+energy will be dissipated, his ambition, not being stimulated by the
+struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away.  If you do
+everything for your son and fight his battles for him, you will have a
+weakling on your hands at twenty-one.
+
+"My life is a wreck," said the dying Cyrus W. Field, "my fortune gone,
+my home dishonored.  Oh, I was so unkind to Edward when I thought I was
+being kind.  If I had only had firmness enough to compel my boys to
+earn their living, then they would have known the meaning of money."
+His table was covered with medals and certificates of honor from many
+nations, in recognition of his great work for civilization in mooring
+two continents side by side in thought, of the fame he had won and
+could never lose.  But grief shook the sands of life as he thought only
+of the son who had brought disgrace upon a name before unsullied, the
+wounds were sharper than those of a serpent's tooth.
+
+During the great financial crisis of 1857 Maria Mitchell, who was
+visiting England, asked an English lady what became of daughters when
+no property was left them.  "They live on their brothers," was the
+reply.  "But what becomes of the American daughters," asked the English
+lady, "when there is no money left?"  "They earn it," was the reply.
+
+Men who have been bolstered up all their lives are seldom good for
+anything in a crisis.  When misfortune comes, they look around for
+somebody to lean upon.  If the prop is not there down they go.  Once
+down, they are as helpless as capsized turtles, or unhorsed men in
+armor.  Many a frontier boy has succeeded beyond all his expectations
+simply because all props were knocked out from under him and he was
+obliged to stand upon his own feet.
+
+"A man's best friends are his ten fingers," said Robert Collyer, who
+brought his wife to America in the steerage.  Young men who are always
+looking for something to lean upon never amount to anything.
+
+There is no manhood mill which takes in boys and turns out men.  What
+you call "no chance" may be your "only chance."  Don't wait for your
+place to be made for you; make it yourself.  Don't wait for somebody to
+give you a lift; lift yourself.  Henry Ward Beecher did not wait for a
+call to a big church with a large salary.  He accepted the first
+pastorate offered him, in a little town near Cincinnati.  He became
+literally the light of the church, for he trimmed the lamps, kindled
+the fires, swept the rooms, and rang the bell.  His salary was only
+about $200 a year,--but he knew that a fine church and great salary
+cannot make a great man.  It was work and opportunity that he wanted.
+He felt that if there was anything in him work would bring it out.
+
+"Physiologists tell us," says Waters, "that it takes twenty-eight years
+for the brain to attain its full development.  If this is so, why
+should not one be able, by his own efforts, to give this long-growing
+organ a particular bent, a peculiar character?  Why should the will not
+be brought to bear upon the formation of the brain as well as of the
+backbone?"  The will is merely our steam power, and we may put it to
+any work we please.  It will do our bidding, whether it be building up
+a character, or tearing it down.  It may be applied to building up a
+habit of truthfulness and honesty, or of falsehood and dishonor.  It
+will help build up a man or a brute, a hero or a coward.  It will brace
+up resolution until one may almost perform miracles, or it may be
+dissipated in irresolution and inaction until life is a wreck.  It will
+hold you to your task until you have formed a powerful habit of
+industry and application, until idleness and inaction are painful, or
+it will lead you into indolence and listlessness until every effort
+will be disagreeable and success impossible.
+
+"The first thing I have to impress upon you is," says J. T. Davidson,
+"that a good name must be the fruit of one's own exertion.  You cannot
+possess it by patrimony; you cannot purchase it with money; you will
+not light on it by chance; it is independent of birth, station,
+talents, and wealth; it must be the outcome of your own endeavor, and
+the reward of good principles and honorable conduct.  Of all the
+elements of success in life none is more vital than self-reliance,--a
+determination to be, under God, the creator of your own reputation and
+advancement.  If difficulties stand in the way, if exceptional
+disadvantages oppose you, all the better, as long as you have pluck to
+fight through them.  I want each young man here (you will not
+misunderstand me) to have faith in himself and, scorning props and
+buttresses, crutches and life-preservers, to take earnest hold of life.
+Many a lad has good stuff in him that never comes to anything because
+he slips too easily into some groove of life; it is commonly those who
+have a tough battle to begin with that make their mark upon their age."
+
+When Beethoven was examining the work of Moscheles, he found written at
+the end "Finis, with God's help."  He wrote under it "Man, help
+yourself."
+
+A young man stood listlessly watching some anglers on a bridge.  He was
+poor and dejected.  At length, approaching a basket filled with fish,
+he sighed, "If now I had these I would be happy.  I could sell them and
+buy food and lodgings."  "I will give you just as many and just as
+good," said the owner, who chanced to overhear his words, "if you will
+do me a trifling favor."  "And what is that?" asked the other.  "Only
+to tend this line till I come back; I wish to go on a short errand."
+The proposal was gladly accepted.  The old man was gone so long that
+the young man began to get impatient.  Meanwhile the fish snapped
+greedily at the hook, and he lost all his depression in the excitement
+of pulling them in.  When the owner returned he had caught a large
+number.  Counting out from them as many as were in the basket, and
+presenting them to the youth, the old fisherman said, "I fulfill my
+promise from the fish you have caught, to teach you whenever you see
+others earning what you need to waste no time in foolish wishing, but
+cast a line for yourself."
+
+A white squall caught a party of tourists on a lake in Scotland, and
+threatened to capsize the boat.  When it seemed that the crisis was
+really come the largest and strongest man in the party, in a state of
+intense fear, said, "Let us pray."  "No, no, my man," shouted the bluff
+old boatman; "_let the little man pray.  You take an oar._"  The
+greatest curse that can befall a young man is to lean.
+
+The grandest fortunes ever accumulated or possessed on earth were and
+are the fruit of endeavor that had no capital to begin with save
+energy, intellect, and the will.  From Croesus down to Rockefeller the
+story is the same, not only in the getting of wealth, but also in the
+acquirement of eminence; those men have won most who relied most upon
+themselves.
+
+It has been said that one of the most disgusting sights in this world
+is that of a young man with healthy blood, broad shoulders, presentable
+calves, and a hundred and fifty pounds, more or less, of good bone and
+muscle, standing with his hands in his pockets longing for help.
+
+"The male inhabitants in the Township of Loaferdom, in the County of
+Hatework," says a printer's squib, "found themselves laboring under
+great inconvenience for want of an easily traveled road between Poverty
+and Independence.  They therefore petitioned the Powers that be to levy
+a tax upon the property of the entire county for the purpose of laying
+out a macadamized highway, broad and smooth, and all the way down hill
+to the latter place."
+
+"It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create
+themselves," says Irving, "springing up under every disadvantage, and
+working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand
+obstacles."
+
+"Every one is the artificer of his own fortune," says Sallust.
+
+Man is not merely the architect of his own fortune, but he must lay the
+bricks himself.  Bayard Taylor, at twenty-three, wrote: "I will become
+the sculptor of my own mind's statue."  His biography shows how often
+the chisel and hammer were in his hands to shape himself into his
+ideal.  "I have seen none, known none, of the celebrities of my time,"
+said Samuel Cox.  "All my energy was directed upon one end, to improve
+myself."
+
+"Man exists for culture," says Goethe; "not for what he can accomplish,
+but for what can be accomplished in him."
+
+When young Professor Tyndall was in the government service, he had no
+definite aim in life until one day a government official asked him how
+he employed his leisure time.  "You have five hours a day at your
+disposal," said he, "and this ought to be devoted to systematic study.
+Had I at your age some one to advise me as I now advise you, instead of
+being in a subordinate position, I might have been at the head of my
+department."  The very next day young Tyndall began a regular course of
+study, and went to the University of Marburg, where he became noted for
+his indomitable industry.  He was so poor that he bought a cask, and
+cut it open for a bathtub.  He often rose before daylight to study,
+while the world was slumbering about him.
+
+Labor is the only legal tender in the world to true success.  The gods
+sell everything for that, nothing without it.  You will never find
+success "marked down."  The door to the temple of success is never left
+open.  Every one who enters makes his own door which closes behind him
+to all others.
+
+Circumstances have rarely favored great men.  They have fought their
+way to triumph over the road of difficulty and through all sorts of
+opposition.  A lowly beginning and a humble origin are no bar to a
+great career.  The farmers' boys fill many of the greatest places in
+legislatures, in syndicates, at the bar, in pulpits, in Congress,
+to-day.  Boys of lowly origin have made many of the greatest
+discoveries, are presidents of our banks, of our colleges, of our
+universities.  Our poor boys and girls have written many of our
+greatest books, and have filled the highest places as teachers and
+journalists.  Ask almost any great man in our large cities where he was
+born, and he will tell you it was on a farm or in a small country
+village.  Nearly all of the great capitalists of the city came from the
+country.  "'T is better to be lowly born."
+
+The founder of Boston University left Cape Cod for Boston to make his
+way with a capital of only four dollars.  Like Horace Greeley, he could
+find no opening for a boy; but what of that?  He made an opening.  He
+found a board, and made it into an oyster stand on the street corner.
+He borrowed a wheelbarrow, and went three miles to an oyster smack,
+bought three bushels of oysters, and wheeled them to his stand.  Soon
+his little savings amounted to $130, and then he bought a horse and
+cart.  This poor boy with no chance kept right on till he became the
+millionaire Isaac Rich.
+
+Chauncey Jerome, the inventor of machine-made clocks, started with two
+others on a tour through New Jersey, they to sell the clocks, and he to
+make cases for them.  On his way to New York he went through New Haven
+in a lumber wagon, eating bread and cheese.  He afterward lived in a
+fine mansion in New Haven.
+
+Self-help has accomplished about all the great things of the world.
+How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose because
+they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good
+luck to give them a lift.  But success is the child of drudgery and
+perseverance.  It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is
+yours.  Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the
+world than Elihu Burritt, apprenticed to a blacksmith, in whose shop he
+had to work at the forge all the daylight, and often by candle-light?
+Yet, he managed, by studying with a book before him at his meals,
+carrying it in his pocket that he might utilize every spare moment, and
+studying nights and holidays, to pick up an excellent education in the
+odds and ends of time which most boys throw away.  While the rich boy
+and the idler were yawning and stretching and getting their eyes open,
+young Burritt had seized the opportunity and improved it.  At thirty
+years of age he was master of every important language in Europe and
+was studying those of Asia.
+
+What chance had such a boy for distinction?  Probably not a single
+youth will read this book who has not a better opportunity for success.
+Yet he had a thirst for knowledge, and a desire for self-improvement,
+which overcame every obstacle in his pathway.  A wealthy gentleman
+offered to pay his expenses at Harvard; but no, he said he could get
+his education himself, even though he had to work twelve or fourteen
+hours a day at the forge.  Here was a determined boy.  He snatched
+every spare moment at the anvil and forge as though it were gold.  He
+believed, with Gladstone, that thrift of time would repay him in after
+years with usury, and that waste of it would make him dwindle.  Think
+of a boy working nearly all the daylight in a blacksmith's shop, and
+yet finding time to study seven languages in a single year!
+
+If the youth of America who are struggling against cruel circumstances,
+to do something and be somebody in the world, could only understand
+that ninety per cent. of what is called genius is merely the result of
+persistent, determined industry, is in most cases downright hard work,
+that it is the slavery to a single idea which has given to many a
+mediocre talent the reputation of being a genius, they would be
+inspired with new hope.  It is interesting to note that the men who
+talk most about genius are the men who like to work the least.  The
+lazier the man, the more he will have to say about great things being
+done by genius.
+
+The greatest geniuses have been the greatest workers.  Sheridan was
+considered a genius, but it was found that the "brilliants" and
+"off-hand sayings" with which he used to dazzle the House of Commons
+were elaborated, polished and repolished, and put down in his
+memorandum book ready for any emergency.
+
+Genius has been well defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.
+If men who have done great things could only reveal to the struggling
+youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard
+digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement
+they would give.  How often I have wished that the discouraged,
+struggling youth could know of the heart-aches, the head-aches, the
+nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears
+and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the
+world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors.  You
+can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book with only
+pleasure and delight, but the days and months of weary plodding over
+details and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger
+belief.
+
+The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated,
+line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times.
+The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which
+have stood the test of time is almost incredible.  Lucretius worked
+nearly a lifetime on one poem.  It completely absorbed his life.  It is
+said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then
+was not satisfied with it.  John Foster would sometimes linger a week
+over a single sentence.  He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the
+roots, or practice any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it
+gained his consent to exist.  Chalmers was once asked what Foster was
+about in London.  "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a
+week."  Dickens, one of the greatest writers of modern fiction, was so
+worn down by hard work that he looked as "haggard as a murderer."  Even
+Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, left large
+numbers of MSS. filled with "sudden thoughts set down for use."  Hume
+toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of England."  Lord Eldon
+astonished the world with his great legal learning, but when he was a
+student too poor to buy books, he had actually borrowed and copied many
+hundreds of pages of large law books, such as Coke upon Littleton, thus
+saturating his mind with legal principles which afterward blossomed out
+into what the world called remarkable genius.  Matthew Hale for years
+studied law sixteen hours a day.  Speaking of Fox, some one declared
+that he wrote "drop by drop."  Rousseau says of the labor involved in
+his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched,
+interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me.
+There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe
+four or five times before it went to press. . . .  Some of my periods I
+have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they
+were fit to be put to paper."
+
+It is said that Waller spent a whole summer over ten lines in one of
+his poems.  Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his
+painstaking fidelity and persistent application.  There is scarcely a
+bar in his music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen
+times.  His favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which
+can say to aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'"
+Gibbon wrote his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every
+morning, summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste
+their evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and
+Fall of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years.  Even
+Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived, wrote the first
+sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied
+with it.  Burke's famous "Letter to a Noble Lord," one of the finest
+things in the English language, was so completely blotted over with
+alterations when the proof was returned to the printing-office that the
+compositors refused to correct it as it was, and entirely reset it.
+Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of Hastings
+sixteen times, and Butler wrote his famous "Analogy" twenty times.  It
+took Virgil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to
+write the Aeneid.  He was so displeased with the latter that he
+attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.
+
+Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and
+lonely, married a servant girl.  He was sent away from home to act as
+errand boy for a music teacher.  He absorbed a great deal of
+information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a
+barber in Vienna.  Here he blacked boots for an influential man, who
+became a friend to him.  In 1798 this poor boy's oratorio, "The
+Creation," came upon the musical world like the rising of a new sun
+which never set.  He was courted by princes and dined with kings and
+queens; his reputation was made; there was no more barbering, no more
+poverty.  But of his eight hundred compositions, "The Creation"
+eclipsed them all.  He died while Napoleon's guns were bombarding
+Vienna, some of the shot falling in his garden.  The greatest creations
+of musicians were written with an effort, to fill the "aching void" in
+the human heart.
+
+Frederick Douglass, America's most representative colored man, born a
+slave, was reared in bondage, liberated by his own exertions, educated
+and advanced by sheer pluck and perseverance to distinguished positions
+in the service of his country, and to a high place in the respect and
+esteem of the whole world.
+
+When a man like Lord Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put
+himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a
+blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a
+great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the
+most possible out of ourselves and opportunities.  Perhaps ninety-nine
+out of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be content
+to remain helpless objects of charity for life.  If it is your call to
+acquire money power instead of brain power, to acquire business power
+instead of professional power, double your talent just the same, no
+matter what it may be.
+
+A glover's apprentice of Glasgow, Scotland, who was too poor to afford
+even a candle or a fire, and who studied by the light of the shop
+windows in the streets, and when the shops were closed climbed the
+lamp-post, holding his book in one hand, and clinging to the lamp-post
+with the other,--this poor boy, with less chance than almost any boy in
+America, became the most eminent scholar of Scotland.
+
+Francis Parkman, half blind, became one of America's greatest
+historians in spite of everything, because he made himself such.
+Personal value is a coin of one's own minting; one is taken at the
+worth he has put into himself.  Franklin was but a poor printer's boy,
+whose highest luxury at one time was only a penny roll, eaten in the
+streets of Philadelphia.  Richard Arkwright, a barber all his earlier
+life, as he rose from poverty to wealth and fame, felt the need of
+correcting the defects of his early education.  After his fiftieth year
+he devoted two hours a day, snatched from his sleep, to improving
+himself in orthography, grammar, and writing.
+
+Michael Faraday was a poor boy, son of a blacksmith, who apprenticed
+him at the age of thirteen to a bookbinder in London.  Michael laid the
+foundations of his future greatness by making himself familiar with the
+contents of the books he bound.  He remained at night, after others had
+gone, to read and study the precious volumes.  Lord Tenterden was proud
+to point out to his son the shop where his father had shaved for a
+penny.  A French doctor once taunted Fl�chier, Bishop of Nismes, who
+had been a tallow-chandler in his youth, with the meanness of his
+origin, to which he replied, "If you had been born in the same
+condition that I was, you would still have been but a maker of candles."
+
+The Duke of Argyle, walking in his garden, saw a Latin copy of Newton's
+"Principia" on the grass, and supposing that it had been taken from his
+library, called for some one to carry it back.  Edmund Stone, however,
+the son of the duke's gardener, claimed it.  "Yours?" asked the
+surprised nobleman.  "Do you understand geometry, Latin, and Newton?"
+"I know a little of them," replied Edmund.  "But how," asked the duke,
+"came you by the knowledge of all these things?"  "A servant taught me
+to read ten years since," answered Stone.  "Does one need to know
+anything more than the twenty-four letters, in order to learn
+everything else that one wishes?"  The duke was astonished.  "I first
+learned to read," said the lad; "the masons were then at work upon your
+house.  I approached them one day and observed that the architect used
+a rule and compasses, and that he made calculations.  I inquired what
+might be the meaning and use of these things, and I was informed that
+there was a science called arithmetic.  I purchased a book of
+arithmetic and learned it.  I was told that there was another science
+called geometry; I bought the necessary books and learned geometry.  By
+reading I found that there were good books on these sciences in Latin,
+so I bought a dictionary and learned Latin.  I understood, also, that
+there were good books of the same kind in French; I bought a
+dictionary, and learned French.  This, my lord, is what I have done; it
+seems to me that we may learn everything when we know the twenty-four
+letters of the alphabet."
+
+Edwin Chadwick, in his report to the British Parliament, stated that
+children, working on half time, that is, studying three hours a day and
+working the rest of their time out of doors, really made the greatest
+intellectual progress during the year.  Business men have often
+accomplished wonders during the busiest lives by simply devoting one,
+two, three, or four hours daily to study or other literary work.
+
+James Watt received only the rudiments of an education at school, for
+his attendance was irregular on account of delicate health.  He more
+than made up for all deficiencies, however, by the diligence with which
+he pursued his studies at home.  Alexander V. was a beggar; he was
+"born mud, and died marble."  William Herschel, placed at the age of
+fourteen as a musician in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, devoted
+all his leisure to philosophical studies.  He acquired a large fund of
+general knowledge, and in astronomy, a science in which he was wholly
+self-instructed, his discoveries entitle him to rank with the greatest
+astronomers of all time.
+
+George Washington was the son of a widow, born under the roof of a
+Westmoreland farmer; almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an
+orphan.  No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned
+him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his
+degrees in knowledge.  Shakespeare learned little more than reading and
+writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master
+among literary men.  Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education,
+and his youth was passed in almost abject poverty.
+
+James Ferguson, the son of a half-starved peasant, learned to read by
+listening to the recitations of one of his elder brothers.  While a
+mere boy he discovered several mechanical principles, made models of
+mills and spinning-wheels, and by means of beads on strings worked out
+an excellent map of the heavens.  Ferguson made remarkable things with
+a common penknife.  How many great men have mounted the hill of
+knowledge by out-of-the-way paths.  Gifford worked his intricate
+problems with a shoemaker's awl on a bit of leather.  Rittenhouse first
+calculated eclipses on his plow-handle.  _A will finds a way_.
+
+Julius Caesar, who has been unduly honored for those great military
+achievements in which he appears as the scourge of his race, is far
+more deserving of respect for those wonderful Commentaries, in which
+his military exploits are recorded.  He attained distinction by his
+writings on astronomy, grammar, history, and several other subjects.
+He was one of the most learned men and one of the greatest orators of
+his time.  Yet his life was spent amid the turmoil of a camp or the
+fierce struggle of politics.  If he found abundant time for study, who
+may not?  Frederick the Great, too, was busy in camp the greater part
+of his life, yet whenever a leisure moment came, it was sure to be
+devoted to study.  He wrote to a friend, "I become every day more
+covetous of my time, I render an account of it to myself, and I lose
+none of it but with great regret."
+
+Columbus, while leading the life of a sailor, managed to become the
+most accomplished geographer and astronomer of his time.
+
+When Peter the Great, a boy of seventeen, became the absolute ruler of
+Russia, his subjects were little better than savages, and in himself,
+even, the passions and propensities of barbarism were so strong that
+they were frequently exhibited during his whole career.  But he
+determined to transform himself and the Russians into civilized people.
+He instituted reforms with great energy, and at the age of twenty-six
+started on a visit to the other countries of Europe for the purpose of
+learning about their arts and institutions.  At Saardam, Holland, he
+was so impressed with the sights of the great East India dockyard, that
+he apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, and helped build the St.
+Peter, which he promptly purchased.  Continuing his travels, after he
+had learned his trade, he worked in England in paper-mills, saw-mills,
+rope-yards, watchmaker's shops, and other manufactories, doing the work
+and receiving the treatment of a common laborer.
+
+While traveling, his constant habit was to obtain as much information
+as he could beforehand with regard to every place he was to visit, and
+he would demand, "Let me see all."  When setting out on his
+investigations, on such occasions, he carried his tablets in his hand,
+and whatever he deemed worthy of remembrance was carefully noted down.
+He would often leave his carriage, if he saw the country people at work
+by the wayside as he passed along, and not only enter into conversation
+with them, on agricultural affairs, but accompany them to their houses,
+examine their furniture, and take drawings of their implements of
+husbandry.  Thus he obtained much minute and correct knowledge, which
+he would scarcely have acquired by other means, and which he afterward
+turned to admirable account in the improvement of his own country.
+
+The ancients said, "Know thyself;" the nineteenth century says, "Help
+thyself."  Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul.  A liberal
+education is a true regeneration.  When a man is once liberally
+educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor
+dwindle to a brute.  But if he is not properly educated, if he has
+merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a
+broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the
+examination, he will continue to shrink and shrivel and dwindle, often
+below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence
+and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of
+himself, evaporate from his distended memory.  Many a youth has made
+his greatest effort in his graduating essay.  But, alas! the beautiful
+flowers of rhetoric blossomed only to exhaust the parent stock, which
+blossoms no more forever.
+
+In Strasburg geese are crammed with food several times a day by opening
+their mouths and forcing the pabulum down the throat with the finger.
+The geese are shut up in boxes just large enough to hold them, and are
+not allowed to take any exercise.  This is done in order to increase
+enormously the liver for _p�t� de fois gras_.  So are our youth
+sometimes stuffed with education.  What are the chances for success of
+students who "cut" recitations or lectures, and gad, lounge about, and
+dissipate in the cities at night until the last two or three weeks,
+sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ
+tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working
+parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not
+to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not
+for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but
+to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed
+facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty per cent. in
+the examination.
+
+True teaching will create a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to
+quench this thirst will lead the eager student to the Pierian spring.
+"Man might be so educated that all his prepossessions would be truth,
+and all his feelings virtues."
+
+Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle
+for existence.  The microscope does not create anything new, but it
+reveals marvels.  To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until
+it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness.  It reveals a world
+we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest
+things.  The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds which the uneducated
+eye never dreamed of.  The cultured hand can do a thousand things the
+uneducated hand cannot do.  It becomes graceful, steady of nerve,
+strong, skillful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it
+with intelligence.  The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the
+possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman
+effort.  The educated touch can almost perform miracles.  The educated
+taste can achieve wonders almost past belief.  What a contrast this,
+between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone
+and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his
+reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry
+brick.
+
+"Culture comes from the constant choice of the best within our reach,"
+says Bulwer.  "Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise
+the genius, to attempt to delight or instruct your race; and, even
+supposing you fall short of every model you set before you, supposing
+your name moulder with your dust, still you will have passed life more
+nobly than the unlaborious herd.  Grant that you win not that glorious
+accident, 'a name below,' how can you tell but that you may have fitted
+yourself for high destiny and employ, not in the world of men, but of
+spirits?  The powers of the mind cannot be less immortal than the mere
+sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal
+Progress, and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter, in
+proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our
+intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God."
+
+But be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is
+purchased at the expense of moral vigor.  An observant professor of one
+of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and
+polished by education, so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any
+one faculty.  In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency
+and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to
+fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than
+the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to
+prevent consciousness of his ignorance.  While all the faculties of the
+mind should be cultivated, it is yet desirable that it should have two
+or three rough-hewn features of massive strength.  Young men are too
+apt to forget the great end of life which is to be and do, not to read
+and brood over what other men have been and done."
+
+In a gymnasium you tug, you expand your chest, you push, pull, strike,
+run, in order to develop your physical self; so you can develop your
+moral and intellectual nature only by continued effort.
+
+"I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge but to teach him
+how to acquire it at need," said Rousseau.
+
+All learning is self-teaching.  It is upon the working of the pupil's
+own mind that his progress in knowledge depends.  The great business of
+the master is to teach the pupil to teach himself.
+
+"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood," says Isaac Taylor.  "Accustom
+yourself, therefore, to thinking.  Set yourself to understand whatever
+you see or read.  To join thinking with reading is one of the first
+maxims, and one of the easiest operations."
+
+  "How few think justly of the thinking few:
+  How many never think who think they do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WORK AND WAIT.
+
+What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we
+already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of
+self-discipline.--H. P. LIDDON.
+
+In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be
+made.--CICERO.
+
+I consider a human soul without education like marble in a quarry which
+shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher
+sketches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every
+ornamental cloud, spot, and vein that runs throughout the body of
+it.--ADDISON.
+
+Many a genius has been slow of growth.  Oaks that flourish for a
+thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.--GEORGE HENRY
+LEWES.
+
+Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what
+you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.--ARNOLD.
+
+All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.--THOREAU.
+
+The more haste, ever the worse speed.--CHURCHILL.
+
+Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.--SENECA.
+
+"Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."
+
+How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed-time
+of character?--THOREAU.
+
+I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to
+perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both
+public and private, of peace and war.--MILTON.
+
+The safe path to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of
+appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the
+art and assiduity in practicing it.--EDWARD EVERETT.
+
+The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which
+belongs to you, and do more work with less effort.--CHARLES KINGSLEY.
+
+
+"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry
+Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831.  Although but
+eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon
+made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on
+cardboard.  His method was so simple that one could learn in ten
+minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny.  Having
+ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official
+papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a
+perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document.
+At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government
+was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps
+from old parchments and using them again.  The chief also appreciated
+the new danger of easy counterfeiting.  So he offered Bessemer a
+definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at
+eight hundred pounds a year.  Bessemer chose the office, and hastened
+to tell the good news to a young woman with whom he had agreed to share
+his fortune.  In explaining his invention, he told how it would prevent
+any one from taking a valuable stamp from a document a hundred years
+old and using it a second time.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS ALVA EDISON]
+
+"The Wizard of Menlo Park."
+
+"What the world wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work
+and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all
+stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used
+without detection."
+
+This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a
+single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved
+the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed,
+that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British
+revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden
+of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year.  And the
+same little word, if published in its connection, would render Henry's
+perforation device of far less value than a last year's bird's nest.
+Henry felt proud of the young woman's ingenuity, and suggested the
+improvement at the stamp office.  As a result his system of perforation
+was abandoned and he was deprived of his promised office, the
+government coolly making use from that day to this, without
+compensation, of the idea conveyed by that little insignificant word.
+
+So Bessemer's financial prospects were not very encouraging; but,
+realizing that the best capital a young man can have is a capital wife,
+he at once entered into a partnership which placed at his command the
+combined ideas of two very level heads.  The result, after years of
+thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel
+cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the
+world.  His method consists simply in forcing hot air from below into
+several tons of melted pig-iron, so as to produce intense combustion;
+and then adding enough spiegel-eisen (looking-glass iron), an ore rich
+in carbon, to change the whole mass to steel.  He discovered this
+simple process only after trying in vain much more difficult and
+expensive methods.
+
+  "All things come round to him who will but wait."
+
+
+The great lack of the age is want of thoroughness.  How seldom you find
+a young man or woman who is willing to take time to prepare for his
+life work.  A little education is all they want, a little smattering of
+books, and then they are ready for business.
+
+"Can't wait" is characteristic of the century, and is written on
+everything; on commerce, on schools, on society, on churches.  Can't
+wait for a high school, seminary, or college.  The boy can't wait to
+become a youth, nor the youth a man.  Youth rush into business with no
+great reserve of education or drill; of course they do poor, feverish
+work, and break down in middle life, and many die of old age in the
+forties.  Everybody is in a hurry.  Buildings are rushed up so quickly
+that they will not stand, and everything is made "to sell."
+
+Not long ago a professor in one of our universities had a letter from a
+young woman in the West, asking him if he did not think she could teach
+elocution if she could come to the university and take twelve lessons.
+Our young people of to-day want something, and want it quickly.  They
+are not willing to lay broad, deep foundations.  The weary years in
+preparatory school and college dishearten them.  They only want a
+"smattering" of an education.  But as Pope says,--
+
+  "A little learning is a dangerous thing;
+  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
+  There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
+  And drinking largely sobers us again."
+
+
+The shifts to cover up ignorance, and "the constant trembling lest some
+blunder should expose one's emptiness," are pitiable.  Short cuts and
+abridged methods are the demand of the hour.  But the way to shorten
+the road to success is to take plenty of time to lay in your reserve
+power.  You can't stop to forage your provender as the army advances;
+if you do the enemy will get there first.  Hard work, a definite aim,
+and faithfulness, will shorten the way.  Don't risk a life's
+superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+
+Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the
+opportunity will only make you ridiculous.  A great occasion is
+valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to
+make use of it.  Beware of that fatal facility of thoughtless speech
+and superficial action which has misled many a young man into the
+belief that he could make a glib tongue or a deft hand take the place
+of deep study or hard work.
+
+Patience is nature's motto.  She works ages to bring a flower to
+perfection.  What will she not do for the greatest of her creation?
+Ages and aeons are nothing to her, out of them she has been carving her
+great statue, a perfect man.
+
+Johnson said a man must turn over half a library to write one book.
+When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he
+replied that he would have spent six weeks.  Think of Bishop Hall
+spending thirty years on one of his works.  Owens was working on the
+"Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty years.  Moore
+spent several weeks on one of his musical stanzas which reads as if it
+were a dash of genius.  Carlyle wrote with the utmost difficulty, and
+never executed a page of his great histories till he had consulted
+every known authority, so that every sentence is the quintessence of
+many books, the product of many hours of drudging research in the great
+libraries.  To-day, "Sartor Resartus" is everywhere.  You can get it
+for a mere trifle at almost any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands
+of copies are scattered over the world.  But when Carlyle brought it to
+London in 1851, it was refused almost contemptuously by three prominent
+publishers.  At last he managed to get it into "Fraser's Magazine," the
+editor of which conveyed to the author the pleasing information that
+his work had been received with "unqualified disapprobation."  Henry
+Ward Beecher sent a half dozen articles to the publisher of a religious
+paper to pay for his subscription, but they were respectfully declined.
+The publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly" returned Miss Alcott's
+manuscript, suggesting that she had better stick to teaching.  One of
+the leading magazines ridiculed Tennyson's first poems, and consigned
+the young poet to oblivion.  Only one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books
+had a remunerative sale.  Washington Irving was nearly seventy years
+old before the income from his books paid the expenses of his household.
+
+In some respects it is very unfortunate that the old system of binding
+boys out to a trade has been abandoned.  To-day very few boys learn any
+trade.  They pick up what they know, as they go along, just as a
+student crams for a particular examination, just to "get through,"
+without any effort to see how much he may learn on any subject.
+
+Think of an American youth spending twelve years with Michael Angelo,
+studying anatomy that he might create the masterpiece of all art; or
+with Da Vinci devoting ten years to the model of an equestrian statue
+that he might master the anatomy of the horse.  Most young American
+artists would expect, in a quarter of that time, to sculpture an Apollo
+Belvidere.  While Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel he
+would not allow himself time for meals or to dress or undress; but he
+kept bread within reach that he might eat when hunger impelled, and he
+slept in his clothes.
+
+A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little thing for his album.
+Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs.  "But it took you only
+five minutes," objected the rich man.  "Yes, but it took me thirty
+years to learn how to do it in five minutes."
+
+"I prepared that sermon," said a young sprig of divinity, "in half an
+hour, and preached it at once, and thought nothing of it."  "In that,"
+said an older minister, "your hearers are at one with you, for they
+also thought nothing of it."
+
+What the age wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work and
+wait, whether the world applaud or hiss.  It wants a Bancroft, who can
+spend twenty-six years on the "History of the United States;" a Noah
+Webster, who can devote thirty-six years to a dictionary; a Gibbon, who
+can plod for twenty years on the "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire;" a Mirabeau, who can struggle on for forty years before he has
+a chance to show his vast reserve, destined to shake an empire; a
+Farragut, a Von Moltke, who have the persistence to work and wait for
+half a century for their first great opportunities; a Garfield, burning
+his lamp fifteen minutes later than a rival student in his academy; a
+Grant, fighting on in heroic silence, when denounced by his brother
+generals and politicians everywhere; a Field's untiring perseverance,
+spending years and a fortune laying a cable when all the world called
+him a fool; a Michael Angelo, working seven long years decorating the
+Sistine Chapel with his matchless "Creation" and the "Last Judgment,"
+refusing all remuneration therefor, lest his pencil might catch the
+taint of avarice; a Titian, spending seven years on the "Last Supper;"
+a Stephenson, working fifteen years on a locomotive; a Watt, twenty
+years on a condensing engine; a Lady Franklin, working incessantly for
+twelve long years to rescue her husband from the polar seas; a Thurlow
+Weed, walking two miles through the snow with rags tied around his feet
+for shoes, to borrow the history of the French Revolution, and eagerly
+devouring it before the sap-bush fire; a Milton, elaborating "Paradise
+Lost" in a world he could not see, and then selling it for fifteen
+pounds; a Thackeray, struggling on cheerfully after his "Vanity Fair"
+was refused by a dozen publishers; a Balzac, toiling and waiting in a
+lonely garret, whom neither poverty, debt, nor hunger could discourage
+or intimidate; not daunted by privations, not hindered by
+discouragements.  It wants men who can work and wait.
+
+When a young lawyer Daniel Webster once looked in vain through all the
+law libraries near him, and then ordered at an expense of fifty dollars
+the necessary books, to obtain authorities and precedents in a case in
+which his client was a poor blacksmith.  He won his cause, but, on
+account of the poverty of his client, only charged fifteen dollars,
+thus losing heavily on the books bought, to say nothing of his time.
+Years after, as he was passing through New York city, he was consulted
+by Aaron Burr on an important but puzzling case then pending before the
+Supreme Court.  He saw in a moment that it was just like the
+blacksmith's case, an intricate question of title, which he had solved
+so thoroughly that it was to him now as simple as the multiplication
+table.  Going back to the time of Charles II. he gave the law and
+precedents involved with such readiness and accuracy of sequence that
+Burr asked in great surprise if he had been consulted before in the
+case.  "Most certainly not," he replied, "I never heard of your case
+till this evening."  "Very well," said Burr, "proceed," and, when he
+had finished, Webster received a fee that paid him liberally for all
+the time and trouble he had spent for his early client.
+
+Albert Bierstadt first crossed the Rocky Mountains with a band of
+pioneers in 1859, making sketches for the paintings of western scenes
+for which he had become famous.  As he followed the trail to Pike's
+Peak, he gazed in wonder upon the enormous herds of buffaloes which
+dotted the plains as far as the eye could reach, and thought of the
+time when they would have disappeared before the march of civilization.
+The thought haunted him and found its final embodiment in "The Last of
+the Buffaloes" in 1890.  To perfect this great work he had spent twenty
+years.
+
+Everything which endures, which will stand the test of time, must have
+a deep, solid foundation.  In Rome the foundation is often the most
+expensive part of an edifice, so deep must they dig to build on the
+living rock.
+
+Fifty feet of Bunker Hill Monument is under ground; unseen and
+unappreciated by those who tread about that historic shaft, but it is
+this foundation, apparently thrown away, which enables it to stand
+upright, true to the plumb-line through all the tempests that lash its
+granite sides.  A large part of every successful life must be spent in
+laying foundation stones under ground.  Success is the child of
+drudgery and perseverance and depends upon "knowing how long it takes
+to succeed."  Havelock joined the army at twenty-eight, and for
+thirty-four years worked and waited for his opportunity; conscious of
+his power, "fretting as a subaltern while he saw drunkards and fools
+put above his head."
+
+But during all these years he was fitting himself to lead that
+marvelous march to Lucknow.
+
+It was many years of drudgery and reading a thousand volumes that
+enabled George Eliot to get fifty thousand dollars for "Daniel
+Deronda."  How came writers to be famous?  By writing for years without
+any pay at all; by writing hundreds of pages for mere practice work; by
+working like galley-slaves at literature for half a lifetime.  It was
+working and waiting many long and weary years that put one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand dollars into "The Angelus."  Millet's first
+attempts were mere daubs, the later were worth fortunes.  Schiller
+"never could get done."  Dante sees himself "growing lean over his
+Divine Comedy."  It is working and waiting that gives perfection.
+
+"I do not remember," said Beecher, "a book in all the depths of
+learning, nor a scrap in literature, nor a work in all the schools of
+art, from which its author has derived a permanent renown, that is not
+known to have been long and patiently elaborated."
+
+Endurance is a much better test of character than any one act of
+heroism, however noble.
+
+The pianist Thalberg said he never ventured to perform one of his
+celebrated pieces in public until he had played it at least fifteen
+hundred times.  He laid no claim whatever to genius; he said it was all
+a question of hard work.  The accomplishments of such industry, such
+perseverance, would put to shame many a man who claims genius.
+
+Before Edmund Kean would consent to appear in that character which he
+acted with such consummate skill, The Gentleman Villain, he practiced
+constantly before a glass, studying expression for a year and a half.
+When he appeared upon the stage, Byron, who went to see him with Moore,
+said he never looked upon so fearful and wicked a face.  As the great
+actor went on to delineate the terrible consequences of sin, Byron
+fainted.
+
+"For years I was in my place of business by sunrise," said a wealthy
+banker who had begun without a dollar, "and often I did not leave it
+for fifteen or eighteen hours."
+
+_Festina lente_--hasten slowly--is a good Latin motto.  Patience, it is
+said, changes the mulberry leaf to satin.  The giant oak on the
+hillside was detained months or years in its upward growth while its
+roots took a great turn around some rock, in order to gain a hold by
+which the tree was anchored to withstand the storms of centuries.  Da
+Vinci spent four years on the head of Mona Lisa, perhaps the most
+beautiful ever painted, but he left therein, an artistic thought for
+all time.
+
+Said Captain Bingham: "You can have no idea of the wonderful machine
+that the German army is and how well it is prepared for war.  A chart
+is made out which shows just what must be done in the case of wars with
+the different nations.  And every officer's place in the scheme is laid
+out beforehand.  There is a schedule of trains which will supersede all
+other schedules the moment war is declared, and this is so arranged
+that the commander of the army here could telegraph to any officer to
+take such a train and go to such a place at a moment's notice.  When
+the Franco-Prussian war was declared, Von Moltke was awakened at
+midnight and told of the fact.  He said coolly to the official who
+aroused him, 'Go to pigeonhole No. ---- in my safe and take a paper
+from it and telegraph as there directed to the different troops of the
+empire.'  He then turned over and went to sleep and awoke at his usual
+hour in the morning.  Every one else in Berlin was excited about the
+war, but Von Moltke took his morning walk as usual, and a friend who
+met him said, 'General, you seem to be taking it very easy.  Aren't you
+afraid of the situation?  I should think you would be busy.'  'Ah,'
+replied Von Moltke, 'all of my work for this time has been done long
+beforehand and everything that can be done now has been done.'"
+
+That is done soon enough which is done well.  Soon ripe, soon rotten.
+He that would enjoy the fruit must not gather the flower.  He who is
+impatient to become his own master is more likely to become his own
+slave.  Better believe yourself a dunce and work away than a genius and
+be idle.  One year of trained thinking is worth more than a whole
+college course of mental absorption of a vast series of undigested
+facts.  The facility with which the world swallows up the ordinary
+college graduate who thought he was going to dazzle mankind should bid
+you pause and reflect.  But just as certainly as man was created not to
+crawl on all fours in the depths of primeval forests, but to develop
+his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education,
+and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,--man,
+in the highest sense of the word.  Ignorance is not simply the negation
+of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind.  "One step in
+knowledge," says Bulwer, "is one step from sin; one step from sin is
+one step nearer to Heaven."
+
+A learned clergyman was thus accosted by an illiterate preacher who
+despised education: "Sir, you have been to college, I presume?"  "Yes,
+sir," was the reply.  "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord
+opened my mouth without any learning."  "A similar event," retorted the
+clergyman, "happened in Balaam's time."
+
+"If a cloth were drawn around the eyes of Praxiteles' statue of Love,"
+says Bulwer, "the face looked grave and sad; but as the bandage was
+removed, a beautiful smile would overspread the countenance.  Even so
+does the removal of the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the mind
+bring radiant happiness to the heart of man."
+
+A young man just graduated told the President of Trinity College that
+he had completed his education, and had come to say good-by.  "Indeed,"
+said the President, "I have just begun my education."
+
+Many an extraordinary man has been made out of a very ordinary boy; but
+in order to accomplish this we must begin with him while he is young.
+It is simply astonishing what training will do for a rough, uncouth,
+and even dull lad, if he has good material in him, and comes under the
+tutelage of a skilled educator before his habits have become confirmed.
+Even a few weeks' or months' drill of the rawest and roughest recruits
+in the late Civil War so straightened and dignified stooping and
+uncouth soldiers, and made them so manly, erect, and courteous in their
+bearing, that their own friends scarcely knew them.  If this change is
+so marked in the youth who has grown to maturity, what a miracle is
+possible in the lad who is taken early and put under a course of drill
+and systematic training, both physical, mental, and moral.  How many a
+man who is now in the penitentiary, in the poorhouse, or among the
+tramps, or living out a miserable existence in the slums of our cities,
+bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering
+within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man,
+an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he
+only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under efficient
+and systematic training.
+
+Laziness begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains.  The more business
+a man has, the more he can do, for be learns to economize his time.
+
+The industry that acquired riches, according to a wise teacher, the
+patience that is required in obtaining them, the reserved self-control,
+the measuring of values, the sympathy felt for fellow-toilers, the
+knowledge of what a dollar costs to the average man, the memory of
+it--all these things are preservative.  But woe to the young farmer who
+hates farming; does not like sowing and reaping; is impatient with the
+dilatory and slow path to a small though secure fortune in the
+neighborhood where he was born, and comes to the city, hoping to become
+suddenly rich, thinking that he can break into the palace of wealth and
+rob it of its golden treasures!
+
+Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce
+an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for
+the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.'  I
+said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument
+responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.'  It was enough to drive one mad.  But
+I held firm, and I have succeeded."
+
+The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and
+hard work.
+
+Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of
+Massachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience
+which can work and wait.  His only inheritance was poverty and hard
+work.  But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a
+determination to get on in the world.  He braided straw to get money to
+buy books which his soul thirsted for.
+
+To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a
+piano.  Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and
+fortune.  Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared
+with accuracy and knowledge.  He could afford to work and wait, for
+quality, not quantity, was his aim.  Fifty years ago the piano was a
+miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day.
+Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the
+fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the
+player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve
+its purity and truthfulness of tone.  And he strove patiently and
+persistently till he succeeded.
+
+"Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no
+idle dream, but a solemn reality," said Carlyle.  "It is thy own.  It
+is all thou hast to comfort eternity with.  Work then like a star,
+unhasting, yet unresting."
+
+Gladstone was bound to win; although he had spent many years of
+preparation for his life work, in spite of the consciousness of
+marvelous natural endowments which would have been deemed sufficient by
+many young men, and notwithstanding he had gained the coveted prize of
+a seat in Parliament, yet he decided to make himself master of the
+situation; and amid all his public and private duties, he not only
+spent eleven terms more in the study of the law, but he studied Greek
+constantly and read every well written book or paper he could obtain,
+so determined was he that his life should be rounded out to its fullest
+measure, and that his mind should have broad and liberal culture.
+
+Emperor William I. was not a genius, but the secret of his power lay in
+tireless perseverance.  A friend says of him, "When I passed the palace
+at Berlin night after night, however late, I always saw that grand
+imperial figure standing beside the green lamp, and I used to say to
+myself, 'That is how the imperial crown of Germany was won.'"
+
+Ole Bull said, "If I practice one day, I can see the result.  If I
+practice two days my friends can see it; if I practice three days the
+great public can see it."
+
+The habit of seizing every bit of knowledge, no matter how
+insignificant it may seem at the time, every opportunity, every
+occasion, and grinding them all up into experience, cannot be
+overestimated.  You will find use for all of it.  Webster once repeated
+an anecdote with effect which he heard fourteen years before, and which
+he had not thought of in the mean time.  It exactly fitted the
+occasion.  "It is an ill mason that rejects any stone."
+
+Webster was once urged to speak on a subject of great importance, but
+refused, saying he was very busy and had no time to master the subject.
+"But," replied his friend, "a very few words from you would do much to
+awaken public attention to it."  Webster replied, "If there be so much
+weight in my words, it is because I do not allow myself to speak on any
+subject until my mind is imbued with it."  On one occasion Webster made
+a remarkable speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, when
+a book was presented to him, but after he had gone, his "impromptu"
+speech, carefully written out, was found in the book which he had
+forgotten to take away.
+
+Demosthenes was once urged to speak on a great and sudden emergency,
+but replied, "I am not prepared."  In fact, it was thought by many that
+Demosthenes did not possess any genius whatever, because he never
+allowed himself to speak on any subject without thorough preparation.
+In any meeting or assembly, when called upon, he would never rise, even
+to make remarks, it was said, without previously preparing himself.
+
+Alexander Hamilton said, "Men give me credit for genius.  All the
+genius I have lies just in this: when I have a subject in hand I study
+it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  I explore it in all its
+bearings.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.  Then the effort which I
+make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius; it is the
+fruit of labor and thought."  The law of labor is equally binding on
+genius and mediocrity.
+
+Are the results so distant that you delay the preparation in the hope
+that fortuitous good luck may make it unnecessary?  As well might the
+husbandman delay sowing his seed until the spring and summer are past
+and the ground hardened by the frosts of a rigorous winter.  As well
+might one who is desirous of enjoying firm health inoculate his system
+with the seeds of disease, and expect at such time as he may see fit to
+recover from its effects, and banish the malady.  Nelaton, the great
+surgeon, said that if he had four minutes in which to perform an
+operation, on which a life depended, he would take one minute to
+consider how best to do it.
+
+"Many men," says Longfellow, "do not allow their principles to take
+root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do flowers they
+have planted, to see if they are growing."  We must not only work, but
+wait.
+
+"The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his
+mustache and boots and shiny hat, of getting along nicely and easily
+during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast
+horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the
+business and make a man of himself, because he will not join in wasting
+his time in dissipation, will see the day, if his useless life is not
+earlier blasted by vicious indulgences, when he will be glad to accept
+a situation from his fellow-clerk whom he now ridicules and affects to
+despise, when the latter shall stand in the firm, dispensing benefits
+and acquiring fortune."
+
+"I have been watching the careers of young men by the thousand in this
+busy city of New York for over thirty years," said Dr. Cuyler, "and I
+find that the chief difference between the successful and the failures
+lies in the single element of staying power.  Permanent success is
+oftener won by holding on than by sudden dash, however brilliant.  The
+easily discouraged, who are pushed back by a straw, are all the time
+dropping to the rear--to perish or to be carried along on the stretcher
+of charity.  They who understand and practice Abraham Lincoln's homely
+maxim of 'pegging away' have achieved the solidest success."
+
+"When a man has done his work," says Ruskin, "and nothing can any way
+be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest
+with his fate if he will, but what excuse can you find for willfulness
+of thought at the very lime when every crisis of fortune hangs on your
+decisions?  A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home
+forever depends on the chances or the passions of the hour!  A youth
+thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity
+of a moment!  A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a
+foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a foundation
+of life or death!  Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than
+now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly
+thoughtless, his deathbed.  Nothing should ever be left to be done
+there."
+
+The Duke of Wellington became so discouraged because he did not advance
+in the army that he applied for a much inferior position in the customs
+department, but was refused.  Napoleon had applied for every vacant
+position for seven years before he was recognized, but meanwhile he
+studied with all his might, supplementing what was considered a
+thorough military education by researches and reflections which in
+later years enabled him easily to teach the art of war to veterans who
+had never dreamed of his novel combinations.
+
+Reserves which carry us through great emergencies are the result of
+long working and long waiting.  Collyer declares that reserves mean to
+a man also achievement,--"the power to do the grandest thing possible
+to your nature when you feel you must, or some precious thing will be
+lost,--to do well always, but best in the crisis on which all things
+turn; to stand the strain of a long fight, and still find you have
+something left, and so to never know you are beaten, because you never
+are beaten."  Every defeat is a Waterloo to him who has no reserves.
+
+He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in
+preparation and self-culture.  "Not for school, but for life, we
+learn;" and our habits--of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness,
+or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality--are the things
+acquired most readily and longest retained.
+
+"One who reads the chronicles of discoveries is struck with the
+prominent part that accident has played in such annals.  For some of
+the most useful processes and machinery the world is indebted to
+apparently chance occurrences.  Inventors in search of one object have
+failed in their quest, but have stumbled on something more valuable
+than that for which they were looking.  Saul is not the only man who
+has gone in search of asses and found a kingdom.  Astrologers sought to
+read from the heavens the fate of men and the fortune of nations, and
+they led to a knowledge of astronomy.  Alchemists were seeking for the
+philosopher's stone, and from their efforts sprung the science of
+chemistry.  Men explored the heavens for something to explain
+irregularities in the movements of the planets, and discovered a star
+other than the one for which they were looking.  A careless glance at
+such facts might encourage the delusion that aimless straying in
+bypaths is quite as likely to be rewarded as is the steady pressing
+forward, with fixed purpose, towards some definite goal.
+
+"But it is to be remembered that the men who made the accidental
+discoveries were men who were looking for something.  The unexpected
+achievement was but the return for the toil after what was attained.
+Others might have encountered the same facts, but only the eye made
+eager by the strain of long watching would be quick to note the
+meaning.  If vain search for hidden treasure has no other recompense,
+it at least gives ability to detect the first gleam of the true metal.
+Men may wake at times surprised to find themselves famous, but it was
+the work they did before going to sleep, and not the slumber, that gave
+the eminence.  When the ledge has been drilled and loaded and the
+proper connections have been made, a child's touch on the electric key
+may be enough to annihilate the obstacle, but without the long
+preparation the pressure of a giant's hand would be without effect.
+
+"In the search for truth and the shaping of character the principle
+remains the same as in science and literature.  Trivial causes are
+followed by wonderful results, but it is only the merchantman who is on
+the watch for goodly pearls who is represented as finding the pearl of
+great price."
+
+To vary the language of another, the three great essentials to success
+in mental and physical labor are Practice, Patience, and Perseverance,
+but the greatest of these is Perseverance.
+
+  Let us, then, be up and doing,
+    With a heart for any fate;
+  Still achieving, still pursuing,
+    Learn to labor and to wait.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CLEAR GRIT.
+
+  I shall show the cinders of my spirits
+    Through the ashes of my chance.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  What though ten thousand faint,
+    Desert, or yield, or in weak terror flee!
+  Heed not the panic of the multitude;
+    Thine be the captain's watchword,--Victory!
+        HORATIUS BONAR.
+
+      Better to stem with heart and hand
+    The roaring tide of life, than lie,
+      Unmindful, on its flowery strand,
+    Of God's occasions drifting by!
+      Better with naked nerve to hear
+    The needles of this goading air,
+  Than in the lap of sensual ease forego
+  The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know.
+        WHITTIER.
+
+  Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me,
+  I have a soul that, like an ample shield,
+  Can take in all, and verge enough for more.
+        DRYDEN.
+
+  There's a brave fellow!  There's a man of pluck!
+  A man who's not afraid to say his say,
+  Though a whole town's against him.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we
+fall.--GOLDSMITH.
+
+  Attempt the end and never stand to doubt;
+  Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.
+        HERRICK.
+
+The barriers are not yet erected which shall say to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther."--BEETHOVEN.
+
+
+"Friends and comrades," said Pizarro, as he turned toward the south,
+after tracing with his sword upon the sand a line from east to west,
+"on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm,
+desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure.  There lies Peru
+with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty.  Choose, each man, what
+best becomes a brave Castilian.  For my part, I go to the south."  So
+saying, he crossed the line and was followed by thirteen Spaniards in
+armor.  Thus, on the little island of Gallo in the Pacific, when his
+men were clamoring to return to Panama, did Pizarro and his few
+volunteers resolve to stake their lives upon the success of a desperate
+crusade against the powerful empire of the Incas.  At the time they had
+not even a vessel to transport them to the country they wished to
+conquer.  Is it necessary to add that all difficulties yielded at last
+to such resolute determination?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON]
+
+"Old Hickory."
+
+  "Stick to your aim: the mongrel's hold will slip,
+  But only crowbars loose the bull-dog's grip."
+
+"The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blenches, the thought
+that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+  "Perseverance is a Roman virtue,
+  That wins each godlike act, and plucks success
+  E'en from the spear-proof crest of rugged danger."
+
+
+At a time when abolitionists were dangerously unpopular, a crowd of
+brawny Cape Cod fishermen had made such riotous demonstrations that all
+the speakers announced, except Stephen Foster and Lucy Stone, had fled
+from an open-air platform.  "You had better run, Stephen," said she,
+"they are coming."  "But who will take care of you?" asked Foster.
+"This gentleman will take care of me," she replied, calmly laying her
+hand within the arm of a burly rioter with a club, who had just sprung
+upon the platform.  "Wh--what did you say?" stammered the astonished
+rowdy, as he looked at the little woman; "yes, I'll take care of you,
+and no one shall touch a hair of your head."  With this he forced a way
+for her through the crowd, and, at her earnest request, placed her upon
+a stump and stood guard with his club while she delivered an address so
+effective that the audience offered no further violence, and even took
+up a collection of twenty dollars to repay Mr. Foster for the damage
+his clothes had received when the riot was at its height.
+
+"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till
+it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer," said Harriet
+Beecher Stowe, "never give up then, for that's just the place and time
+that the tide'll turn."
+
+Charles Sumner said, "Three things are necessary: first, backbone;
+second, backbone; third, backbone."
+
+While digging among the ruins of Pompeii, which was buried by the dust
+and ashes from an eruption of Vesuvius, A. D. 79, the workmen found the
+skeleton of a Roman soldier in the sentry-box at one of the city's
+gates.  He might have found safety under sheltering rocks close by;
+but, in the face of certain death, he had remained at his post, a mute
+witness to the thorough discipline, the ceaseless vigilance and
+fidelity which made the Roman legionaries masters of the known world.
+Bulwer, describing the flight of a party amid the dust, and ashes, and
+streams of boiling water, and huge hurtling fragments of scoria, and
+gusty winds, and lurid lightnings, continues: "The air was now still
+for a few minutes; the lamp from the gate streamed out far and clear;
+the fugitives hurried on.  They gained the gate.  They passed by the
+Roman sentry.  The lightning flashed over his livid face and polished
+helmet, but his stern features were composed even in their awe!  He
+remained erect and motionless at his post.  That hour itself had not
+animated the machine of the ruthless majesty of Rome into the reasoning
+and self-acting man.  There he stood amidst the crashing elements; he
+had not received the permission to desert his station and escape."
+
+The world admires the man who never flinches from unexpected
+difficulties, who calmly, patiently, and courageously grapples with his
+fate, who dies, if need be, at his post.
+
+"Clear grit" always commands respect.  It is that quality which
+achieves, and everybody admires achievement.  In the strife of parties
+and principles, backbone without brains will carry against brains
+without backbone.  "A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no
+match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong."  You
+cannot, by tying an opinion to a man's tongue, make him the
+representative of that opinion; at the close of any battle for
+principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the
+wounded, but among the missing.
+
+The "London Times" was an insignificant sheet published by Mr. Walter
+and was steadily losing money.  John Walter, Jr., then only
+twenty-seven years old, begged his father to give him full control of
+the paper.  After many misgivings, the father finally consented.  The
+young journalist began to remodel the establishment and to introduce
+new ideas everywhere.  The paper had not attempted to mould public
+opinion, and had no individuality or character of its own.  The
+audacious young editor boldly attacked every wrong, even the
+government, when he thought it corrupt.  Thereupon the public customs,
+printing, and the government advertisements were withdrawn.  The father
+was in utter dismay.  The son he was sure would ruin the paper and
+himself.  But no remonstrance could swerve him from his purpose, to
+give the world a great journal which should have weight, character,
+individuality, and independence.
+
+The public soon saw that a new power stood behind the "Times"; that its
+articles meant business; that new life and new blood and new ideas had
+been infused into the insignificant sheet; that a man with brains and
+push and tenacity of purpose stood at the helm,--a man who could make a
+way when he could not find one.  Among other new features foreign
+dispatches were introduced, and they appeared in the "Times" several
+days before their appearance in the government organs.  The "leading
+article" also was introduced to stay.  But the aggressive editor
+antagonized the government, and his foreign dispatches were all stopped
+at the outpost, while those of the ministerial journalists were allowed
+to proceed.  But nothing could daunt this resolute young spirit.  At
+enormous expense he employed special couriers.  Every obstacle put in
+his way, and all opposition from the government, only added to his
+determination to succeed.  Enterprise, push, grit were behind the
+"Times," and nothing could stay its progress.  Walter was the soul of
+the paper, and his personality pervaded every detail.  In those days
+only three hundred copies of the "Times" could be struck off in an hour
+by the best presses, and Walter had duplicate and even triplicate types
+set.  Then he set his brain to work, and finally the Walter Press,
+throwing off 17,000 copies, both sides printed, per hour, was the
+result.  It was the 29th of November, 1814, that the first steam
+printed paper was given to the world.  Walter's tenacity of purpose was
+remarkable.  He shrank from no undertaking, and neglected no detail.
+
+"Mean natures always feel a sort of terror before great natures, and
+many a base thought has been unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld,
+through the fear inspired by the rebuking presence of one noble man."
+As a rule, pure grit, character, has the right of way.  In the presence
+of men permeated with grit and sound in character, meanness and
+baseness slink out of sight.  Mean men are uncomfortable, dishonesty
+trembles, hypocrisy is uncertain.
+
+Lincoln, being asked by an anxious visitor what he would do after three
+or four years if the rebellion was not subdued, replied: "Oh, there is
+no alternative but to keep pegging away."
+
+"It is in me and it shall come out," said Sheridan, when told that he
+would never make an orator, as he had failed in his first speech in
+Parliament.  He became known as one of the foremost orators of his day.
+
+When a boy Henry Clay was very bashful and diffident, and scarcely
+dared recite before his class at school, but he determined to become an
+orator.  So he committed speeches and recited them in the cornfields,
+or in the barn with the horse and cows for an audience.
+
+Look at Garrison reading this advertisement in a Southern paper: "Five
+thousand dollars will be paid for the head of W. L. Garrison by the
+Governor of Georgia."  Behold him again; a broadcloth mob is leading
+him through the streets of Boston by a rope.  He is hurried to jail.
+See him return calmly and unflinchingly to his work, beginning at the
+point at which he was interrupted.  Note this heading in the
+"Liberator," the type of which he set himself in an attic on State
+Street, in Boston: "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not
+excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."  Was
+Garrison heard?  Ask a race set free largely by his efforts.  Even the
+gallows erected in front of his own door did not daunt him.  He held
+the ear of an unwilling world with that burning word "freedom," which
+was destined never to cease its vibrations until it had breathed its
+sweet secret to the last slave.
+
+If impossibilities ever exist, popularly speaking, they ought to have
+been found somewhere between the birth and the death of Kitto, that
+deaf pauper and master of Oriental learning.  But Kitto did not find
+them there.  In the presence of his decision and imperial energy they
+melted away.  Kitto begged his father to take him out of the poorhouse,
+even if he had to subsist like the Hottentots.  He told him that he
+would sell his books and pawn his handkerchief, by which he thought he
+could raise about twelve shillings.  He said he could live upon
+blackberries, nuts, and field turnips, and was willing to sleep on a
+hayrick.  Here was real grit.  What were impossibilities to such a
+resolute will?  Patrick Henry voiced that decision which characterized
+the great men of the Revolution when he said, "Is life so dear, or
+peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
+Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others may take; but
+as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
+
+Grit is a permanent, solid quality, which enters into the very
+structure, the very tissues of the constitution.  A weak man, a
+wavering, irresolute man, may be "spunky" upon occasion, he may be
+"plucky" in an emergency; but pure "grit" is a part of the very
+character of strong men alone.  Lord Erskine was a plucky man; he even
+had flashes of heroism, and when he was with weaker men, he was thought
+to have nerve and even grit; but when he entered the House of Commons,
+although a hero at the bar, the imperiousness, the audacious scorn, and
+the intellectual supremacy of Pitt disturbed his equanimity and exposed
+the weak places in his armor.  In Pitt's commanding presence he lost
+his equilibrium.  His individuality seemed off its centre; he felt
+fluttered, weak, and uneasy.
+
+Many of our generals in the late war exhibited heroism.  They were
+"plucky," and often displayed great determination, but Grant had pure
+"grit" in the most concentrated form.  He could not be moved from his
+base; he was self-centred, immovable.  "If you try to wheedle out of
+him his plans for a campaign, he stolidly smokes; if you call him an
+imbecile and a blunderer, he blandly lights another cigar; if you
+praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff
+from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the presidency,
+it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales
+the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises.
+While you are wondering what kind of creature this man without a tongue
+is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid
+victory, proving that behind the cigar, and behind the face discharged
+of all tell-tale expression, is the best brain to plan and the
+strongest heart to dare among the generals of the Republic."
+
+Demosthenes was a man who could rise to sublime heights of heroism, but
+his bravery was not his normal condition and depended upon his genius
+being aroused.
+
+He had "pluck" and "spunk" on occasions, but Lincoln had pure "grit."
+When the illustrated papers everywhere were caricaturing him, when no
+epithet seemed too harsh to heap upon him, when his methods were
+criticised by his own party, and the generals in the war were
+denouncing his "foolish" confidence in Grant, and delegations were
+waiting upon him to ask for that general's removal, the great President
+sat with crossed legs, and was reminded of a story.
+
+Lincoln and Grant both had that rare nerve which cares not for
+ridicule, is not swerved by public clamor, can bear abuse and hatred.
+There is a mighty force in truth and in the sublime conviction and
+supreme self-confidence behind it, in the knowledge that truth is
+mighty and the conviction and confidence that it will prevail.
+
+Pure grit is that element of character which enables a man to clutch
+his aim with an iron grip, and keep the needle of his purpose pointing
+to the star of his hope.  Through sunshine and storm, through hurricane
+and tempest, through sleet and rain, with a leaky ship, with a crew in
+mutiny, it perseveres; in fact, nothing but death can subdue it, and it
+dies still struggling.
+
+The man of grit carries in his very presence a power which controls and
+commands.  He is spared the necessity of declaring himself, for his
+grit speaks in his every act.  It does not come by fits and starts, it
+is a part of his very life.  It inspires a sublime audacity and a
+heroic courage.  Many of the failures of life are due to the want of
+grit or business nerve.  It is unfortunate for a young man to start out
+in business life with a weak, yielding disposition, with no resolution
+or backbone to mark his own course and stick to it, with no ability to
+say "No" with an emphasis, obliging this man by investing in hopeless
+speculation, and rather than offend a friend, indorsing a questionable
+note.
+
+A little boy was asked how he learned to skate.  "Oh, by getting up
+every time I fell down," he replied.
+
+Whipple tells a story of Mass�na which illustrates the masterful
+purpose that plucks victory out of the jaws of defeat.  "After the
+defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his
+beaten army depended on the character of Mass�na, to whom the Emperor
+dispatched a messenger, telling him to keep his position for two hours
+longer at Aspern.  This order, couched in the form of a request,
+required almost an impossibility; but Napoleon knew the indomitable
+tenacity of the man to whom he gave it.  The messenger found Mass�na
+seated on a heap of rubbish, his eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by
+his unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, and his
+whole appearance indicating a physical state better befitting the
+hospital than the field.  But that steadfast soul seemed altogether
+unaffected by bodily prostration; half dead as he was with fatigue, he
+rose painfully and said, 'Tell the Emperor that I will hold out for two
+hours.'  And he kept his word."
+
+"Often defeated in battle," said Macaulay of Alexander the Great, "he
+was always successful in war."  He might have said the same of
+Washington, and, with appropriate changes, of all who win great
+triumphs of any kind.
+
+In the battle of Marengo, the Austrians considered the day won.  The
+French army was inferior in numbers, and had given way.  The Austrian
+army extended its wings on the right and on the left, to follow up the
+French.  Then, though the French themselves thought the battle lost,
+and the Austrians were confident it was won, Napoleon gave the command
+to charge; and, the trumpet's blast being given, the Old Guard charged
+down into the weakened centre of the enemy, cut it in two, rolled the
+two wings up on either side, and the battle was won for France.
+
+"Never despair," says Burke, "but if you do, work on in despair."
+
+Once when Marshal Ney was going into battle, looking down at his knees
+which were smiting together, he said, "You may well shake; you would
+shake worse yet if you knew where I am going to take you."
+
+It is victory after victory with the soldier, lesson after lesson with
+the scholar, blow after blow with the laborer, crop after crop with the
+farmer, picture after picture with the painter, and mile after mile
+with the traveler, that secures what all so much desire--SUCCESS.
+
+A promising Harvard student was stricken with paralysis of both legs.
+Physicians said there was no hope for him.  The lad determined to
+continue his college studies.  The examiners heard him at his bedside,
+and in four years he took his degree.  He resolved to make a critical
+study of Dante, to do which he had to learn Italian and German.  He
+persevered in spite of repeated attacks of illness and partial loss of
+sight.  He was competing for the university prize.  Think of the
+paralytic lad, helpless in bed, competing for a prize, fighting death
+inch by inch.  What a lesson!  Before his book was published or the
+prize awarded, the brave student died, but the book was successful.  He
+meant that his life should not be a burden or a failure, and he was not
+only graduated from the best college in America, but competed
+successfully for the university prize, and made a valuable contribution
+to literature.
+
+Professor L. T. Townsend, the famous author of "Credo," is another
+triumph of grit over environment.  He had a hard struggle as a boy, but
+succeeded in working his way through Amherst College, living on
+forty-five cents a week.
+
+Orange Judd was a remarkable example of success through grit.  He
+earned corn by working for farmers, carried it on his back to mill,
+brought back the meal to his room, cooked it himself, milked cows for
+his pint of milk per day, and lived on mush and milk for months
+together.  He worked his way through Wesleyan University, and took a
+three years' post-graduate course at Yale.
+
+Congressman William W. Crapo, while working his way through college,
+being too poor to buy a dictionary, actually copied one, walking from
+his home in the village of Dartmouth, Mass., to New Bedford to
+replenish his store of words and definitions from the town library.
+
+Oh, the triumphs of this indomitable spirit of the conqueror!  This it
+was that enabled Franklin to dine on a small loaf in the
+printing-office with a book in his hand.  It helped Locke to live on
+bread and water in a Dutch garret.  It enabled Gideon Lee to go
+barefoot in the snow, half starved and thinly clad.  It sustained
+Lincoln and Garfield on their hard journeys from the log cabin to the
+White House.
+
+President Chadbourne put grit in place of his lost lung, and worked
+thirty-five years after his funeral had been planned.
+
+Lord Cavanagh put grit in the place of arms and legs, and went to
+Parliament in spite of his deformity.
+
+Henry Fawcett put grit in place of eyesight, and became the greatest
+Postmaster-General England ever had.
+
+Prescott also put grit in place of eyesight, and became one of
+America's greatest historians.  Francis Parkman put grit in place of
+health and eyesight, and became the greatest historian of America in
+his line.  Thousands of men have put grit in place of health, eyes,
+ears, hands, legs, and yet have achieved marvelous success.  Indeed,
+most of the great things of the world have been accomplished by grit
+and pluck.  You cannot keep a man down who has these qualities.  He
+will make stepping-stones out of his stumbling-blocks, and lift himself
+to success.
+
+At fifty, Barnum was a ruined man, owing thousands more than he
+possessed, yet he resolutely resumed business once more, fairly
+wringing success from adverse fortune, and paying his notes at the same
+time.  Again and again he was ruined, but phoenix-like, he rose
+repeatedly from the ashes of his misfortune each time more determined
+than before.
+
+It was the last three days of the first voyage of Columbus that told.
+All his years of struggle and study would have availed nothing if he
+had yielded to the mutiny.  It was all in those three days.  But what
+days!
+
+"It is all very well," said Charles J. Fox, "to tell me that a young
+man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech.  He may go
+on, or he may be satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young
+man who has not succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on, and I
+will back that young man to do better than most of those who have
+succeeded at the first trial."
+
+Cobden broke down completely the first time he appeared on a platform
+in Manchester, and the chairman apologized for him.  But he did not
+give up speaking till every poor man in England had a larger, better,
+and cheaper loaf.
+
+See young Disraeli, sprung from a hated and persecuted race; without
+opportunity, pushing his way up through the middle classes, up through
+the upper classes, until he stands self-poised upon the topmost round
+of political and social power.  Scoffed, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed
+from the House of Commons, he simply says, "The time will come when you
+will hear me."  The time did come, and the boy with no chance swayed
+the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.
+
+One of the most remarkable examples in history is Disraeli, forcing his
+leadership upon that very party whose prejudices were deepest against
+his race, and which had an utter contempt for self-made men and
+interlopers.  Imagine England's surprise when she awoke to find this
+insignificant Hebrew actually Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was
+easily master of all the tortures supplied by the armory of rhetoric;
+he could exhaust the resources of the bitterest invective; he could
+sting Gladstone out of his self-control; he was absolute master of
+himself and his situation.  You can see that this young man intends to
+make his way in the world.  A determined audacity is in his very face.
+He is a gay fop.  Handsome, with the hated Hebrew blood in his veins,
+after three defeats in parliamentary elections he was not the least
+daunted, for he knew his day would come, as it did.  Lord Melbourne,
+the great Prime Minister, when this gay young fop was introduced to
+him, asked him what he wished to be.  "Prime Minister of England," was
+his audacious reply.
+
+One of the greatest preachers of modern times, Lacordaire, failed again
+and again.  Everybody said he would never make a preacher, but he was
+determined to succeed, and in two years from his humiliating failures
+he was preaching in Notre Dame to immense congregations.
+
+The boy Thorwaldsen, whose father died in the poor-house, and whose
+education was so scanty that he had to write his letters over many
+times before they could be posted, by his indomitable perseverance,
+tenacity, and grit, fascinated the world with the genius which neither
+his discouraging father, poverty, nor hardship could suppress.
+
+William H. Seward was given a thousand dollars by his father to go to
+college with; this was all he was to have.  The son returned at the end
+of the freshman year with extravagant habits and no money.  His father
+refused to give him more, and told him he could not stay at home.  When
+the youth found the props all taken out from under him, and that he
+must now sink or swim, he left home moneyless, returned to college,
+graduated at the head of his class, studied law, was elected Governor
+of New York, and became Lincoln's great Secretary of State during the
+Civil War.
+
+Louisa M. Alcott wrote the conclusion to "An Old-Fashioned Girl" with
+her left hand in a sling, one foot up, head aching, and no voice.  She
+proudly writes in her diary, "Twenty years ago I resolved to make the
+family independent if I could.  At forty, that is done.  Debts all
+paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable.  It
+has cost me my health, perhaps."  She earned two hundred thousand
+dollars by her pen.
+
+Mrs. Frank Leslie often refers to the time she lived in her carpetless
+attic while striving to pay her husband's obligations.  She has fought
+her way successfully through nine lawsuits, and has paid the entire
+debt.  She manages her ten publications entirely herself, signs all
+checks and money-orders, makes all contracts, looks over all proofs,
+and approves the make-up of everything before it goes to press.  She
+has developed great business ability, which no one dreamed she
+possessed.
+
+Garfield said, "If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the
+best possible substitute for it."  The triumph of industry and grit
+over low birth and iron fortune in America, this land of opportunity,
+ought to be sufficient to put to shame all grumblers over their hard
+fortune and those who attempt to excuse aimless, shiftless, successless
+men because they have no chance.
+
+The fear of ridicule and the dread of humiliation often hinder one from
+taking decisive steps when it is plainly a duty, so that courage is a
+very important element of decision.  In a New England academy a pupil
+who was engaged to assist the teacher was unable to solve a problem in
+algebra.  The class was approaching the problem, and he was mortified
+because, after many trials, he was obliged to take it to the teacher
+for solution.  The teacher returned it unsolved.  What could he do?  He
+would not confess to the class that he could not solve it, so, after
+many futile attempts, he went to a distant town to seek the assistance
+of a friend who, he believed, could do the work.  But, alas! his friend
+had gone away, and would not be back for a week.  On his way back he
+said to himself, "What a fool! am I unable to perform a problem in
+algebra, and shall I go back to my class and confess my ignorance?  I
+can solve it and I will."  He shut himself in his room, determined not
+to sleep until he had mastered the problem, and finally he won success.
+Underneath the solution he wrote, "Obtained Monday evening, September
+2, at half past eleven o'clock, after more than a dozen trials that
+have consumed more than twenty hours of time."
+
+During a winter in the war of 1812, General Jackson's troops,
+unprovided for and starving, became mutinous and were going home.  But
+the general set the example of living on acorns; then rode before the
+rebellious line and threatened with death the first mutineer that
+should try to leave.
+
+The race is not always to the swift, the battle is not always to the
+strong.  Horses are sometimes weighted or hampered in the race, and
+this is taken into account in the result.  So in the race of life the
+distance alone does not determine the prize.  We must take into
+consideration the hindrances, the weights we have carried, the
+disadvantages of education, of breeding, of training, of surroundings,
+of circumstances.  How many young men are weighted down with debt, with
+poverty, with the support of invalid parents or brothers and sisters,
+or friends?  How many are fettered with ignorance, hampered by
+inhospitable surroundings, with the opposition of parents who do not
+understand them?  How many a round boy is hindered in the race by being
+forced into a square hole?  How many are delayed in their course
+because nobody believes in them, because nobody encourages them,
+because they get no sympathy and are forever tortured for not doing
+that against which every fibre of their being protests, and every drop
+of their blood rebels?  How many have to feel their way to the goal,
+through the blindness of ignorance and lack of experience?  How many go
+bungling along from the lack of early discipline and drill in the
+vocation they have chosen?  How many have to hobble along on crutches
+because they were never taught to help themselves, but to lean upon a
+father's wealth or a mother's indulgence?  How many are weakened for
+the journey of life by self-indulgence, by dissipation, by
+"life-sappers;" how many are crippled by disease, by a weak
+constitution, by impaired eyesight or hearing?
+
+When the prizes of life shall be awarded by the Supreme Judge, who
+knows our weaknesses and frailties, the distance we have run, the
+weights we have carried, the handicaps, will all be taken into account.
+Not the distance we have run, but the obstacles we have overcome, the
+disadvantages under which we have made the race, will decide the
+prizes.  The poor wretch who has plodded along against unknown
+temptations, the poor woman who has buried her sorrows in her silent
+heart and sewed her weary way through life, those who have suffered
+abuse in silence, and who have been unrecognized or despised by their
+fellow-runners, will often receive the greater prize.
+
+  "The wise and active conquer difficulties,
+  By daring to attempt them: sloth and folly
+  Shiver and sink at sight of toil and hazard,
+  And make the impossibility they fear."
+
+  Tumble me down, and I will sit
+  Upon my ruins, smiling yet:
+  Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be
+  Patient in my necessity:
+  Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
+  Me as a fear'd infection:
+  Yet scare-crow like I'll walk, as one
+  Neglecting thy derision.
+        ROBERT HERRICK.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD.
+
+"One ruddy drop of manly blood the surging sea outweighs."
+
+"Manhood overtops all titles."
+
+The truest test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of
+cities, nor the crops; no, but the kind of man the country turns
+out.--EMERSON.
+
+Hew the block off, and get out the man.--POPE.
+
+Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the
+peerless and immortal name of Washington.--JAMES A. GARFIELD.
+
+  Better not be at all
+  Than not be noble.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+  Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
+  In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
+  Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
+        LOWELL.
+
+  Virtue alone out-builds the pyramids:
+  Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall.
+        YOUNG.
+
+  Were one so tall to touch the pole,
+    Or grasp creation in his span,
+  He must be measured by his soul,
+    The mind's the measure of the man.
+        WATTS.
+
+  We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
+    In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
+  We should count time by heart-throbs.  He most lives
+    Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
+        BAILEY.
+
+  "Good name in man or woman
+  Is the immediate jewel of their souls."
+
+But this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to
+exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in my grave.--EMERSON.
+
+
+A Moor was walking in his garden when a Spanish cavalier suddenly fell at
+his feet, pleading for concealment from pursuers who sought his life in
+revenge for the killing of a Moorish gentleman.  The Moor promised aid,
+and locked his visitor in a summer-house until night should afford
+opportunity for his escape.  Not long after the dead body of his son was
+brought home, and from the description given he knew the Spaniard was the
+murderer.  He concealed his horror, however, and at midnight unlocked the
+summer-house, saying, "Christian, the youth whom you have murdered was my
+only son.  Your crime deserves the severest punishment.  But I have
+solemnly pledged my word not to betray you, and I disdain to violate a
+rash engagement even with a cruel enemy."  Then, saddling one of his
+fleetest mules, he said, "Flee while the darkness of night conceals you.
+Your hands are polluted with blood; but God is just; and I humbly thank
+Him that my faith is unspotted, and that I have resigned judgment to Him."
+
+[Illustration: John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)]
+
+Character never dies.  As Longfellow says:--
+
+  "Were a star quenched on high,
+    For ages would its light,
+  Still traveling downward from the sky,
+    Shine on our mortal sight.
+
+  "So when a great man dies,
+    For years beyond our ken,
+  The light he leaves behind him lies
+    Upon the paths of men."
+
+
+The character of Socrates was mightier than the hemlock, and banished the
+fear and sting of death.
+
+Who can estimate the power of a well-lived life?  _Character is power_.
+Hang this motto in every school in the land, in every home, in every
+youth's room.  Mothers, engrave it on every child's heart.
+
+You cannot destroy one single atom of a Garrison, even though he were
+hanged.  The mighty force of martyrs to truth lives; the candle burns
+more brilliantly than before it was snuffed.  "No varnish or veneer of
+scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic or rhetoric, can ever make
+you a positive force in the world;" but your character can.
+
+When the statue of George Peabody, erected in one of the thoroughfares of
+London, was unveiled, the sculptor Story was asked to speak.  Twice he
+touched the statue with his hand, and said, "That is my speech.  That is
+my speech."  What could be more eloquent?  Character needs no
+recommendation.  It pleads its own cause.
+
+"Show me," said Omar the Caliph to Amru the warrior, "the sword with
+which you have fought so many battles and slain so many infidels."  "Ah!"
+replied Amru, "the sword without the arm of the master is no sharper nor
+heavier than the sword of Farezdak the poet."  So one hundred and fifty
+pounds of flesh and blood without character is of no great value.
+
+Napoleon was so much impressed with the courage and resources of Marshal
+Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I
+would give them all for Ney."
+
+In Agra, India, stands the Taj Mahal, the acme of Oriental architecture,
+said to be the most beautiful building in the world.  It was planned as a
+mausoleum for the favorite wife of Shah Jehan.  When the latter was
+deposed by his son Aurungzebe, his daughter Jahanara chose to share his
+captivity and poverty rather than the guilty glory of her brother.  On
+her tomb in Delhi were cut her dying words: "Let no rich coverlet adorn
+my grave; this grass is the best covering for the tomb of the poor in
+spirit, the humble, the transitory Jahanara, the disciple of the holy men
+of Christ, the daughter of the Emperor Shah Jehan."  Travelers who visit
+the magnificent Taj linger long by the grass-green sarcophagus in Delhi,
+but give only passing notice to the beautiful Jamma Masjid, a mausoleum
+afterwards erected in her honor.
+
+Some writer has well said that David of the throne we cannot always
+recall with pleasure, but David of the Psalms we never forget.  The
+strong, sweet faith of the latter streams like sunlight through even the
+closed windows of the soul, long after the wearied eye has turned with
+disgust from all the gilded pomp and pride of the former.
+
+Robertson says that when you have got to the lowest depths of your heart,
+you will find there not the mere desire of happiness, but a craving as
+natural to us as the desire for food,--the craving for nobler, higher
+life.
+
+"Private Benjamin Owen, ---- Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, was found
+asleep at his post while on picket duty last night.  The court-martial
+has sentenced him to be shot in twenty-four hours, as the offense
+occurred at a critical time."  "I thought when I gave Bennie to his
+country," said farmer Owen as he read the above telegram with dimming
+eyes, "that no other father in all this broad laud made so precious a
+gift.  He only slept a minute,--just one little minute,--at his post, I
+know that was all, for Bennie never dozed over a duty.  How prompt and
+trustworthy he was!  He was as tall as I, and only eighteen! and now they
+shoot him because he was found asleep when doing sentinel duty!"  Just
+then Bennie's little sister Blossom answered a tap at the door, and
+returned with a letter.  "It is from him," was all she said.
+
+
+DEAR FATHER,--For sleeping on sentinel duty I am to be shot.  At first,
+it seemed awful to me; but I have thought about it so much now that it
+has no terror.  They say that they will not bind me, nor blind me; but
+that I may meet my death like a man.  I thought, father, that it might
+have been on the battlefield, for my country, and that, when I fell, it
+would be fighting gloriously; but to be shot down like a dog for nearly
+betraying it,--to die for neglect of duty!  Oh, father, I wonder the very
+thought does not kill me!  But I shall not disgrace you.  I am going to
+write you all about it; and when I am gone, you may tell my comrades; I
+cannot now.
+
+You know I promised Jemmie Carr's mother I would look after her boy; and,
+when he fell sick, I did all I could for him.  He was not strong when he
+was ordered back into the ranks, and the day before that night I carried
+all his baggage, besides my own, on our march.  Toward night we went in
+on double-quick, and the baggage began to feel very heavy.  Everybody was
+tired; and as for Jemmie, if I had not lent him an arm now and then, he
+would have dropped by the way.  I was all tired out when we came into
+camp; and then it was Jemmie's turn to be sentry, and I could take his
+place; but I was too tired, father.  I could not have kept awake if a gun
+had been pointed at my head; but I did not know it until,--well, until it
+was too late.
+
+They tell me to-day that I have a short reprieve,--given to me by
+circumstances,--"time to write to you," our good colonel says.  Forgive
+him, father, he only does his duty; he would gladly save me if he could;
+and do not lay my death up against Jemmie.  The poor boy is
+broken-hearted, and does nothing but beg and entreat them to let him die
+in my stead.  I can't bear to think of mother and Blossom.  Comfort them,
+father!  Tell them I die as a brave boy should, and that, when the war is
+over, they will not be ashamed of me, as they must be now.  God help me:
+it is very hard to bear!  Good-by, father.  To-night, in the early
+twilight, I shall see the cows all coming home from pasture, and precious
+little Blossom standing on the back stoop, waiting for me,--but I shall
+never, never come!  God bless you all!
+
+
+"God be thanked!" said Mr. Owen reverently; "I knew Bennie was not the
+boy to sleep carelessly."
+
+Late that night a little figure glided out of the house and down the
+path.  Two hours later the conductor of the southward mail lifted her
+into a car at Mill Depot.  Next morning she was in New York, and the next
+she was admitted to the White House at Washington.  "Well, my child,"
+said the President in pleasant, cheerful tones, "what do you want so
+bright and early this morning?"  "Bennie's life, please, sir," faltered
+Blossom.  "Bennie?  Who is Bennie?" asked Mr. Lincoln.  "My brother, sir.
+They are going to shoot him for sleeping at his post," said the little
+girl.  "I remember," said the President; "it was a fatal sleep.  You see,
+child, it was a time of special danger.  Thousands of lives might have
+been lost through his culpable negligence."  "So my father said; but poor
+Bennie was so tired, sir, and Jemmie so weak.  He did the work of two,
+sir, and it was Jemmie's night, not his; but Jemmie was too tired, and
+Bennie never thought about himself,--that he was tired, too."  "What is
+that you say, child?  Come here; I do not understand."  He read Bennie's
+letter to his father, which Blossom held out, wrote a few lines, rang his
+bell, and said to the messenger who appeared, "Send this dispatch at
+once."  Then, turning to Blossom, he continued: "Go home, my child, and
+tell that father of yours, who could approve his country's sentence, even
+when it took the life of a child like that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks
+the life far too precious to be lost.  Go back, or--wait until to-morrow;
+Bennie will need a change after he has so bravely faced death, he shall
+go with you."  "God bless you, sir," said Blossom.  _Not all the queens
+are crowned._
+
+Two days later, when the young soldier came with his sister to thank the
+President, Mr. Lincoln fastened the strap of a lieutenant upon his
+shoulder, saying, "The soldier that could carry a sick comrade's baggage,
+and die for the act without complaining, deserves well of his country."
+
+When telegrams poured in announcing terrible carnage upon battlefields in
+our late war, and when President Lincoln's heart-strings were nearly
+broken over the cruel treatment of our prisoners at Andersonville, Belle
+Isle, and Libby Prison, he never once departed from his famous motto,
+"With malice toward none, with charity for all."  When it was reported
+that among those returned at Baltimore from Southern prisons, not one in
+ten could stand alone from hunger and neglect, and many were so eaten and
+covered by vermin as to resemble those pitted by smallpox, and so
+emaciated that they were living skeletons, not even these reports could
+move the great President to retaliate in kind upon the Southern prisoners.
+
+Among the slain on the battlefield at Fredericksburg was the body of a
+youth upon which was found next the heart a photograph of Lincoln.  Upon
+the back of it were these words: "God bless President Lincoln."  The
+youth had been sentenced to death for sleeping at his post, but had been
+pardoned by the President.
+
+David Dudley Field said he considered Lincoln the greatest man of his
+day.  Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others were great, each in one way, but
+Lincoln was great in many ways.  There seemed to be hidden springs of
+greatness in this man that would gush forth in the most unexpected way.
+The men about him were at a loss to name the order of his genius.  Horace
+Greeley was almost as many-sided, but was a wonderful combination of
+goodness and weakness, while Lincoln seemed strong in every way.  After
+Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "The promise
+must now be kept; I shall never recall one word."
+
+Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, bears the following testimony to the
+influence for good which Gladstone, when a school-fellow at Eton,
+exercised upon him.  "I was a thoroughly idle boy; but I was saved from
+worse things by getting to know Gladstone."  At Oxford we are told the
+effect of his example was so strong that men who followed him there ten
+years later declare "that undergraduates drank less in the forties
+because Gladstone had been so courageously abstemious in the thirties."
+
+The Rev. John Newton said, "I see in this world two heaps of human
+happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one
+heap and add it to the other, I carry a point; if as I go home a child
+has dropped a half-penny, and by giving it another I can wipe away its
+tears, I feel I have done something."
+
+A holy hermit, who had lived for six years in a cave of the Thebaid,
+fasting, praying, and performing severe penances, spending his whole life
+in trying to make himself of some account with God, that he might be sure
+of a seat in Paradise, prayed to be shown some saint greater than
+himself, in order that he might pattern after him to reach still greater
+heights of holiness.  The same night an angel came to him and said, "If
+thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanctity, strive to imitate a
+certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."  The
+hermit, much chagrined, sought the minstrel and asked him how he had
+managed to make himself so acceptable to God.  The minstrel hung down his
+head and replied, "Do not mock me, holy father; I have performed no good
+works, and I am not worthy to pray.  I only go from door to door to amuse
+people with my viol and my flute."  The hermit insisted that he must have
+done some good deeds.  The minstrel replied, "Nay, I know of nothing good
+that I have done."  "But how hast thou become a beggar?  Hast thou spent
+thy substance in riotous living?"  "Nay, not so," replied the minstrel.
+"I met a poor woman running hither and thither, distracted, because her
+husband and children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt.  I took
+her home and protected her from certain sons of Belial, for she was very
+beautiful.  I gave her all I possessed to redeem her family and returned
+her to her husband and children.  Is there any man who would not have
+done the same?"   The hermit shed tears, and said in all his life he had
+not done as much as the poor minstrel.
+
+"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor
+than silver or gold."
+
+A gentleman, traveling through West Virginia, went to a house, and
+procured food for himself and companion and their horses.  He wanted to
+make payment, but the woman was ashamed to take pay for a mere act of
+kindness.  He pressed the money upon her.  Finally she said, "If you
+don't think I'm mean, I'll take one quarter of a dollar from you, so as
+to look at it now and then, for there has been no money in this house for
+a year."
+
+Do not take the world's estimate of success.  The real height of the
+Washington Monument is not measured between the capstone and the earth,
+but includes the fifty feet of solid masonry below.  Many of the most
+successful lives are like the rivers of India which run under ground,
+unseen and unheard by the millions who tread above them.  But have these
+rivers therefore no influence?  Ask the rich harvest fields if they feel
+the flowing water beneath.  The greatest worth is never measured.  It is
+only the nearest stars whose distances we compute.  That life whose
+influence can be measured by the world's tape-line of dollars and corn is
+not worth the measuring.
+
+All the forces in nature that are the most powerful are the quietest.  We
+speak of the rolling thunder as powerful; but gravitation, which makes no
+noise, yet keeps orbs in their orbits, and the whole system in harmony,
+binding every atom in each planet to the great centre of all attraction,
+is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful.  We say the
+bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into
+splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half
+so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that
+we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable speed, strikes and
+yet is not felt, but exercises an influence so great that the earth is
+clothed with verdure through its influence, and all nature beautified and
+blessed by its ceaseless action.  The things that make no noise, make no
+pretension, may be really the strongest.  The most conclusive logic that
+a preacher uses in the pulpit will never exercise the influence that the
+consistent piety of character will exercise over all the earth.
+
+The old Sicilian story relates how Pythias, condemned to death through
+the hasty anger of Dionysius of Syracuse, asked that he might go to his
+native Greece, and arrange his affairs, promising to return before the
+time appointed for his execution.  The tyrant laughed his request to
+scorn, saying that when he was once safe out of Sicily no one would
+answer for his reappearance.  At this juncture, Damon, a friend of the
+doomed man, offered to become surety for him, and to die in his stead if
+he did not come back in time.  Dionysius was surprised, but accepted the
+proposition.  When the fatal day came, Pythias had not reached Syracuse,
+but Damon remained firm in his faith that his friend would not fail him.
+At the very last hour Pythias appeared and announced himself ready to
+die.  But such touching loyalty moved even the iron heart of Dionysius;
+accordingly he ordered both to be spared, and asked to be allowed to make
+a third partner in such a noble friendship.  It is a grander thing to be
+nobly remembered than to be nobly born.
+
+When Attila, flushed with conquest, appeared with his barbarian horde
+before the gates of Rome in 452, Pope Leo alone of all the people dared
+go forth and try to turn his wrath aside.  A single magistrate followed
+him.  The Huns were awed by the fearless majesty of the unarmed old man,
+and led him before their chief, whose respect was so great that he agreed
+not to enter the city, provided a tribute should be paid to him.
+
+Blackie thinks there is no kind of a sermon so effective as the example
+of a great man, where we see the thing done before us,--actually
+done,--the thing of which we were not even dreaming.
+
+It was said that when Washington led the American forces as commanding
+officer, it "doubled the strength of the army."
+
+When General Lee was in conversation with one of his officers in regard
+to a movement of his army, a plain farmer's boy overheard the general's
+remark that he had decided to march upon Gettysburg instead of
+Harrisburg.  The boy telegraphed this fact to Governor Curtin.  A special
+engine was sent for the boy.  "I would give my right hand," said the
+governor, "to know if this boy tells the truth."  A corporal replied,
+"Governor, I know that boy; it is impossible for him to lie; there is not
+a drop of false blood in his veins."  In fifteen minutes the Union troops
+were marching to Gettysburg, where they gained a victory.  Character is
+power.  The great thing is to be a man, to have a high purpose, a noble
+aim, to be dead in earnest, to yearn for the good and the true.
+
+"Your lordships," said Wellington in Parliament, "must all feel the high
+and honorable character of the late Sir Robert Peel.  I was long
+connected with him in public life.  We were both in the councils of our
+sovereign together, and I had long the honor to enjoy his private
+friendship.  In all the course of my acquaintance with him, I never knew
+a man in whose truth and justice I had greater confidence, or in whom I
+saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service.  In the whole
+course of my communication with him, I never knew an instance in which he
+did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the
+whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated
+anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact."
+
+"The Secretary stood alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt.  "Modern
+degeneracy had not reached him.  Original and unaccommodating, the
+features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity.  His august
+mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so
+impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be
+relieved from his superiority.  No state chicanery, no narrow system of
+vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but,
+overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his
+ambition, fame.  A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, so
+authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the
+name of Pitt through all the classes of venality.  Corruption imagined,
+indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
+the inconsistency of his policy, and much of the ruin of his victories;
+but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answered
+and refuted her.  Upon the whole, there was in this man something that
+could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+eloquence to summon mankind to united exertion, or to break the bonds of
+slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded
+authority; something that could establish or overwhelm an empire, and
+strike a blow in the world that would resound through the universe."
+
+Pitt was Paymaster-General for George II.  When a subsidy was voted a
+foreign office, it was customary for the office to claim one half per
+cent. for honorarium.  Pitt astonished the King of Sardinia by sending
+him the sum without any deduction, and further astonished him by refusing
+a present as a compliment to his integrity.  He was a poor man.
+
+Washington would take no pay as commander-in-chief of the Continental
+armies.  He would keep a strict account of his expenses; and these, he
+doubted not, would be discharged.
+
+Remember, the main business of life is not to do, but to become; an
+action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.
+
+In 1837, after George Peabody moved to London, there came a commercial
+crisis in the United States.  Many banks suspended specie payments.  Many
+mercantile houses went to the wall, and thousands more were in great
+distress.  Edward Everett said, "The great sympathetic nerve of the
+commercial world, credit, as far as the United States were concerned, was
+for the time paralyzed."  Probably not a half dozen men in Europe would
+have been listened to for a moment in the Bank of England upon the
+subject of American securities, but George Peabody was one of them.  His
+name was already a tower of strength in the commercial world.  In those
+dark days his integrity stood four-square in every business panic.
+Peabody retrieved the credit of the State of Maryland, and, it might
+almost be said, of the United States.  His character was the magic wand
+which in many a case changed almost worthless paper into gold.  Merchants
+on both sides of the Atlantic procured large advances from him, even
+before the goods consigned to him had been sold.
+
+Thackeray says, "Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's
+faces which is honored wherever presented.  You cannot help trusting such
+men; their very presence gives confidence.  There is a 'promise to pay'
+in their very faces which gives confidence, and you prefer it to another
+man's indorsement."  _Character is credit._
+
+With most people, as with most nations, "things are worth what they will
+sell for," and the dollar is mightier than the sword.  As good as gold
+has become a proverb--as though it were the highest standard of
+comparison.
+
+Themistocles, having conceived the design of transferring the government
+of Greece from the hands of the Lacedaemonians into those of the
+Athenians, kept his thoughts continually fixed on this great project.
+Being at no time very nice or scrupulous in the choice of his measures,
+he thought anything which could tend to the accomplishment of the end he
+had in view just and lawful.  Accordingly in an assembly of the people
+one day, he intimated that he had a very important design to propose; but
+he could not communicate it to the public at large, because the greatest
+secrecy was necessary to its success, and he therefore desired that they
+would appoint a person to whom he might explain himself on the subject.
+Aristides was unanimously selected by the assembly, which deferred
+entirely to his opinion.  Themistocles, taking him aside, told him that
+the design he had conceived was to burn the fleet belonging to the rest
+of the Grecian states, which then lay in a neighboring port, when Athens
+would assuredly become mistress of all Greece.  Aristides returned to the
+assembly, and declared to them that nothing could be more advantageous to
+the commonwealth than the project of Themistocles, but that, at the same
+time, nothing in the world could be more unfair.  The assembly
+unanimously declared that, since such was the case, Themistocles should
+wholly abandon his project.
+
+A tragedy by Aeschylus was once represented before the Athenians, in
+which it was said of one of the characters, "that he cared not more to be
+just than to appear so."  At these words all eyes were instantly turned
+upon Aristides as the man who, of all the Greeks, most merited that
+distinguished reputation.  Ever after he received, by universal consent,
+the surname of the Just,--a title, says Plutarch, truly royal, or rather
+truly divine.  This remarkable distinction roused envy, and envy
+prevailed so far as to procure his banishment for years, upon the unjust
+suspicion that his influence with the people was dangerous to their
+freedom.  When the sentence was passed by his countrymen, Aristides
+himself was present in the midst of them, and a stranger who stood near,
+and could not write, applied to him to write for him on his shell-ballot.
+"What name?" asked the philosopher.  "Aristides," replied the stranger.
+
+"Do you know him, then?" said Aristides, "or has he in any way injured
+you?"  "Neither," said the other, "but it is for this very thing I would
+he were condemned.  I can go nowhere but I hear of Aristides the Just."
+Aristides inquired no further, but took the shell, and wrote his name on
+it as desired.  The absence of Aristides soon dissipated the
+apprehensions which his countrymen had so idly indulged.  He was in a
+short time recalled, and for many years after took a leading part in the
+affairs of the republic, without showing the least resentment against his
+enemies, or seeking any other gratification than that of serving his
+countrymen with fidelity and honor.  The virtues of Aristides did not
+pass without reward.  He had two daughters, who were educated at the
+expense of the state, and to whom portions were allotted from the public
+treasury.
+
+The strongest proof, however, of the justice and integrity of Aristides
+is, that notwithstanding he had possessed the highest employments in the
+republic, and had the absolute disposal of its treasures, yet he died so
+poor as not to leave money enough to defray the expenses of his funeral.
+
+Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong;
+they, and not the police, guarantee the execution of the laws.  Their
+influence is the bulwark of good government.
+
+It was said of the first Emperor Alexander of Russia, that his personal
+character was equivalent to a constitution.  Of Montaigne, it was said
+that his high reputation for integrity was a better protection for him
+than a regiment of horse would have been, he being the only man among the
+French gentry who, during the wars of the Fronde, kept his castle gates
+unbarred.  There are men, fortunately for the world, who would rather be
+right than be President.
+
+Fisher Ames, while in Congress, said of Roger Sherman, of Connecticut:
+"If I am absent during a discussion of a subject, and consequently know
+not on which side to vote, when I return I always look at Roger Sherman,
+for I am sure if I vote with him, I shall vote right."
+
+Character gravitates upward, as with a celestial gravitation, while mere
+genius, without character, gravitates downward.  How often we see in
+school or college young men, who are apparently dull and even stupid,
+rise gradually and surely above others who are without character, merely
+because the former have an upward tendency in their lives, a reaching-up
+principle, which gradually but surely unfolds, and elevates them to
+positions of honor and trust.  There is something which everybody admires
+in an aspiring soul, one whose tendency is upward and onward, in spite of
+hindrances and in defiance of obstacles.
+
+We may try to stifle the voice of the mysterious angel within, but it
+always says "yes" to right actions and "no" to wrong ones.  No matter
+whether we heed it or not, no power can change its decision one iota.
+Through health, through disease, through prosperity and adversity, this
+faithful servant stands behind us in the shadow of ourselves, never
+intruding, but weighing every act we perform, every word we utter,
+pronouncing the verdict "right" or "wrong."
+
+Francis Horner, of England, was a man of whom Sydney Smith said, that
+"the ten commandments were stamped upon his forehead."  The valuable and
+peculiar light in which Horner's history is calculated to inspire every
+right-minded youth is this: he died at the age of thirty-eight, possessed
+of greater influence than any other private man, and admired, beloved,
+trusted, and deplored by all except the heartless and the base.  No
+greater homage was ever paid in Parliament to any deceased member.  How
+was this attained?  By rank?  He was the son of an Edinburgh merchant.
+By wealth?  Neither he nor any of his relatives ever had a superfluous
+sixpence.  By office?  He held but one, and that for only a few years, of
+no influence, and with very little pay.  By talents?  His were not
+splendid, and he had no genius.  Cautious and slow, his only ambition was
+to be right.  By eloquence?  He spoke in calm, good taste, without any of
+the oratory that either terrifies or seduces.  By any fascination of
+manner?  His was only correct and agreeable.  By what was it, then?
+Merely by sense, industry, good principles and a good heart, qualities
+which no well constituted mind need ever despair of attaining.  It was
+the force of his character that raised him; and this character was not
+impressed on him by nature, but formed, out of no peculiarly fine
+elements, by himself.  There were many in the House of Commons of far
+greater ability and eloquence.  But no one surpassed him in the
+combination of an adequate portion of these with moral worth.  Horner was
+born to show what moderate powers, unaided by anything whatever except
+culture and goodness, may achieve, even when these powers are displayed
+amidst the competition and jealousies of public life.
+
+"When it was reported in Paris that the great Napoleon was dead, I passed
+the Palais Royal," says a French writer, "where a public crier called,
+'Here's your account of the death of Bonaparte.'  This cry which once
+would have appalled all Europe fell perfectly flat.  I entered," he adds,
+"several caf�s, and found the same indifference,--coldness everywhere; no
+one seemed interested or troubled.  This man, who had conquered Europe
+and awed the world, had inspired neither the love nor the admiration of
+even his own countrymen.  He had impressed the world with his
+marvelousness, and had inspired astonishment but not love."
+
+Emerson says that Napoleon did all that in him lay to live and thrive
+without moral principle.  It was the nature of things, the eternal law of
+man and of the world, which balked and ruined him; and the result, in a
+million attempts of this kind, will be the same.  His was an experiment,
+under the most favorable conditions, to test the powers of intellect
+without conscience.  Never elsewhere was such a leader so endowed, and so
+weaponed; never has another leader found such aids and followers.  And
+what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense
+armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men,
+of this demoralized Europe?  He left France smaller, poorer, feebler than
+he found her.
+
+A hundred years hence what difference will it make whether you were rich
+or poor, a peer or a peasant?  But what difference may it not make
+whether you did what was right or what was wrong?
+
+"The 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said George William Curtis, "was sold,
+through Dr. Johnson's mediation, for sixty pounds; and ten years after,
+the author died.  With what love do we hang over its pages!  What springs
+of feeling it has opened!  Goldsmith's books are influences and friends
+forever, yet the five thousandth copy was never announced, and Oliver
+Goldsmith, M. D., often wanted a dinner!  Horace Walpole, the coxcomb of
+literature, smiled at him contemptuously from his gilded carriage.
+Goldsmith struggled cheerfully with his adverse fate, and died.  But then
+sad mourners, whom he had aided in their affliction, gathered around his
+bed, and a lady of distinction, whom he had only dared to admire at a
+distance, came and cut a lock of his hair for remembrance.  When I see
+Goldsmith, thus carrying his heart in his hand like a palm branch, I look
+on him as a successful man, whom adversity could not bring down from the
+level of his lofty nature."
+
+Dr. Maudsley tells us that the aims which chiefly predominate--riches,
+position, power, applause of men--are such as inevitably breed and foster
+many bad passions in the eager competition to attain them.  Hence, in
+fact, come disappointed ambition, jealousy, grief from loss of fortune,
+all the torments of wounded self-love, and a thousand other mental
+sufferings,--the commonly enumerated moral causes of insanity.  They are
+griefs of a kind to which a rightly developed nature should not fall a
+prey.  There need be no envy nor jealousy, if a man were to consider that
+it mattered not whether he did a great thing or some one else did it,
+Nature's only concern being that it should be done; no grief from loss of
+fortune, if he were to estimate at its true value that which fortune can
+bring him, and that which fortune can never bring him; no wounded
+self-love, if he had learned well the eternal lesson of
+life,--self-renunciation.
+
+Soon after his establishment in Philadelphia Franklin was offered a piece
+for publication in his newspaper.  Being very busy, he begged the
+gentleman would leave it for consideration.  The next day the author
+called and asked his opinion of it.  "Well, sir," replied Franklin, "I am
+sorry to say I think it highly scurrilous and defamatory.  But being at a
+loss on account of my poverty whether to reject it or not, I thought I
+would put it to this issue: At night, when my work was done, I bought a
+two-penny loaf, on which I supped heartily, and then, wrapping myself in
+my great coat, slept very soundly on the floor till morning, when another
+loaf and mug of water afforded a pleasant breakfast.  Now, sir, since I
+can live very comfortably in this manner, why should I prostitute my
+press to personal hatred or party passion for a more luxurious living?"
+
+One cannot read this anecdote of our American sage without thinking of
+Socrates' reply to King Archelaus, who had pressed him to give up
+preaching in the dirty streets of Athens, and come and live with him in
+his splendid courts: "Meal, please your Majesty, is a half-penny a peck
+at Athens, and water I get for nothing!"
+
+During Alexander's march into Africa he found a people dwelling in peace,
+who knew neither war nor conquest.  While he was interviewing the chief
+two of his subjects brought a case before him for judgment.  The dispute
+was this: the one had bought of the other a piece of ground, which, after
+the purchase, was found to contain a treasure, for which he felt bound to
+pay.  The other refused to receive anything, stating that when he sold
+the ground he sold it with all the advantages apparent or concealed which
+it might be found to afford.  The king said, "One of you has a daughter
+and the other a son; let them be married and the treasure given to them
+as a dowry."  Alexander was surprised, and said, "If this case had been
+in our country it would have been dismissed, and the king would have kept
+the treasure."  The chief said, "Does the sun shine on your country, and
+the rain fall, and the grass grow?"  Alexander replied, "Certainly."  The
+chief then asked, "Are there any cattle?"  "Certainly," was the reply.
+The chief replied, "Then it is for these innocent cattle that the Great
+Being permits the rain to fall and the grass to grow."
+
+A good character is a precious thing, above rubies, gold, crowns, or
+kingdoms, and the work of making it is the noblest labor on earth.
+
+Professor Blackie of the University of Edinburgh said to a class of young
+men: "Money is not needful; power is not needful; liberty is not needful;
+even health is not the one thing needful; but character alone is that
+which can truly save us, and if we are not saved in this sense, we
+certainly must be damned."  It has been said that "when poverty is your
+inheritance, virtue must be your capital."
+
+During the American Revolution, while General Reed was President of
+Congress, the British Commissioners offered him a bribe of ten thousand
+guineas to desert the cause of his country.  His reply was, "Gentlemen, I
+am poor, very poor; but your king is not rich enough to buy me."
+
+"When Le P�re Bourdaloue preached at Rouen," said P�re Arrius, "the
+tradesmen forsook their shops, lawyers their clients, physicians their
+sick, and tavern-keepers their bars; but when I preached the following
+year I set all things to rights,--every man minded his own business."
+
+"I fear John Knox's prayers more than an army of ten thousand men," said
+Mary, Queen of Scotland.
+
+When Pope Paul IV. heard of the death of Calvin he exclaimed with a sigh,
+"Ah, the strength of that proud heretic lay in--riches?  No.  Honors?
+No.  But nothing could move him from his course.  Holy Virgin!  With two
+such servants, our church would soon be mistress of both worlds."
+
+Garibaldi's power over his men amounted to fascination.  Soldiers and
+officers were ready to die for him.  His will power seemed to enslave
+them.  In Rome he called for forty volunteers to go where half of them
+would be sure to be killed and the others probably wounded.  The whole
+battalion rushed forward; and they had to draw lots, so eager were all to
+obey.
+
+What power of magic lies in a great name!  There was not a throne in
+Europe that could stand against Washington's character, and in comparison
+with it the millions of the Croesuses would look ridiculous.  What are
+the works of avarice compared with the names of Lincoln, Grant, or
+Garfield?  A few names have ever been the leaven which has preserved many
+a nation from premature decay.
+
+  "But strew his ashes to the wind
+    Whose sword or voice has served mankind--
+  And is he dead, whose glorious mind
+    Lifts thine on high?--
+  To live in hearts we leave behind
+    Is not to die."
+
+
+Mr. Gladstone gave in Parliament, when announcing the death of Princess
+Alice, a touching story of sick-room ministration.  The Princess' little
+boy was ill with diphtheria, the physician had cautioned her not to
+inhale the poisoned breath; the child was tossing in the delirium of
+fever.  The mother took the little one in her lap and stroked his fevered
+brow; the boy threw his arms around her neck, and whispered, "Kiss me,
+mamma;" the mother's instinct was stronger than the physician's caution;
+she pressed her lips to the child's, but lost her life.
+
+At a large dinner-party given by Lord Stratford after the Crimean War, it
+was proposed that every one should write on a slip of paper the name
+which appeared most likely to descend to posterity with renown.  When the
+papers were opened every one of them contained the name of Florence
+Nightingale.
+
+Leckey says that the first hospital ever established was opened by that
+noble Christian woman, Fabiola, in the fourth century.  The two foremost
+names in modern philanthropy are those of John Howard and Florence
+Nightingale.  Not a general of the Crimean War on either side can be
+named by one person in ten.  The one name that rises instantly, when that
+carnival of pestilence and blood is suggested, is that of a young woman
+just recovering from a serious illness, Florence Nightingale.  A soldier
+said, "Before she came there was such cussin' and swearin'; and after
+that it was as holy as a church."  She robbed war of half its terrors.
+Since her time the hospital systems of all the nations during war have
+been changed.  No soldier was braver and no patriot truer than Clara
+Barton, and wherever that noble company of Protestant women known as the
+Red Cross Society,--the cross, I suppose, pointing to Calvary, and the
+red to the blood of the Redeemer,--wherever those consecrated workers
+seek to alleviate the condition of those who suffer from plagues,
+cholera, fevers, flood, famine, there this tireless angel moves on her
+pathway of blessing.  And of all heroes, what nobler ones than these,
+whose names shine from the pages of our missionary history?  I never read
+of Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Snow, Miss Brittain, Miss West, without feeling that
+the heroic age of our race has just begun, the age which opens to woman
+the privilege of following her benevolent inspirations wheresoever she
+will, without thinking that our Christianity needs no other evidence.
+
+"Duty is the cement without which all power, goodness, intellect, truth,
+happiness, and love itself can have no permanence, but all the fabric of
+existence crumbles away from under us and leaves us at last sitting in
+the midst of a ruin, astonished at our own desolation."  A constant,
+abiding sense of duty is the last reason of culture.
+
+  "I slept and dreamed that life is beauty;
+  I woke and found that life is duty."
+
+
+We have no more right to refuse to perform a duty than to refuse to pay a
+debt.  Moral insolvency is certain to him who neglects and disregards his
+duty to his fellow-men.  Nor can we hire another to perform our duty.
+The mere accident of having money does not release you from your duty to
+the world.  Nay, it increases it, for it enables you to do a larger and
+nobler duty.
+
+If your money is not clean, if there is a dirty dollar in your millions,
+you have not succeeded.  If there is the blood of the poor and
+unfortunate, of orphans and widows, on your bank account, you have not
+succeeded.  If your wealth has made others poorer, your life is a
+failure.  If you have gained it in an occupation that kills, that
+shortens the lives of others, that poisons their blood, or engenders
+disease, if you have taken a day from a human life, if you have gained
+your money by that which has debauched other lives, you have failed.
+
+Remember that a question will be asked you some time which you cannot
+evade, the right answer to which will fix your destiny forever: "How did
+you get that fortune?"  Are other men's lives in it; are others' hope and
+happiness buried in it; are others' comforts sacrificed to it; are
+others' rights buried in it; are others' opportunities smothered in it;
+others' chances strangled by it; has their growth been stunted by it;
+their characters stained by it; have others a smaller loaf, a meaner
+home?  If so, you have failed; all your millions cannot save you from the
+curse, "thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting."
+
+When Walter Scott's publisher and printer failed and $600,000 of debt
+stared them in the face, friends came forward and offered to raise money
+enough to allow him to arrange with his creditors.  "No," said he
+proudly, "this right hand shall work it all off; if we lose everything
+else, we will at least keep our honor unblemished."  What a grand picture
+of manliness, of integrity in this noble man, working like a dray-horse
+to cancel that great debt, throwing off at white heat the "Life of
+Napoleon," "Woodstock," "The Tales of a Grandfather," articles for the
+"Quarterly," and so on, all written in the midst of great sorrow, pain,
+and ruin.  "I could not have slept soundly," he writes, "as I now can
+under the comfortable impression of receiving the thanks of my creditors,
+and the conscious feeling of discharging my duty as a man of honesty.  I
+see before me a long, tedious, and dark path, but it leads to stainless
+reputation.  If I die in the harness, as is very likely, I shall die with
+honor."
+
+One of the last things he uttered was, "I have been, perhaps, the most
+voluminous author of my day, and it is a comfort to me to think that I
+have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles,
+and that I have written nothing which, on my deathbed, I would wish
+blotted out."
+
+Although Agassiz refused to lecture even for a large sum of money, yet he
+left a greater legacy to the world, and left even more money to Harvard
+University ($300,000) than he would have left if he had taken the time to
+lecture for money.
+
+Faraday had to choose between a fortune of nearly a million and a life of
+almost certain poverty if he pursued science.  He chose poverty and
+science, and earned a name never to be erased from the book of fame.
+
+Beecher says that we are all building a soul-house for eternity; yet with
+what differing architecture and what various care!
+
+What if a man should see his neighbor getting workmen and building
+materials together, and should say to him, "What are you building?" and
+he should answer, "I don't exactly know.  I am waiting to see what will
+come of it."  And so walls are reared, and room is added to room, while
+the man looks idly on, and all the bystanders exclaim, "What a fool he
+is!"  Yet this is the way many men are building their characters for
+eternity, adding room to room, without plan or aim, and thoughtlessly
+waiting to see what the effect will be.  Such builders will never dwell
+in "the house of God, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
+
+Some people build as cathedrals are built, the part nearest the ground
+finished; but that part which soars towards heaven, the turrets and the
+spires, forever incomplete.
+
+Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise--the head and heart are
+stuffed with goods.  Like those houses in the lower streets of cities
+which were once family dwellings, but are now used for commercial
+purposes, there are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by
+taste, and love, and joy, and worship; but they are all deserted now, and
+the rooms are filled with material things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+WEALTH IN ECONOMY.
+
+Economy is half the battle of life.--SPURGEON.
+
+Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and ease, and the
+beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health.--DR. JOHNSON.
+
+Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's
+self?
+
+As much wisdom can be expended on a private economy as on an
+empire.--EMERSON.
+
+Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and
+little by little will multiply.--GOETHE.
+
+No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of
+what you have.--LATIN PROVERB.
+
+Beware of little extravagances: a small leak will sink a big
+ship.--FRANKLIN.
+
+Better go to bed supperless than rise with debts.--GERMAN PROVERB.
+
+Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to
+get out of.--H. W. SHAW.
+
+Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen
+pence a day; but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not
+suffice.--MACAULAY.
+
+Economy, the poor man's mint.--TUPPER.
+
+I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only
+lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is incurable.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate
+away on the chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision
+against the workhouse.--BULWER.
+
+  Not for to hide it in a hedge,
+    Nor for a train attendant,
+  But for the glorious privilege
+    Of being independent.
+        BURNS.
+
+
+"We shan't get much here," whispered a lady to her companion, as John
+Murray blew out one of the two candles by whose light he had been writing
+when they asked him to contribute to some benevolent object.  He listened
+to their story and gave one hundred dollars.  "Mr. Murray, I am very
+agreeably surprised," said the lady quoted; "I did not expect to get a
+cent from you."  The old Quaker asked the reason for her opinion; and,
+when told, said, "That, ladies, is the reason I am able to let you have
+the hundred dollars.  It is by practicing economy that I save up money
+with which to do charitable actions.  One candle is enough to talk by."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]
+
+"The Moses of Colonial Finance."
+
+"Poverty is a condition which no man should accept, unless it is forced
+upon him as an inexorable necessity or as the alternative of dishonor."
+
+"Comfort and independence abide with those who can postpone their
+desires."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Emerson relates the following anecdote: "An opulent merchant in Boston
+was called on by a friend in behalf of a charity.  At that time he was
+admonishing his clerk for using whole wafers instead of halves; his
+friend thought the circumstance unpropitious; but to his surprise, on
+listening to the appeal, the merchant subscribed five hundred dollars.
+The applicant expressed his astonishment that any person who was so
+particular about half a wafer should present five hundred dollars to a
+charity; but the merchant said, "It is by saving half wafers, and
+attending to such little things, that I have now something to give."
+
+"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the
+shipowner.  "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one, by
+dint of exertion."
+
+Four years from the time Marshall Field left the rocky New England farm
+to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm
+of Coaley, Farwell & Co.  The only reason the modest young man gave, to
+explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor influence,
+was that he saved his money.
+
+If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents
+every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he
+will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old.
+Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in
+fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars.  Even a
+saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give
+him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years
+of life.  "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
+
+Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world
+with gifts even if he is poor.  In fact, the poor and the middle classes
+give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor.
+Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.
+
+But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy.  The
+miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it.  A
+miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter
+does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice.
+Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup,
+but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is
+to become of that?  It will be a sad waste."  And so the rich Paris
+banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.
+
+A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a
+broken latch on a farmyard gate.  Every one going through would shut the
+gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every
+breeze.  One day a pig ran out into the woods.  Every one on the farm
+went to help get him back.  A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the
+pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two
+weeks.  When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at
+the fire, was all badly scorched.  The dairymaid in her excitement left
+the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt.  The gardener
+lost several hours of valuable time.  Yet a new latch would not have cost
+five cents.
+
+Guy, the London bookseller, and afterward the founder of the great
+hospital, was a great miser, living in the back part of his shop, eating
+upon an old bench, and using his counter for a table, with a newspaper
+for a cloth.  He did not marry.  One day he was visited by "Vulture"
+Hopkins, another well-known miser.  "What is your business?" asked Guy,
+lighting a candle.  "To discuss your methods of saving money," was the
+reply, alluding to the niggardly economy for which Guy was famous.  On
+learning Hopkins's business he blew out the light, saying, "We can do
+that in the dark."  "Sir, you are my master in the art," said the
+"Vulture;" "I need ask no further.  I see where your secret lies."
+
+Yet that kind of economy which verges on the niggardly is better than the
+extravagance that laughs at it.  Either, when carried to excess, is not
+only apt to cause misery, but to ruin the character.
+
+"Lay by something for a rainy day," said a gentleman to an Irishman in
+his service.  Not long afterwards he asked Patrick how much he had added
+to his store.  "Faith, nothing at all," was the reply; "I did as you bid
+me, but it rained very hard yesterday, and it all went--in drink."
+
+  "Wealth, a monster gorged
+  'Mid starving populations."
+
+
+But nowhere and at no period were these contrasts more startling than in
+Imperial Rome.  There a whole population might be trembling lest they
+should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn-ship, while the
+upper classes were squandering fortunes at a single banquet, drinking out
+of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on
+the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales.  As a
+consequence, disease was rife, men were short-lived.  At this time the
+dress of Roman ladies displayed an unheard-of splendor.  The elder Pliny
+tells us that he himself saw Lollia Paulina dressed for a betrothal feast
+in a robe entirely covered with pearls and emeralds, which had cost
+40,000,000 sesterces, and which was known to be less costly than some of
+her other dresses.  Gluttony, caprice, extravagance, ostentation,
+impurity, rioted in the heart of a society which knew of no other means
+by which to break the monotony of its weariness or alleviate the anguish
+of its despair.
+
+The expense ridiculously bestowed on the Roman feasts passes all belief.
+Suetonius mentions a supper given to Vitellius by his brother, in which,
+among other articles, there were two thousand of the choicest fishes,
+seven thousand of the most delicate birds, and one dish, from its size
+and capacity, named the aegis or shield of Minerva.  It was filled
+chiefly with the liver of the scari, a delicate species of fish, the
+brains of pheasants and peacocks, and the tongues of parrots, considered
+desirable chiefly because of their great cost.
+
+"I hope that there will not be another sale," exclaimed Horace Walpole,
+"for I have not an inch of room nor a farthing left."  A woman once
+bought an old door-plate with "Thompson" on it because she thought it
+might come in handy some time.  The habit of buying what you don't need
+because it is cheap encourages extravagance.  "Many have been ruined by
+buying good pennyworths."
+
+"Where there is no prudence," said Dr. Johnson, "there is no virtue."
+
+The eccentric John Randolph once sprang from his seat in the House of
+Representatives, and exclaimed in his piercing voice, "Mr. Speaker, I
+have found it."  And then, in the stillness which followed this strange
+outburst, he added, "I have found the Philosopher's Stone: it is _Pay as
+you go_."
+
+Many a young man seems to think that when he sees his name on a sign he
+is on the highway to fortune, and he begins to live on a scale as though
+there was no possible chance of failure; as though he were already beyond
+the danger point.  Unfortunately Congress can pass no law that will
+remedy the vice of living beyond one's means.
+
+"The prosperity of fools shall destroy them."  "However easy it may be to
+make money," said Barnum, "it is the most difficult thing in the world to
+keep it."  Money often makes the mare--run away with you.
+
+Very few men know how to use money properly.  They can earn it, lavish
+it, hoard it, waste it, but to deal with it _wisely_, as a means to an
+end, is an education difficult of acquirement.
+
+After a large stained-glass window had been constructed an artist picked
+up the discarded fragments and made one of the most exquisite windows in
+Europe for another cathedral.  So one boy will pick up a splendid
+education out of the odds and ends of time which others carelessly throw
+away, or gain a fortune by saving what others waste.
+
+It has become a part of the new political economy to argue that a debt on
+a church or a house or a firm is a desirable thing to develop character.
+When the young man starts out in life with the old-fashioned idea strong
+in his mind that debt is bondage and a disgrace, that a mortgage is to be
+shunned like the cholera, and that to owe a dollar that you cannot pay,
+unless overtaken by misfortune, is nothing more or less than stealing,
+then he is bound in so much at least to succeed, and save his old age
+from being a burden upon his friends or the state.
+
+To do your best you must own every bit of yourself.  If you are in debt,
+part of you belongs to your creditors.  Nothing but actual sin is so
+paralyzing to a young man's energies as debt.
+
+The "loose change" which many young men throw away carelessly, or worse,
+would often form the basis of a fortune and independence.  The earnings
+of the people of the United States, rich and poor, old and young, male
+and female, amount to an average of less than fifty cents a day.  But it
+is by economizing such savings that one must get his start in business.
+The man without a penny is practically helpless, from a business point of
+view, except so far as he can immediately utilize his powers of body and
+mind.  Besides, when a man or woman is driven to the wall, the chance of
+goodness surviving self-respect and the loss of public esteem is
+frightfully diminished.
+
+"Money goes as it comes."  "A child and a fool imagine that twenty years
+and twenty shillings can never be spent."
+
+Live between extravagance and meanness.  Don't save money and starve your
+mind.  "The very secret and essence of thrift consists in getting things
+into higher values.  Spend upward, that is, for the higher faculties.
+Spend for the mind rather than for the body, for culture rather than for
+amusement.  Some young men are too stingy to buy the daily papers, and
+are very ignorant and narrow."  "There is that withholdeth more than is
+meet, but it tendeth to poverty."  "Don't squeeze out of your life and
+comfort and family what you save."
+
+Liberal, not lavish, is Nature's hand.  Even God, it is said, cannot
+afford to be extravagant.  When He increased the loaves and fishes, He
+commanded to gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.
+
+"Nature uses a grinding economy," says Emerson, "working up all that is
+wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of sand
+for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.  She flung
+us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair or a paring of a nail but
+instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates it to her general
+stock."  Last summer's flowers and foliage decayed in autumn only to
+enrich the earth this year for other forms of beauty.  Nature will not
+even wait for our friends to see us, unless we die at home.  The moment
+the breath has left the body she begins to take us to pieces, that the
+parts may be used again for other creations.  Mark the following
+contrast:--
+
+  1772.                              1822.
+  Man, to the plow;                  Man, tally-ho;
+  Wife, to the cow;                  Wife, piano;
+  Girl, to the sow;                  Miss, silk and satin;
+  Boy, to the mow;                   Boy, Greek and Latin;
+  And your rents will be netted.     And you'll all be gazetted.
+        _Hone's Works._                      _The Times._
+
+
+More than a lifetime has elapsed since the above was published, but
+instead of returning to the style of 1772, our farmers have out-Heroded
+Herod in the direction of the fashion, of 1822, and many a farmhouse,
+like the home of Artemas [Transcriber's note: Artemus?] Ward, may be
+known by the cupola and the mortgage with which it is decorated.
+
+It is by the mysterious power of economy, it has been said, that the loaf
+is multiplied, that using does not waste, that little becomes much, that
+scattered fragments grow to unity, and that out of nothing or next to
+nothing comes the miracle of something.  It is not merely saving, still
+less, parsimony.  It is foresight and arrangement, insight and
+combination, causing inert things to labor, useless things to serve our
+necessities, perishing things to renew their vigor, and all things to
+exert themselves for human comfort.
+
+English working men and women work very hard, seldom take a holiday, and
+though they get nearly double the wages of the same classes in France,
+yet save very little.  The millions earned by them slip out of their
+hands almost as soon as obtained to satisfy the pleasures of the moment.
+In France every housekeeper is taught the art of making much out of
+little.  "I am simply astonished," writes an American lady stopping in
+France, "at the number of good wholesome dishes which my friend here
+makes for her table from things, which at home, I always throw away.
+Dainty little dishes from scraps of cold meat, from hard crusts of bread,
+delicately prepared and seasoned, from almost everything and nothing.
+And yet there is no feeling of stinginess or want."
+
+"I wish I could write all across the sky, in letters of gold," says Rev.
+William Marsh, "the one word, savings-bank."
+
+Boston savings-banks have $130,000,000 on deposit, mostly saved in
+driblets.  Josiah Quincy used to say that the servant girls built most of
+the palaces on Beacon Street.
+
+"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer.
+"With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at least
+have 'my crust of bread and liberty.'  But with five thousand pounds a
+year I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical master in
+servants whose wages I cannot pay; my exile may be at the fiat of the
+first long-suffering man who enters a judgment against me; for the flesh
+that lies nearest my heart some Shylock may be dusting his scales and
+whetting his knife.  Every man is needy who spends more than he has; no
+man is needy who spends less.  I may so ill manage, that with five
+thousand pounds a year I purchase the worst evils of poverty,--terror and
+shame; I may so well manage my money, that with one hundred pounds a year
+I purchase the best blessings of wealth,--safety and respect."
+
+Edmund Burke, speaking on Economic Reform, quoted from Cicero: "Magnum
+vectigal est parsimonia," accenting the second word on the first
+syllable.  Lord North whispered a correction, when Burke turned the
+mistake to advantage.  "The noble lord hints that I have erred in the
+quantity of a principal word in my quotation; I rejoice at it, sir,
+because it gives me an opportunity of repeating the inestimable
+adage,--'Magnum vectigal est parsimonia.'"  The sentiment, meaning
+"Thrift is a good income," is well worthy of emphatic repetition by us
+all.
+
+Washington examined the minutest expenditures of his family, even when
+President of the United States.  He understood that without economy none
+can be rich, and with it none need be poor.
+
+"I make a point of paying my own bills," said Wellington.
+
+John Jacob Astor said that the first thousand dollars cost him more
+effort than all of his millions.  Boys who are careless with their dimes
+and quarters, just because they have so few, never get this first
+thousand, and without it no fortune is possible.
+
+To find out uses for the persons or things which are now wasted in life
+is to be the glorious work of the men of the next generation, and that
+which will contribute most to their enrichment.
+
+Economizing "in spots" or by freaks is no economy at all.  It must be
+done by management.
+
+Learn early in life to say "I can't afford it."  It is an indication of
+power and courage and manliness.  Dr. Franklin said, "It is not our own
+eyes, but other people's, that ruin us."  "Fashion wears out more apparel
+than the man," says Shakespeare.
+
+"Of what a hideous progeny of ill is debt the father," said Douglas
+Jerrold.  "What meanness, what invasions of self-respect, what cares,
+what double-dealing!  How in due season it will carve the frank, open
+face into wrinkles; how like a knife it will stab the honest heart.  And
+then its transformations,--how it has been known to change a goodly face
+into a mask of brass; how with the evil custom of debt has the true man
+become a callous trickster!  A freedom from debt, and what nourishing
+sweetness may be found in cold water; what toothsomeness in a dry crust;
+what ambrosial nourishment in a hard egg!  Be sure of it, he who dines
+out of debt, though his meal be a biscuit and an onion, dines in 'The
+Apollo.'  And then, for raiment, what warmth in a threadbare coat, if the
+tailor's receipt be in your pocket!  What Tyrian purple in the faded
+waistcoat, the vest not owed for; how glossy the well-worn hat, if it
+covers not the aching head of a debtor!  Next, the home sweets, the
+outdoor recreation of the free man.  The street door falls not a knell in
+his heart, the foot on the staircase, though he lives on the third pair,
+sends no spasm through his anatomy; at the rap of his door he can crow
+'come in,' and his pulse still beats healthfully.  See him abroad!  How
+he returns look for look with any passenger.  Poverty is a bitter
+draught, yet may, and sometimes can with advantage, be gulped down.
+Though the drinker makes wry faces, there may, after all, be a wholesome
+goodness in the cup.  But debt, however courteously it may be offered, is
+the Cup of Siren; and the wine, spiced and delicious though it be, is
+poison.  My son, if poor, see Hyson in the running spring; see thy mouth
+water at a last week's roll; think a threadbare coat the only wear; and
+acknowledge a whitewashed garret the fittest housing-place for a
+gentleman; do this, and flee debt.  So shall thy heart be at rest, and
+the sheriff confounded."
+
+"Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men to the extent of that
+sixpence," says Carlyle; "commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to
+teach him, kings to mount guard over him,--to the extent of that
+sixpence."
+
+If a man owes you a dollar, he is almost sure to owe you a grudge, too.
+If you owe another money, you will be apt to regard him with uncharitable
+eyes.  Why not economize before getting into debt instead of pinching
+afterwards?
+
+Communities which live wholly from hand to mouth never make much progress
+in the useful arts.  Savings mean power.  _Comfort and independence abide
+with those who can postpone their desires._
+
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are
+disagreeable," says Horace Greeley, "but debt is infinitely worse than
+them all."
+
+Many a ruined man dates his downfall from the day when he began borrowing
+money.  Debt demoralized Daniel Webster, and Theodore Hook, and Sheridan,
+and Fox, and Pitt.  Mirabeau's life was made wretched by duns.
+
+"Annual income," says Micawber, "twenty pounds; annual expenditure,
+nineteen six, result--happiness.  Annual income, twenty pounds; annual
+expenditure, twenty pounds ought and six, result--misery."
+
+"We are ruined," says Colton, "not by what we really want, but by what we
+think we do.  Therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they
+be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys
+what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy."
+
+The honorable course is to give every man his due.  It is better to
+starve than not to do this.  It is better to do a small business on a
+cash basis than a large one on credit.  _Owe no man anything_, wrote St.
+Paul.  It is a good motto to place in every purse, in every
+counting-room, in every church, in every home.
+
+Economy is of itself a great revenue.--CICERO.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RICH WITHOUT MONEY.
+
+Let others plead for pensions; I can be rich without money, by
+endeavoring to be superior to everything poor.  I would have my
+services to my country unstained by any interested motive.--LORD
+COLLINGWOOD.
+
+  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
+  Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
+        GOLDSMITH.
+
+Pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; to be
+without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; sunlight
+is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who choose.--HELEN
+HUNT.
+
+I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that
+he is rich in my presence.  I ought to make him feel that I can do
+without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort,
+neither by pride,--and although I be utterly penniless, and receiving
+bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.--EMERSON.
+
+To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of
+riches.--CICERO.
+
+There is no riches above a sound body and no joy above the joy of the
+heart.--ECCLESIASTES.
+
+  Where, thy true treasure?  Gold says, "Not in me;"
+  And "Not in me," the Diamond.  Gold is poor;
+  India's insolvent: seek it in thyself.
+        YOUNG.
+
+He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth
+of nature.--SOCRATES.
+
+A great heart in a little house is of all things here below that which
+has ever touched me most.--LACORDAIRE.
+
+  My crown is in my heart, not on my head,
+  Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
+  Nor to be seen: my crown is called content;
+  A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.
+        SHAKESPEAKE.
+
+
+Many a man is rich without money.  Thousands of men with nothing in
+their pockets, and thousands without even a pocket, are rich.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]
+
+"The Sage of Concord."
+
+"I revere the person who is riches: so I cannot think of him as alone,
+or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+A man born with a good, sound constitution, a good stomach, a good
+heart and good limbs, and a pretty good headpiece, is rich.
+
+Good bones are better than gold, tough muscles than silver, and nerves
+that carry energy to every function are better than houses and land.
+
+"Heart-life, soul-life, hope, joy, and love, are true riches," said
+Beecher.
+
+Why should I scramble and struggle to get possession of a little
+portion of this earth?  This is my world now; why should I envy others
+its mere legal possession?  It belongs to him who can see it, enjoy it.
+I need not envy the so-called owners of estates in Boston and New York.
+They are merely taking care of my property and keeping it in excellent
+condition for me.  For a few pennies for railroad fare whenever I wish
+I can see and possess the best of it all.  It has cost me no effort, it
+gives me no care; yet the green grass, the shrubbery, and the statues
+on the lawns, the finer sculptures and the paintings within, are always
+ready for me whenever I feel a desire to look upon them.  I do not wish
+to carry them home with me, for I could not give them half the care
+they now receive; besides, it would take too much of my valuable time,
+and I should be worrying continually lest they be spoiled or stolen.  I
+have much of the wealth of the world now.  It is all prepared for me
+without any pains on my part.  All around me are working hard to get
+things that will please me, and competing to see who can give them the
+cheapest.  The little I pay for the use of libraries, railroads,
+galleries, parks, is less than it would cost to care for the least of
+all I use.  Life and landscape are mine, the stars and flowers, the sea
+and air, the birds and trees.  What more do I want?  All the ages have
+been working for me; all mankind are my servants.  I am only required
+to feed and clothe myself, an easy task in this land of opportunity.
+
+A millionaire pays thousands of pounds for a gallery of paintings, and
+some poor boy or girl comes in, with open mind and poetic fancy, and
+carries away a treasure of beauty which the owner never saw.  A
+collector bought at public auction in London, for one hundred and
+fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a
+schoolboy can read and absorb the riches of "Hamlet."
+
+Why should I waste my abilities pursuing this will-o'-the-wisp
+"Enough," which is ever a little more than one has, and which none of
+the panting millions ever yet overtook in his mad chase?  Is there no
+desirable thing left in this world but gold, luxury, and ease?
+
+"Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough
+to cover."  "A man may as soon fill a chest with grace, or a vessel
+with virtue," says Phillips Brooks, "as a heart with wealth."
+
+Shall we seek happiness through the sense of taste or of touch?  Shall
+we idolize our stomachs and our backs?  Have we no higher missions, no
+nobler destinies?  Shall we "disgrace the fair day by a pusillanimous
+preference of our bread to our freedom"?
+
+In the three great "Banquets" of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch the food
+is not even mentioned.
+
+What does your money say to you: what message does it bring to you?
+Does it say to you, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die"?
+Does it bring a message of comfort, of education, of culture, of
+travel, of books, of an opportunity to help your fellow-man, or is the
+message "More land, more thousands and millions"?  What message does it
+bring you?  Clothes for the naked, bread for the starving, schools for
+the ignorant, hospitals for the sick, asylums for the orphans, or of
+more for yourself and none for others?  Is it a message of generosity
+or of meanness, breadth or narrowness?  Does it speak to you of
+character?  Does it mean a broader manhood, a larger aim, a nobler
+ambition, or does it cry "More, more, more"?
+
+Are you an animal loaded with ingots, or a man filled with a purpose?
+He is rich whose mind is rich, whose thought enriches the intellect of
+the world.  It is a sad sight to see a soul which thirsts not for truth
+or beauty or the good.
+
+A sailor on a sinking vessel in the Caribbean Sea eagerly filled his
+pockets with Spanish dollars from a barrel on board while his
+companions, about to leave in the only boat, begged him to seek safety
+with them.  But he could not leave the bright metal which he had so
+longed for and idolized, and was prevented from reaching shore by his
+very riches, when the vessel went down.
+
+"Who is the richest of men," asked Socrates?  "He who is content with
+the least, for contentment is nature's riches."
+
+In More's "Utopia" gold was despised.  Criminals were forced to wear
+heavy chains of it, and to have rings of it in their ears; it was put
+to the vilest uses to keep up the scorn of it.  Bad characters were
+compelled to wear gold head-bands.  Diamonds and pearls were used to
+decorate infants, so that the youth would discard and despise them.
+
+"Ah, if the rich were as rich as the poor fancy riches!" exclaims
+Emerson.
+
+Many a rich man has died in the poorhouse.
+
+In excavating Pompeii a skeleton was found with the fingers clenched
+round a quantity of gold.  A man of business in the town of Hull,
+England, when dying, pulled a bag of money from under his pillow, which
+he held between his clenched fingers with a grasp so firm as scarcely
+to relax under the agonies of death.
+
+  Oh! blind and wanting wit to choose,
+  Who house the chaff and burn the grain;
+  Who hug the wealth ye cannot use,
+  And lack the riches all may gain.
+        WILLIAM WATSON.
+
+
+Poverty is the want of much, avarice the want of everything.
+
+A poor man was met by a stranger while scoffing at the wealthy for not
+enjoying themselves.  The stranger gave him a purse, in which he was
+always to find a ducat.  As fast as he took one out another was to drop
+in, but he was not to begin to spend his fortune until he had thrown
+away the purse.  He takes ducat after ducat out, but continually
+procrastinates and puts off the hour of enjoyment until he has got "a
+little more," and dies at last counting his millions.
+
+A beggar was once met by Fortune, who promised to fill his wallet with
+gold, as much as he might please, on condition that whatever touched
+the ground should turn at once to dust.  The beggar opens his wallet,
+asks for more and yet more, until the bag bursts.  The gold falls to
+the ground, and all is lost.
+
+When the steamer Central America was about to sink, the stewardess,
+having collected all the gold she could from the staterooms, and tied
+it in her apron, jumped for the last boat leaving the steamer.  She
+missed her aim and fell into the water, the gold carrying her down head
+first.
+
+In the year 1843 a rich miser lived in Padua, who was so mean and
+sordid that he would never give a cent to any person or object, and he
+was so afraid of the banks that he would not deposit with them, but
+would sit up nights with sword and pistol by him to guard his idol
+hoard.  When his health gave way from anxiety and watching he built an
+underground treasure-chamber, so arranged that if any burglar ever
+entered, he would step upon a spring which would precipitate him into a
+subterranean river, where he could neither escape nor be heard.  One
+night the miser went to his chest to see that all was right, when his
+foot touched the spring of the trap, and he was hurled into the deep,
+hidden stream.
+
+"One would think," said Boswell, "that the proprietor of all this
+(Keddlestone, the seat of Lord Scarsfield) must be happy."  "Nay, sir,"
+said Johnson, "all this excludes but one evil, poverty."
+
+John Duncan, the illegitimate child of a Scottish weaver, was ignorant,
+near-sighted, bent, a miserable apology for a human being, and at last
+a pauper.  If he went upon the street he would sometimes be stoned by
+other boys.  The farmer, for whom he watched cattle, was cruel to him,
+and after a rainy day would send him cold and wet to sleep on a
+miserable bed in a dark outhouse.  Here he would empty the water from
+his shoes, and wring out his wet clothes and sleep as best he might.
+But the boy had a desire to learn to read, and when, a little later, he
+was put to weaving, he persuaded a schoolgirl, twelve years old, to
+teach him.  He was sixteen when he learned the alphabet, after which
+his progress was quite rapid.  He was very fond of plants, and worked
+overtime for several months to earn five shillings to buy a book on
+botany.  He became a good botanist, and such was his interest in the
+study that at the age of eighty he walked twelve miles to obtain a new
+specimen.  A man whom he met became interested at finding such a
+well-stored mind in such a miserable body, poorly clad, and published
+an account of his career.  Many readers sent him money, but he saved
+it, and left it in his will to found eight scholarships and offer
+prizes for the encouragement of the study of natural science by the
+poor.  His small but valuable library was left for a similar use.
+
+Franklin said money never made a man happy yet; there is nothing in its
+nature to produce happiness.  The more a man has, the more he wants.
+Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.  A great bank account can
+never make a man rich.  It is the mind that makes the body rich.  No
+man is rich, however much money or land he may possess, who has a poor
+heart.  If that is poor, he is poor indeed, though he own and rule
+kingdoms.  He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to
+what he has.
+
+Who would not choose to be a millionaire of deeds with a Lincoln, a
+Grant, a Florence Nightingale, a Childs; a millionaire of ideas with
+Emerson, with Lowell, with Shakespeare, with Wordsworth; a millionaire
+of statesmanship with a Gladstone, a Bright, a Sumner, a Washington?
+
+Some men are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial
+temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a
+shipload of ordinary men.  Others are rich in disposition, family, and
+friends.  There are some men so amiable that everybody loves them; some
+so cheerful that they carry an atmosphere of jollity about them.  Some
+are rich in integrity and character.
+
+One of the first great lessons of life is to learn the true estimate of
+values.  As the youth starts out in his career, all sorts of wares will
+be imposed upon him, and all kinds of temptations will be used to
+induce him to buy.  His success will depend very largely upon his
+ability to estimate properly, not the apparent but the real value of
+everything presented to him.  Vulgar Wealth will flaunt her banner
+before his eyes, and claim supremacy over everything else.  A thousand
+different schemes will be thrust into his face with their claims for
+superiority.  Every occupation and vocation will present its charms in
+turn, and offer its inducements.  The youth who would succeed must not
+allow himself to be deceived by appearances, but must place the
+emphasis of life where it belongs.
+
+No man, it is said, can read the works of John Ruskin without learning
+that his sources of pleasure are well-nigh infinite.  There is not a
+flower, nor a cloud, nor a tree, nor a mountain, nor a star; not a bird
+that fans the air, nor a creature that walks the earth; not a glimpse
+of sea or sky or meadow-greenery; not a work of worthy art in the
+domains of painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture; not a thought
+of God as the Great Spirit presiding over and informing all things,
+that is not to him a source of the sweetest pleasure.  The whole world
+of matter and of spirit and the long record of human art are open to
+him as the never-failing fountains of his delight.  In these pure
+realms he seeks his daily food and has his daily life.
+
+There is now and then a man who sees beauty and true riches everywhere,
+and "worships the splendor of God which he sees bursting through each
+chink and cranny."
+
+Phillips Brooks, Thoreau, Garrison, Emerson, Beecher, Agassiz, were
+rich without money.  They saw the splendor in the flower, the glory in
+the grass, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything.  They knew that the man who owns the landscape is seldom
+the one who pays the taxes on it.  They sucked in power and wealth at
+first hands from the meadows, fields, and flowers, birds, brooks,
+mountains, and forest, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers.  Every
+natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great
+Author of the beautiful.  To these rare souls every natural object was
+touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drank it in as a
+traveler on a desert drinks in the god-sent water of the oasis.  To
+extract power and real wealth from men and things seemed to be their
+mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsty
+humanity.  They believed that man's most important food does not enter
+by the mouth.  They knew that man could not live by estates, dollars,
+and bread alone, and that if he could he would only be an animal.  They
+believed that the higher life demands a higher food.  They believed in
+man's unlimited power of expansion, and that this growth demands a more
+highly organized food product than that which merely sustains animal
+life.  They saw a finer nutriment in the landscape, in the meadows,
+than could be ground into flour, and which escaped the loaf.  They felt
+a sentiment in natural objects which pointed upward, ever upward to the
+Author, and which was capable of feeding and expanding the higher life
+until it should grow into a finer sympathy and fellowship with the
+Author of the beautiful.  They believed that the Creation thunders the
+ten commandments, and that all Nature is tugging at the terms of every
+contract to make it just.  They could feel this finer sentiment, this
+soul lifter, this man inspirer, in the growing grain, in the waving
+corn, in the golden harvest.  They saw it reflected in every brook, in
+every star, in every flower, in every dewdrop.  They believed that
+Nature together with human nature were man's great schoolmasters, that
+if rightly used they would carve his rough life into beauty and touch
+his rude manner with grace.
+
+"More servants wait on man than he'll take notice of."  But if he would
+enjoy Nature he must come to it from a higher level than the yardstick.
+He must bring a spirit as grand and sublime as that by which the thing
+itself exists.
+
+We all live on far lower levels than we need to do.  We linger in the
+misty and oppressive valleys, when we might be climbing the sunlit
+hills.  God puts into our hands the Book of Life, bright on every page
+with open secrets, and we suffer it to drop out of our hands unread.
+Emerson says, "We have come into a world which is a living poem.
+Everything is as I am."  Nature provides for us a perpetual festival;
+she is bright to the bright, comforting to those who will accept
+comfort.  We cannot conceive how a universe could possibly be created
+which could devise more efficient methods or greater opportunities for
+the delight, the happiness, and the real wealth of human beings than
+the one we live in.
+
+The human body is packed full of marvelous devices, of wonderful
+contrivances, of infinite possibilities for the happiness and riches of
+the individual.  No physiologist nor scientist has ever yet been able
+to point out a single improvement, even in the minutest detail, in the
+structure of the human body.  No inventor has ever yet been able to
+suggest an improvement in this human mechanism.  No chemist has ever
+been able to suggest a superior combination in any one of the elements
+which make up the human structure.  One of the first things to do in
+life is to learn the natural wealth of our surroundings, instead of
+bemoaning our lot, for, no matter where we are placed, there is
+infinitely more about us than we can ever understand, than we can ever
+exhaust the meaning of.
+
+"Thank Heaven there are still some Matthew Arnolds who prefer the
+heavenly sweetness of light to the Eden of riches."  Arnold left only a
+few thousand dollars, but yet was he not one of the richest of men?
+What the world wants is young men who will amass golden thoughts,
+golden wisdom, golden deeds, not mere golden dollars; young men who
+prefer to have thought-capital, character-capital, to cash-capital.  He
+who estimates his money the highest values himself the least.  "I
+revere the person," says Emerson, "who is riches; so that I cannot
+think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+
+Raphael was rich without money.  All doors opened to him, and he was
+more than welcome everywhere.  His sweet spirit radiated sunshine
+wherever he went.
+
+Henry Wilson was rich without money.  So scrupulous had he been not to
+make his exalted position a means of worldly gain, that when this
+Natick cobbler, the sworn friend of the oppressed, whose one question
+as to measures or acts was ever "Is it right; will it do good?" came to
+be inaugurated as Vice-President of the country, he was obliged to
+borrow of his fellow-senator, Charles Sumner, one hundred dollars to
+meet the necessary expenses of the occasion.
+
+Mozart, the great composer of the "Requiem," left barely enough money
+to bury him, but he has made the world richer.
+
+A rich mind and noble spirit will cast a radiance of beauty over the
+humblest home, which the upholsterer and decorator can never approach.
+Who would not prefer to be a millionaire of character, of contentment,
+rather than possess nothing but the vulgar coins of a Croesus?  Whoever
+uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future
+generations will erect his monument.
+
+Are we tender, loving, self-denying, and honest, trying to fashion our
+frail life after that of the model man of Nazareth?  Then, though our
+pockets are often empty, we have an inheritance which is as
+overwhelmingly precious as it is eternally incorruptible.
+
+An Asiatic traveler tells us that one day he found the bodies of two
+men laid upon the desert sand beside the carcass of a camel.  They had
+evidently died from thirst, and yet around the waist of each was a
+large store of jewels of different kinds, which they had doubtless been
+crossing the desert to sell in the markets of Persia.
+
+The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is
+poorer than he.  He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he who
+is covetous is poor though he have millions.  There are riches of
+intellect, and no man with an intellectual taste can be called poor.
+He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by
+changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in
+fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
+He is rich as well as brave who can face poverty and misfortune with
+cheerfulness and courage.
+
+We can so educate the will power that it will focus the thoughts upon
+the bright side of things, and upon objects which elevate the soul,
+thus forming a habit of happiness and goodness which will make us rich.
+The habit of making the best of everything and of always looking on the
+bright side of everything is a fortune in itself.
+
+He is rich who values a good name above gold.  Among the ancient Greeks
+and Romans honor was more sought after than wealth.  Rome was imperial
+Rome no more when the imperial purple became an article of traffic.
+
+This is the evil of trade, as well as of partisan politics.  As Emerson
+remarks, it would put everything into market,--talent, beauty, virtue,
+and man himself.
+
+Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave.  His purchaser
+released him, and gave him charge of his household and of the education
+of his children.  He despised wealth and affectation, and lived in a
+tub.  "Do you want anything?" asked Alexander the Great, forcibly
+impressed by the abounding cheerfulness of the philosopher under such
+circumstances.  "Yes," replied Diogenes, "I want you to stand out of my
+sunshine and not to take from me what you cannot give me."  "Were I not
+Alexander," exclaimed the great conqueror, "I would be Diogenes."
+
+Brave and honest men do not work for gold.  They work for love, for
+honor, for character.  When Socrates suffered death rather than abandon
+his views of right morality, when Las Casas endeavored to mitigate the
+tortures of the poor Indians, they had no thought of money or country.
+They worked for the elevation of all that thought, and for the relief
+of all that suffered.
+
+"I don't want such things," said Epictetus to the rich Roman orator who
+was making light of his contempt for money-wealth; "and besides," said
+the stoic, "you are poorer than I am, after all.  You have silver
+vessels, but earthenware reasons, principles, appetites.  My mind to me
+a kingdom is, and it furnishes me with abundant and happy occupation in
+lieu of your restless idleness.  All your possessions seem small to
+you; mine seem great to me.  Your desire is insatiate, mine is
+satisfied."
+
+"Do you know, sir," said a devotee of Mammon to John Bright, "that I am
+worth a million sterling?"  "Yes," said the irritated but calm-spirited
+respondent, "I do; and I know that it is all you are worth."
+
+A bankrupt merchant, returning home one night, said to his noble wife,
+"My dear, I am ruined; everything we have is in the hands of the
+sheriff."  After a few moments of silence the wife looked into his face
+and asked, "Will the sheriff sell you?"  "Oh, no."  "Will the sheriff
+sell me?"  "Oh, no."  "Then do not say we have lost everything.  All
+that is most valuable remains to us,--manhood, womanhood, childhood.
+We have lost but the results of our skill and industry.  We can make
+another fortune if our hearts and hands are left us."
+
+What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating
+with a consciousness of untold riches of head and heart?
+
+Paul was never so great as when he occupied a prison cell; and Jesus
+Christ reached the height of his success when, smitten, spat upon,
+tormented, and crucified, He cried in agony, and yet with triumphant
+satisfaction, "It is finished."
+
+"Character before wealth," was the motto of Amos Lawrence, who had
+inscribed on his pocket-book, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall
+gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
+
+If you make a fortune let every dollar of it be clean.  You do not want
+to see in it drunkards reel, orphans weep, widows moan.  Your riches
+must not make others poorer and more wretched.
+
+Alexander the Great wandered to the gates of Paradise, and knocked for
+entrance.  "Who knocks?" demanded the guardian angel.  "Alexander."
+"Who is Alexander?"  "Alexander,--the Alexander,--Alexander the
+Great,--the conqueror of the world."  "We know him not," replied the
+angel; "this is the Lord's gate; only the righteous enter here."
+
+Don't start out in life with a false standard; a truly great man makes
+official position and money and houses and estates look so tawdry, so
+mean and poor, that we feel like sinking out of sight with our cheap
+laurels and gold.  _Millions look trifling beside character_.
+
+A friend of Professor Agassiz, an eminent practical man, once expressed
+his wonder that a man of such abilities should remain contented with
+such a moderate income as he received.  "I have enough," was Agassiz's
+reply.  "I have no time to waste in making money.  Life is not
+sufficiently long to enable a man to get rich and do his duty to his
+fellow-men at the same time."
+
+How were the thousands of business men who lost every dollar they had
+in the Chicago fire enabled to go into business at once, some into
+wholesale business, without money?  Their record was their bank
+account.  The commercial agencies said they were square men; that they
+had always paid one hundred cents on a dollar; that they had paid
+promptly, and that they were industrious and dealt honorably with all
+men.  This record was as good as a bank account.  _They drew on their
+character_.  Character was the coin which enabled penniless men to buy
+thousands of dollars' worth of goods.  Their integrity did not burn up
+with their stores.  The best part of them was beyond the reach of fire
+and could not be burned.
+
+What are the toil-sweated productions of wealth piled up in vast
+profusion around a Girard, or a Rothschild, when weighed against the
+stores of wisdom, the treasures of knowledge, and the strength, beauty,
+and glory with which victorious virtue has enriched and adorned a great
+multitude of minds during the march of a hundred generations?
+
+"Lord, how many things are in the world of which Diogenes hath no
+need!" exclaimed the stoic, as he wandered among the miscellaneous
+articles at a country fair.
+
+"There are treasures laid up in the heart--treasures of charity, piety,
+temperance, and soberness.  These treasures a man takes with him beyond
+death when he leaves this world."  (Buddhist Scriptures.)
+
+Is it any wonder that our children start out with wrong ideals of life,
+with wrong ideas of what constitutes success?  The child is "urged to
+get on," to "rise in the world," to "make money."  The youth is
+constantly told that nothing succeeds like success.  False standards
+are everywhere set up for him, and then the boy is blamed if he makes a
+failure.
+
+It is all very well to urge youth on to success, but the great mass of
+mankind can never reach or even approximate the goal constantly
+preached to them, nor can we all be rich.  One of the great lessons to
+teach in this century of sharp competition and the survival of the
+fittest is how to be rich without money, and to learn how to do without
+success, according to the popular standard.
+
+Gold cannot make the miser rich, nor can the want of it make the beggar
+poor.
+
+In the poem, "The Changed Cross," a weary woman is represented as
+dreaming that she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of
+divers shapes and sizes.  The most beautiful one was set in jewels of
+gold.  It was so tiny and exquisite that she changed her own plain
+cross for it, thinking she was fortunate in finding one so much lighter
+and lovelier.  But soon her back began to ache under the glittering
+burden, and she changed it for another cross very beautiful and
+entwined with flowers.  But she soon found that underneath the flowers
+were piercing thorns which tore her flesh.  At last she came to a very
+plain cross without jewels, without carving, and with only the word,
+"Love," inscribed upon it.  She took this one up and it proved the
+easiest and best of all.  She was amazed, however, to find that it was
+her old cross which she had discarded.  It is easy to see the jewels
+and the flowers in other people's crosses, but the thorns and heavy
+weight are known only to the bearers.  How easy other people's burdens
+seem to us compared with our own.  We do not appreciate the secret
+burdens which almost crush the heart, nor the years of weary waiting
+for delayed success--the aching hearts longing for sympathy, the hidden
+poverty, the suppressed emotion in other lives.
+
+William Pitt, the great Commoner, considered money as dirt beneath his
+feet compared with the public interest and public esteem.  His hands
+were clean.
+
+The object for which we strive tells the story of our lives.  Men and
+women should be judged by the happiness they create in those around
+them.  Noble deeds always enrich, but millions of mere money may
+impoverish.  _Character is perpetual wealth_, and by the side of him
+who possesses it the millionaire who has it not seems a pauper.
+Compared with it, what are houses and lands, stocks and bonds?  "It is
+better that great souls should live in small habitations than that
+abject slaves should burrow in great houses."  Plain living, rich
+thought, and grand effort are real riches.
+
+Invest in yourself, and you will never be poor.  Floods cannot carry
+your wealth away, fire cannot burn it, rust cannot consume it.
+
+"If a man empties his purse into his head," says Franklin, "no man can
+take it from him.  An investment in knowledge always pays the best
+interest."
+
+"There is a cunning juggle in riches.  I observe," says Emerson, "that
+they take somewhat for everything they give.  I look bigger, but I am
+less, I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but less
+courage; more books, but less wit."
+
+  Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
+  'T is only noble to be good.
+  Kind hearts are more than coronets,
+  And simple faith than Norman blood.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE.
+
+  To each man's life there comes a time supreme;
+    One day, one night, one morning, or one noon,
+    One freighted hour, one moment opportune,
+  One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam,
+  One space when fate goes tiding with the stream,
+    One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon,
+    And ready for the passing instant's boon
+  To tip in favor the uncertain beam.
+  Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait,
+    Knows also how to watch and work and stand
+    On Life's broad deck alert, and at the prow
+  To seize the passing moment, big with fate,
+    From opportunity's extended hand,
+    When the great clock of destiny strikes Now!
+        MARY A. TOWNSEND.
+
+  Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
+  In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.
+        LOWELL.
+
+What is opportunity to a man who can't use it?  An unfecundated egg,
+which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.--GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+  A thousand years a poor man watched
+    Before the gate of Paradise:
+  But while one little nap he snatched,
+    It oped and shut.  Ah! was he wise?
+        W. B. ALGER.
+
+Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
+do what lies clearly at hand.--CARLYLE.
+
+  A man's best things are nearest him,
+  Lie close about his feet.
+        R. M. MILNES.
+
+The secret of success in life is for a man _to be ready for his
+opportunity_ when it comes.--DISRAELI.
+
+
+"There are no longer any good chances for young men," complained a law
+student to Daniel Webster.  "There is always room at the top," replied
+the great lawyer.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON]
+
+"The world is all gates, all opportunities to him who can use them.'
+
+  "'T is never offered twice, seize then the hour
+  When fortune smiles and duty points the way."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+No chance, no opportunities, in a land where many poor boys become rich
+men, where newsboys go to Congress, and where those born in the lowest
+stations attain the highest positions?  The world is all gates, all
+opportunities to him who will use them.  But, like Bunyan's Pilgrim in
+the dungeon of Giant Despair's castle, who had the key of deliverance
+all the time with him but had forgotten it, we fail to rely wholly upon
+the ability to advance all that is good for us which has been given to
+the weakest as well as the strongest.  We depend too much upon outside
+assistance.
+
+  "We look too high
+  For things close by."
+
+
+A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
+supposed that it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak.  Years
+afterward she washed the steps of the Peabody Institute, pondering how
+to get money to buy food.  She cut up an old, worn-out, ragged cloak to
+make a hood, when lo! in the lining of the cloak she discovered the
+diamond bracelet.  During all her poverty she was worth $3500, but did
+not know it.
+
+Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities, if we could
+only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
+than diamond bracelets.  In our large Eastern cities it has been found
+that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
+fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
+wants.  It is a sorry day for a young man who cannot see any
+opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
+Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
+gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
+with on the voyage.  After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
+had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
+diamonds.  They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
+from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by others
+and sold to the government.
+
+The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for $42 by the
+owner to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
+he could get rich.  Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a
+farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and
+rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
+business.  He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
+measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time.  He
+sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
+miles away.  Only a short time after the man who bought his farm
+discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
+previously ignorantly tried to drain off.
+
+Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
+Persian by the name of Ali Hafed.  He lived in a cottage on the river
+bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
+stretching away to the sea.  He had a wife and children, an extensive
+farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
+of forest.  He had a plenty of money and everything that heart could
+wish.  He was contented and happy.  One evening a priest of Buddha
+visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
+world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
+earth's surface into diamonds.  The old priest told that a drop of
+sunlight the size of his thumb was worth more than large mines of
+copper, silver, or gold; that with one of them he could buy many farms
+like his; that with a handful he could buy a province, and with a mine
+of diamonds he could purchase a kingdom.  Ali Hafed listened, and was
+no longer a rich man.  He had been touched with discontent, and with
+that all wealth vanishes.  Early the next morning he woke the priest
+who had been the cause of his unhappiness, and anxiously asked him
+where he could find a mine of diamonds.  "What do you want of
+diamonds?" asked the astonished priest.  "I want to be rich and place
+my children on thrones."  "All you have to do is to go and search until
+you find them," said the priest.  "But where shall I go?" asked the
+poor farmer.  "Go anywhere, north, south, east, or west."  "How shall I
+know when I have found the place?"  "When you find a river running over
+white sands between high mountain ranges, in those white sands you will
+find diamonds," answered the priest.
+
+The discontented man sold the farm for what he could get, left his
+family with a neighbor, took the money he had at interest, and went to
+search for the coveted treasure.  Over the mountains of Arabia, through
+Palestine and Egypt, he wandered for years, but found no diamonds.
+When his money was all gone and starvation stared him in the face,
+ashamed of his folly and of his rags, poor Ali Hafed threw himself into
+the tide and was drowned.  The man who bought his farm was a contented
+man, who made the most of his surroundings, and did not believe in
+going away from home to hunt for diamonds or success.  While his camel
+was drinking in the garden one day, he noticed a flash of light from
+the white sands of the brook.  He picked up a pebble, and pleased with
+its brilliant hues took it into the house, put it on the shelf near the
+fireplace, and forgot all about it.  The old priest of Buddha who had
+filled Ali Hafed with the fatal discontent called one day upon the new
+owner of the farm.  He had no sooner entered the room than his eye
+caught that flash of light from the stone.  "Here's a diamond! here's a
+diamond!" the old priest shouted in great excitement.  "Has Ali Hafed
+returned?" said the priest.  "No," said the farmer, "nor is that a
+diamond.  That is but a stone."  They went into the garden and stirred
+up the white sand with their fingers, and behold, other diamonds more
+beautiful than the first gleamed out of it.  So the famous diamond beds
+of Golconda were discovered.  Had Ali Hafed been content to remain at
+home, had he dug in his own garden, instead of going abroad in search
+for wealth, and reaping poverty, hardships, starvation, and death, he
+would have been one of the richest men in the world, for the entire
+farm abounded in the richest of gems.
+
+You have your own special place and work.  Find it, fill it.  Scarcely
+a boy or girl will read these lines but has much better opportunity to
+win success than Garfield, Wilson, Franklin, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher
+Stowe, Frances Willard, and thousands of others.  But to succeed you
+must be prepared to seize and improve the opportunity when it comes.
+Remember that four things come not back: the spoken word, the sped
+arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
+
+It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that the more opportunities
+are utilized, the more new ones are thereby created.  New openings are
+as easy to fill as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
+so easy as formerly to obtain distinction in the old lines, because the
+standard has advanced so much and competition has so greatly increased.
+"The world is no longer clay," said Emerson, "but rather iron in the
+hands of its workers, and men have got to hammer out a place for
+themselves by steady and rugged blows."
+
+Thousands of men have made fortunes out of trifles which others pass
+by.  As the bee gets honey from the same flower from which the spider
+gets poison, so some men will get a fortune out of the commonest and
+meanest things, as scraps of leather, cotton waste, slag, iron filings,
+from which others get only poverty and failure.  There is scarcely a
+thing which contributes to the welfare and comfort of humanity, not an
+article of household furniture, a kitchen utensil, an article of
+clothing or of food, that is not capable of an improvement in which
+there may be a fortune.
+
+Opportunities?  They are all around us.  Edison found them in a baggage
+car.  Forces of nature plead to be used in the service of man, as
+lightning for ages tried to attract his attention to the great force of
+electricity, which would do his drudgery and leave him to develop the
+God-given powers within him.  There is power lying latent everywhere
+waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
+
+First find out what the world needs and then supply that want.  An
+invention to make smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very
+ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity.  The patent
+office at Washington is full of wonderful devices of ingenious
+mechanism, but not one in hundreds is of use to the inventor or to the
+world.  And yet how many families have been impoverished, and have
+struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
+working on useless inventions.  A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
+eighty-seven cents when his capital was one dollar and a half in buying
+buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for.  After that he made
+it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want, and so
+prospered.
+
+It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
+manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles which
+made their fortunes.  One of the greatest hindrances to advancement in
+life is the lack of observation and of the inclination to take pains.
+An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
+not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
+metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather;" he was so
+poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut the grass in front of his
+hired tenement.  Now he is a very rich man.
+
+An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
+improvement in shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
+rich.  A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
+his invalid wife.  He had never realized what it was to wash before.
+Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing-machine,
+and made a fortune.  A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
+said to himself, there must be some way of filling teeth which will
+prevent their aching.  So he invented the principle of gold filling for
+teeth.
+
+The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
+Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
+The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin.  John Harrison,
+the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
+loft of an old barn.  Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
+were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
+McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a gristmill.  The first
+model dry dock was made in an attic.  Clark, the founder of Clark
+University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
+wagons in a horse shed.  Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
+with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft.  Edison
+began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
+a newsboy.
+
+As soon as the weather would permit, the Jamestown colonists began to
+stroll about the country digging for gold.  In a bank of sand some
+glittering particles were found, and the whole settlement was in a
+state of excitement.  Fourteen weeks of the precious springtime, which
+ought to have been given to plowing and planting, were consumed in this
+stupid nonsense.  Even the Indians ridiculed the madness of the men
+who, for imaginary grains of gold, were wasting their chances for a
+crop of corn.
+
+Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
+rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskillful workman had
+cut, hacked, spoiled, and thrown away.  No doubt many artists had
+noticed the fine quality of the marble, and regretted that it should
+have been spoiled.  But Michael Angelo still saw an angel in the ruin,
+and with his chisel and mallet he called out from it one of the finest
+pieces of statuary in Italy, the young David.
+
+The lonely island of Nantucket would not be considered a very favorable
+place to win success and fame.  But Maria Mitchell, on seventy-five
+dollars a year, as librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum, found time and
+opportunity to become a celebrated astronomer.  Lucretia Mott, one of
+America's foremost philanthropists and reformers, who made herself felt
+over a whole continent, gained much of her reputation as a preacher on
+Nantucket Island.
+
+"Why does not America have fine sculptors?" asked a romping girl, of
+Watertown, Mass., in 1842.  Her father, a physician, answered that he
+supposed "an American could be a stone-cutter, but that is a very
+different thing from being a sculptor."  "I think," said the plucky
+maiden, "that if no other American tries it I will."  She began her
+studies in Boston, and walked seven miles to and fro daily between her
+home and the city.  The medical schools in Boston would not admit her
+to study anatomy, so she had to go to St. Louis.  Subsequently she went
+to Rome, and there, during a long residence, and afterward, modeled and
+carved very beautiful statuary which made the name of Harriet G. Hosmer
+famous.  Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you
+are now wasting, dreaming of some far-off success, may be crowded with
+grand possibilities.
+
+Patrick Henry was called a lazy boy, a good-for-nothing farmer, and he
+failed as a merchant.  He was always dreaming of some far-off
+greatness, and never thought he could be a hero among the corn and
+tobacco and saddlebags of Virginia.  He studied law six weeks, when he
+put out his shingle.  People thought he would fail, but in his first
+case he showed that he had a wonderful power of oratory.  It then first
+dawned upon him that he could be a hero in Virginia.  From the time the
+Stamp Act was passed and Henry was elected to the Virginia House of
+Burgesses, and he had introduced his famous resolution against the
+unjust taxation of the American colonies, he rose steadily until he
+became one of the brilliant orators of America.  In one of his first
+speeches upon this resolution he uttered these words, which were
+prophetic of his power and courage: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the
+First his Cromwell, and George the Third--may profit by their example.
+If this be treason, make the most of it."
+
+The great natural philosopher, Faraday, who was the son of a
+blacksmith, wrote, when a young man, to Humphry Davy, asking for
+employment at the Royal Institution.  Davy consulted a friend on the
+matter.  "Here is a letter from a young man named Faraday, he has been
+attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal
+Institution--what can I do?"  "Do? put him to washing bottles; if he is
+good for anything he will do it directly; if he refuses he is good for
+nothing."  But the boy who could experiment in the attic of an
+apothecary shop with an old pan and glass vials during every moment he
+could snatch from his work saw an opportunity in washing bottles, which
+led to a professorship at the Royal Academy at Woolwich.  Tyndall said
+of this boy with no chance, "He is the greatest experimental
+philosopher the world has ever seen."  He became the wonder of his age
+in science.
+
+There is a legend of an artist who long sought for a piece of
+sandal-wood, out of which to carve a Madonna.  He was about to give up
+in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream
+he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was
+destined for the fire.  He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece from a
+log of common firewood.  Many of us lose great opportunities in life by
+waiting to find sandal-wood for our carvings, when they really lie
+hidden in the common logs that we burn.  One man goes through life
+without seeing chances for doing anything great, while another close
+beside him snatches from the same circumstances and privileges
+opportunities for achieving grand results.
+
+Anna Dickinson began life as a school-teacher.  Adelaide Neilson was a
+child's nurse.  Charlotte Cushman's parents were poor.  The renowned
+Jeanne d'Arc fed swine.  Christine Nilsson was a poor Swedish peasant,
+and ran barefoot in childhood.  Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor,
+overcame the prejudice against her sex and color, and pursued her
+profession in Italy.  Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, was the daughter
+of a poor man who taught school at two dollars per week.  These are but
+a few of the many who have struggled with fate and risen to distinction
+through their own personal efforts.
+
+Opportunities?  They are everywhere.  "America is another name for
+opportunities.  Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine
+Providence in behalf of the human race."  Never before were there such
+grand openings, such chances, such opportunities.  Especially is this
+true for girls and young women.  A new era is dawning for them.
+Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only
+a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter.
+
+When I hear of a young woman entering the medical profession, or
+beginning the study of law, or entering school with a view to teaching,
+I feel like congratulating her for thus asserting her individuality.
+
+We cannot all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
+Faraday, Edison, and Thompson.  We cannot all of us paint immortal
+pictures like an Angelo or a Raphael.  But we can all of us make our
+lives sublime, by _seizing common occasions and making them great_.
+What chance had the young girl, Grace Darling, to distinguish herself,
+living on those barren lighthouse rocks alone with her aged parents?
+But while her brothers and sisters, who moved to the cities to win
+wealth and fame, are not known to the world, she became more famous
+than a princess.  This poor girl did not need to go to London to see
+the nobility; they came to the lighthouse to see her.  Right at home
+this young girl had won fame which the regal heirs might envy, and a
+name which will never perish from the earth.  She did not wander away
+into dreamy distance for fame and fortune, but did her best where duty
+had placed her.
+
+If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants.  You will
+find that millions have the same wants.  The safest business is always
+connected with man's prime necessities.  He must have clothing and a
+dwelling; he must eat.  He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
+pleasure, luxuries, education, and culture.  Any man who can supply a
+great want of humanity, improve any methods which men use, supply any
+demand of comfort, or contribute in any way to their well-being, can
+make a fortune.
+
+"We cannot doubt," said Edward Everett, "that truths now unknown are in
+reserve to reward the patience and the labors of future lovers of
+truth, which will go as far beyond the brilliant discoveries of the
+last generation as these do beyond all that was known to the ancient
+world."
+
+          The golden opportunity
+  Is never offered twice; seize then the hour
+  When fortune smiles and duty points the way;
+  Nor shrink aside to 'scape the spectre fear,
+  Nor pause, though pleasure beckon from her bower;
+  But bravely bear thee onward to the goal.
+        ANON.
+
+  For the distant still thou yearnest,
+    And behold the good so near;
+  If to use the good thou learnest,
+    Thou wilt surely find it here.
+        GOETHE.
+
+  Do not, then, stand idly waiting
+    For some greater work to do;
+  Fortune is a lazy goddess--
+    She will never come to you.
+  Go and toil in any vineyard,
+    Do not fear to do or dare;
+  If you want a field of labor,
+    You can find it anywhere.
+        ELLEN H. GATES.
+
+  Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,
+    For the far-off, unattained and dim,
+  While the beautiful, all around thee lying
+    Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
+        HARRIET WINSLOW.
+
+  Work for the good that is nighest;
+    Dream not of greatness afar:
+  That glory is ever the highest
+    Which shines upon men as they are.
+        W. MORLEY PUNSHON.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS.
+
+Little strokes fell great oaks.--FRANKLIN.
+
+  Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
+  Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
+  And trifles, life.
+        YOUNG.
+
+  "Scorn not the slightest word or deed,
+    Nor deem it void of power;
+  There's fruit in each wind-wafted seed,
+    That waits its natal hour."
+
+It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in
+trifles.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+
+He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and
+little.--ECCLESIASTICUS.
+
+Often from our weakness our strongest principles of conduct are born;
+and from the acorn, which a breeze has wafted, springs the oak which
+defies the storm.--BULWER.
+
+The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.--EMERSON.
+
+Men are led by trifles.--NAPOLEON I.
+
+  "A pebble on the streamlet scant
+    Has turned the course of many a river;
+  A dewdrop on the baby plant
+    Has warped the giant oak forever."
+
+The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing.--SCOTCH
+PROVERB.
+
+"The bad thing about a little sin is that it won't stay little."
+
+  "A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,
+  And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;
+  A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,
+  And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way."
+
+
+"Arletta's pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of
+William the Conqueror," says Palgrave's "History of Normandy and
+England."  "Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of
+Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman
+dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: AGASSIZ]
+
+Small things become great when a great soul sees them.  Trifles light
+as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize
+the world.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the
+ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved
+forever.  We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man
+never saw, walked to the river's edge to find their food.
+
+The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when
+nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.
+
+It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic
+luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of
+the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless
+mental growth.  A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress
+of the human race more than ten centuries.
+
+Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute
+silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.
+
+The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an
+educated man to shame.  Returning home, an Indian discovered that his
+venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen.  After
+careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods.
+Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old,
+white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog.  The man
+told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the
+Indian had not even seen the one he described.  He asked the Indian how
+he could give such a minute description of the man whom he had never
+seen.  "I knew the thief was a little man," said the Indian, "because
+he rolled up a stone to stand on in order to reach the venison; I knew
+he was an old man by his short steps; I knew he was a white man by his
+turning out his toes in walking, which an Indian never does; I knew he
+had a short gun by the mark it left on the tree where he had stood it
+up; I knew the dog was small by his tracks and short steps, and that he
+had a bob-tail by the mark it left in the dust where he sat."
+
+Two drops of rain, falling side by side, were separated a few inches by
+a gentle breeze.  Striking on opposite sides of the roof of a
+court-house in Wisconsin, one rolled southward through the Rock River
+and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico; while the other entered
+successively the Fox River, Green Bay, Lake Michigan, the Straits of
+Mackinaw, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River,
+Lake Erie, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and
+finally reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  How slight the influence of
+the breeze, yet such was the formation of the continent that a trifling
+cause was multiplied almost beyond the power of figures to express its
+momentous effect upon the destinies of these companion raindrops.  Who
+can calculate the future of the smallest trifle when a mud crack swells
+to an Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold?  Who
+does not know that the act of a moment may cause a life's regret?  A
+trigger may be pulled in an instant, but the soul returns never.
+
+A spark falling upon some combustibles led to the invention of
+gunpowder.  Irritable tempers have marred the reputation of many a
+great man, as in the case of Edmund Burke and of Thomas Carlyle.  A few
+bits of seaweed and driftwood, floating on the waves, enabled Columbus
+to stay a mutiny of his sailors which threatened to prevent the
+discovery of a new world.  There are moments in history which balance
+years of ordinary life.  Dana could interest a class for hours on a
+grain of sand; and from a single bone, such as no one had ever seen
+before, Agassiz could deduce the entire structure and habits of an
+animal so accurately that subsequent discoveries of complete skeletons
+have not changed one of his conclusions.
+
+A cricket once saved a military expedition from destruction.  The
+commanding officer and hundreds of his men were going to South America
+on a great ship, and, through the carelessness of the watch, they would
+have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket
+which a soldier had brought on board.  When the little insect scented
+the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned
+them of their danger.
+
+"Strange that a little thing like that should cause a man so much
+pain!" exclaimed a giant, as he rolled in his hand and examined with
+eager curiosity the acorn which his friend the dwarf had obligingly
+taken from the huge eye into which it had fallen just as the colossus
+was on the point of shooting a bird perched in the branches of an oak.
+
+Sometimes a conversation, or a sentence in a letter, or a paragraph in
+an article, will help us to reproduce the whole character of the
+author; as a single bone, a fish scale, a fin, or a tooth, will enable
+the scientist and anatomist to reproduce the fish or the animal,
+although extinct for ages.
+
+By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.  A little boy
+in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a
+dike.  He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the
+water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a
+dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of
+passers-by.  His name is still held in grateful remembrance in Holland.
+
+The beetling chalk cliffs of England were built by rhizopods, too small
+to be clearly seen without the aid of a magnifying-glass.
+
+What was so unlikely as that throwing an empty wine-flask in the fire
+should furnish the first notion of a locomotive, or that the sickness
+of an Italian chemist's wife and her absurd craving for reptiles for
+food should begin the electric telegraph?
+
+Madame Galvani noticed the contraction of the muscles of a skinned frog
+which was accidentally touched at the moment her husband took a spark
+from an electrical machine.  She gave the hint which led to the
+discovery of galvanic electricity, now so useful in the arts and in
+transmitting vocal or written language.
+
+M. Louis Pasteur was usher in the Lyceum.  Thursdays he took the boys
+to walk.  A student took his microscope to examine insects, and allowed
+Pasteur to look through it.  This was the starting of the boy on the
+microscopic career which has made men wonder.  He was almost wild with
+enthusiasm at the new world which the microscope revealed.
+
+A stamp act to raise 60,000 pounds produced the American Revolution, a
+war that cost 100,000,000 pounds.  What mighty contests rise from
+trivial things!
+
+Congress met near a livery stable to discuss the Declaration of
+Independence.  The members, in knee breeches and silk stockings, were
+so annoyed by flies, which they could not keep away with their
+handkerchiefs, that it has been said they cut short the debate, and
+hastened to affix their signatures to the greatest document in history.
+
+"The fate of a nation," says Gladstone, "has often depended upon the
+good or bad digestion of a fine dinner."
+
+A young man once went to India to seek his fortune, but, finding no
+opening, he went to his room, loaded his pistol, put the muzzle to his
+head, and pulled the trigger.  But it did not go off.  He went to the
+window to point it in another direction and try it again, resolved that
+if the weapon went off he would regard it as a Providence that he was
+spared.  He pulled the trigger and it went off the first time.
+Trembling with excitement he resolved to hold his life sacred, to make
+the most of it, and never again to cheapen it.  This young man became
+General Robert Clive, who, with but a handful of European soldiers,
+secured to the East India Company and afterwards to Great Britain a
+great and rich country with two hundred millions of people.
+
+The cackling of a goose aroused the sentinels and saved Rome from the
+Gauls, and the pain from a thistle warned a Scottish army of the
+approach of the Danes.  "Had Acre fallen," said Napoleon, "I should
+have changed the face of the world."
+
+Henry Ward Beecher came within one vote of being elected superintendent
+of a railway.  If he had had that vote America would probably have lost
+its greatest preacher.  What a little thing fixes destiny!
+
+In the earliest days of cotton spinning, the small fibres would stick
+to the bobbins, and make it necessary to stop and clear the machinery.
+Although this loss of time reduced the earnings of the operatives, the
+father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full
+pay, as his machine never stopped.  "How is this, Dick?" asked Mr. Peel
+one day; "the on-looker tells me your bobbins are always clean."  "Ay,
+that they be," replied Dick Ferguson.  "How do you manage it, Dick?"
+"Why, you see, Meester Peel," said the workman, "it is sort o' secret!
+If I tow'd ye, yo'd be as wise as I am."  "That's so," said Mr. Peel,
+smiling; "but I'd give you something to know.  Could you make all the
+looms work as smoothly as yours?"  "Ivery one of 'em, meester," replied
+Dick.  "Well, what shall I give you for your secret?" asked Mr. Peel,
+and Dick replied, "Gi' me a quart of ale every day as I'm in the mills,
+and I'll tell thee all about it."  "Agreed," said Mr. Peel, and Dick
+whispered very cautiously in his ear, "Chalk your bobbins!"  That was
+the whole secret, and Mr. Peel soon shot ahead of all his competitors,
+for he made machines that would chalk their own bobbins.  Dick was
+handsomely rewarded with money instead of beer.  His little idea has
+saved the world millions of dollars.
+
+Trifles light as air often suggest to the thinking mind ideas which
+have revolutionized the world.
+
+A poor English boy was compelled by his employer to deposit something
+on board a ship about to start for Algiers, in accordance with the
+merchant's custom of interesting employees by making them put something
+at risk in his business and so share in the gain or loss of each common
+venture.  The boy had only a cat, which he had bought for a penny to
+catch mice in the garret where he slept.  In tears, he carried her on
+board the vessel.  On arriving at Algiers, the captain learned that the
+Dey was greatly annoyed by rats, and loaned him the cat.  The rats
+disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the
+captain would not sell until a very high price was offered.  With the
+purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of
+Tabby.  When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to
+find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the
+bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods.  The
+London merchant took the boy into partnership; the latter became very
+wealthy, and in the course of business loaned money to the Dey who had
+bought the cat.  As Lord Mayor of London, our cat merchant was
+knighted, and became the second man in the city,--Sir Richard
+Whittington.
+
+When John Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, went to the
+South Sea Islands, he took with him a single banana-tree from an
+English nobleman's conservatory; and now, from that single banana-tree,
+bananas are to be found throughout whole groups of islands.  Before the
+negro slaves in the West Indies were emancipated a regiment of British
+soldiers was stationed near one of the plantations.  A soldier offered
+to teach a slave to read on condition that he would teach a second, and
+that second a third, and so on.  This the slave faithfully carried out,
+though severely flogged by the master of the plantation.  Being sent to
+another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at
+length liberty was proclaimed throughout the island, and the Bible
+Society offered a New Testament to every negro who could read, the
+number taught through this slave's instrumentality was found to be no
+less than six hundred.
+
+A famous ruby was offered to the English government.  The report of the
+crown jeweler was that it was the finest he had ever seen or heard of,
+but that one of the "facets" was slightly fractured.  That invisible
+fracture reduced its value thousands of dollars, and it was rejected
+from the regalia of England.
+
+It was a little thing for the janitor to leave a lamp swinging in the
+cathedral at Pisa, but in that steady swaying motion the boy Galileo
+saw the pendulum, and conceived the idea of thus measuring time.
+
+"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," said Edison, "when
+the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of
+my fingers held just behind it.  That set me to thinking.  If I could
+record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface
+afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.  I determined
+to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants
+the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered.  That's
+the whole story.  The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a
+finger."
+
+It was a little thing for a cow to kick over a lantern left in a
+shanty, but it laid Chicago in ashes, and rendered homeless a hundred
+thousand people.
+
+You turned a cold shoulder but once, you made but one stinging remark,
+yet it lost you a friend forever.
+
+Some little weakness, some self-indulgence, a quick temper, want of
+decision, are little things, you say, when placed beside great
+abilities, but they have wrecked many a career.  The Parliament of
+Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative
+governments all over the world have come from King John signing the
+Magna Charta.
+
+Bentham says, "The turn of a sentence has decided many a friendship,
+and, for aught we know, the fate of many a kingdom."
+
+The sight of a stranded cuttlefish led Cuvier to an investigation which
+made him one of the greatest natural historians in the world.  The web
+of a spider suggested to Captain Brown the idea of a suspension bridge.
+A man, looking for a lost horse, picked up a stone in the Idaho
+mountains which led to the discovery of a rich gold mine.
+
+An officer apologized to General O. M. Mitchel, the astronomer, for a
+brief delay, saying he was only a few moments late.  "I have been in
+the habit of calculating the value of the thousandth part of a second,"
+was Mitchel's reply.
+
+A missing marriage certificate kept the hod-carrier of Hugh Miller from
+establishing his claim to the Earldom of Crawford.  The masons would
+call out, "John, Yearl of Crawford, bring us anither hod o' lime."
+
+Not long ago the great steamship Umbria was stopped in mid-Atlantic by
+a flaw in her engine shaft.
+
+The absence of a comma in a bill which passed through Congress several
+years ago cost our government a million dollars.  A single misspelled
+word prevented a deserving young man from obtaining a situation as
+instructor in a New England college.  A cinder on the eyeball will
+conquer a Napoleon.  Some little weakness, as lack of courtesy, want of
+decision, a bad temper, may nullify the labor of years.
+
+"I cannot see that you have made any progress since my last visit,"
+said a gentleman to Michael Angelo.  "But," said the sculptor, "I have
+retouched this part, polished that, softened that feature, brought out
+that muscle, given some expression to this lip, more energy to that
+limb, etc."  "But they are trifles!" exclaimed the visitor.  "It may be
+so," replied the great artist, "but trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle."
+
+That infinite patience which made Michael Angelo spend a week in
+bringing out a muscle in a statue with more vital fidelity to truth, or
+Gerhard Dow a day in giving the right effect to a dewdrop on a cabbage
+leaf, makes all the difference between success and failure.
+
+By scattering it upon a sloping field of grain so as to form, in
+letters of great size, "Effects of Gypsum," Franklin brought this
+fertilizer into general use in America.  By means of a kite he
+established principles in the science of electricity of such broad
+significance that they underlie nearly all the modern applications of
+that science, with probably boundless possibilities of development in
+the future.
+
+More than four hundred and fifty years have passed since Laurens Coster
+amused his children by cutting their names in the bark of trees, in the
+land of windmills, and the monks have laid aside forever their old
+trade of copying books.  From that day monarchies have crumbled, and
+Liberty, lifting up her head for the first time among the nations of
+the earth, has ever since kept pace with the march of her sister,
+Knowledge, up through the centuries.  Yet how simple was the thought
+which has borne such a rich harvest of benefit to mankind.
+
+As he carved the names of his prattling children it occurred to him
+that if the letters were made in separate blocks, and wet with ink,
+they would make clear printed impressions better and more rapidly than
+would the pen.  So he made blocks, tied them together with strings, and
+printed a pamphlet with the aid of a hired man, John Gutenberg.  People
+bought the pamphlets at a slight reduction from the price charged by
+the monks, supposing that the work was done in the old way.  Coster
+died soon afterward, but young Gutenberg kept the secret, and
+experimented with metals until he had invented the metal type.  In an
+obscure chamber in Strasburg he printed his first book.
+
+At about this time a traveler called upon Charles VII. of France, who
+was so afraid somebody would poison him that he dared eat but little,
+and made his servants taste of every dish of food before he ate any.
+He looked with suspicion upon the stranger; but when the latter offered
+a beautiful copy of the Bible for only seven hundred and fifty crowns,
+the monarch bought it at once.  Charles showed his Bible to the
+archbishop, telling him that it was the finest copy in the world,
+without a blot or mistake, and that it must have taken the copyist a
+lifetime to write it.  "Why!" exclaimed the archbishop in surprise, "I
+bought one exactly like it a few days ago."  It was soon learned that
+other rich people in Paris had bought similar copies.  The king traced
+the book to John Faust, of Strasburg, who had furnished Gutenberg money
+to experiment with.  The people said that Faust must have sold himself
+to the devil, and he only escaped burning at the stake by divulging the
+secret.
+
+William Caxton, a London merchant who went to Holland to purchase
+cloth, bought a few books and some type, and established a
+printing-office in Westminster Chapel, where he issued, in 1474, "The
+Game of Chess," the first book printed in England.
+
+The cry of the infant Moses attracted the attention of Pharaoh's
+daughter, and gave the Jews a lawgiver.  A bird alighting on the bough
+of a tree at the mouth of the cave where Mahomet lay hid turned aside
+his pursuers, and gave a prophet to many nations.  A flight of birds
+probably prevented Columbus from discovering this continent, for when
+he was growing anxious, Martin Alonzo Pinzon persuaded him to follow a
+flight of parrots toward the southwest; for to the Spanish seamen of
+that day it was good luck to follow in the wake of a flock of birds
+when on a voyage of discovery.  But for his change of course Columbus
+would have reached the coast of Florida.  "Never," wrote Humboldt, "had
+the flight of birds more important consequences."
+
+The children of a spectacle-maker placed two or more pairs of the
+spectacles before each other in play, and told their father that
+distant objects looked larger.  From this hint came the telescope.
+
+"Of what use is it?" people asked with a sneer, when Franklin told of
+his discovery that lightning and electricity are identical.  "What is
+the use of a child?" replied Franklin; "it may become a man."
+
+"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once," said Dr. Johnson,
+"will never do any."  Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee
+no good.
+
+Every day is a little life; and our whole life but a day repeated.
+Those that dare lose a day are dangerously prodigal, those that dare
+misspend it, desperate.  What is the happiness of your life made up of?
+Little courtesies, little kindnesses, pleasant words, genial smiles, a
+friendly letter, good wishes, and good deeds.  One in a million--once
+in a lifetime--may do a heroic action.  The atomic theory is the true
+one.  Many think common fractions vulgar, but they are the components
+of millions.
+
+He is a great man who sees great things where others see little things,
+who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Ruskin sees a poem in the
+rose or the lily, while the hod-carrier would perhaps not go a rod out
+of his way to see a sunset which Ruskin would feed upon for a year.
+
+Napoleon was a master of trifles.  To details which his inferior
+officers thought too microscopic for their notice he gave the most
+exhaustive attention.  Nothing was too small for his attention.  He
+must know all about the provisions, the horse fodder, the biscuits, the
+camp kettles, the shoes.  When the bugle sounded for the march to
+battle, every officer had his orders as to the exact route which he
+should follow, the exact day he was to arrive at a certain station, and
+the exact hour he was to leave, and they were all to reach the point of
+destination at a precise moment.  It is said that nothing could be more
+perfectly planned than his memorable march which led to the victory of
+Austerlitz, and which sealed the fate of Europe for many years.  He
+would often charge his absent officers to send him perfectly accurate
+returns, even to the smallest detail.  "When they are sent to me, I
+give up every occupation in order to read them in detail, and to
+observe the difference between one monthly return and another.  No
+young girl enjoys her novel as much as I do these returns."  The
+captain who conveyed Napoleon to Elba was astonished with his
+familiarity with all the minute details connected with the ship.
+Napoleon left nothing to chance, nothing to contingency, so far as he
+could possibly avoid it.  Everything was planned to a nicety before he
+attempted to execute it.
+
+Wellington too was "great in little things."  He knew no such things as
+trifles.  While other generals trusted to subordinates, he gave his
+personal attention to the minutest detail.  The history of many a
+failure could be written in three words, "Lack of detail."  How many a
+lawyer has failed from the lack of details in deeds and important
+papers, the lack of little words which seemed like surplusage, and
+which involved his clients in litigation, and often great losses!  How
+many wills are contested from the carelessness of lawyers in the
+omission or shading of words, or ambiguous use of language!
+
+Physicians often fail to make a reputation through their habitual
+blundering, carelessness in writing prescriptions, failure to give
+minute instruction.  The world is full of blunderers; business men fail
+from a disregard of trifles; they go to the bank to pay a note the day
+after it has gone to protest; they do not pay their bills promptly; do
+not answer their letters promptly or file them away accurately; their
+books do not quite balance; they do not know exactly how they stand,
+they have a contempt for details.
+
+"My rule of conduct has been that whatever is worth doing at all is
+worth doing well," said Nicolas Poussin, the great French painter.
+When asked the reason why he had become so eminent in a land of famous
+artists he replied, "Because I have neglected nothing."
+
+Not even Helen of Troy, it is said, was beautiful enough to spare the
+tip of her nose; and if Cleopatra's had been an inch shorter Mark
+Antony would never have become infatuated with her wonderful charms,
+and the blemish would have changed the history of the world.  Anne
+Boleyn's fascinating smile split the great Church of Rome in twain, and
+gave a nation an altered destiny.  Napoleon, who feared not to attack
+the proudest monarchs in their capitols, shrank from the political
+influence of one independent woman in private life, Madame de Sta�l.
+Had not Scott sprained his foot his life would probably have taken a
+different direction.
+
+Cromwell was about to sail for America when a law was passed
+prohibiting emigration.  At that time he was a profligate, having
+squandered all his property.  But when he found that he could not leave
+England he reformed his life.  Had he not been detained who can tell
+what the history of Great Britain would have been?
+
+When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that
+could be of little use to him, he answered, "It is in these useless and
+superfluous things that I am rich and happy."
+
+It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon's day.  Mites
+play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and
+furs, and mice in our pantries.  More than half our diseases are
+produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.
+
+Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice.
+There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the
+peace, the happiness, of a home.
+
+"We call the large majority of human lives obscure," says Bulwer,
+"presumptuous that we are!  How know we what lives a single thought
+retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?"
+
+The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe.
+From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each
+trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a
+Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the
+science of botany.  A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools
+by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat, and a prism, a lens, and a
+sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light
+and the origin of colors.  An eminent foreign savant called on Dr.
+Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in
+which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the
+doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray
+on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small
+balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory."  A burnt
+stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper.  A
+single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the
+sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving
+famine from Ireland again and again.
+
+It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and
+the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as
+Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people.  A cloud may hide
+the sun which it cannot extinguish.
+
+"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth."  "A look of
+vexation or a word coldly spoken, or a little help thoughtlessly
+withheld, may produce long issues of regret."
+
+It was but a little dispute, a little flash of temper, the trigger was
+pulled in an instant, but the soul returned never.
+
+A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from
+Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its
+action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished
+forever.
+
+  "For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
+  For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
+  For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,"
+
+says Poor Richard, "for want of a horse-shoe nail."
+
+A single remark dropped by an unknown person in the street led to the
+successful story of "The Bread-winners."  A hymn chanted by the
+barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter at Rome led to the famous
+"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
+
+"Do little things now," says a Persian proverb; "so shall big things
+come to thee by and by asking to be done."  God will take care of the
+great things if we do not neglect the little ones.
+
+"Words are things," says Byron, "and a small drop of ink, falling like
+dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps
+millions think."
+
+"I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony;" such
+were the words of ten ministers who in the year 1700 assembled at the
+village of Branford a few miles east of New Haven.  Each of the worthy
+fathers deposited a few books upon the table around which they were
+sitting; such was the founding of Yale College.
+
+"He that has a spirit of detail," says Webster, "will do better in life
+than many who figured beyond him in the university."
+
+The pyramid of knowledge is made up of little grains of information,
+little observations picked up from everywhere.
+
+For a thousand years Asia monopolized the secret of silk culture, and
+at Rome the product was sold for its weight in gold.  During the sixth
+century, at the request of Justinian, two Persian monks brought a few
+eggs from China to Europe in a hollow cane.  The eggs were hatched by
+means of heat, and Asia no longer held the monopoly of the silk
+business.
+
+In comparison with Ferdinand, preparing to lead forth his magnificent
+army in Europe's supreme contest with the Moors, how insignificant
+seemed the visionary expedition of Columbus, about to start in three
+small shallops across the unknown ocean.  But grand as was the triumph
+of Ferdinand, it now seems hardly worthy of mention in comparison with
+the wonderful achievement of the poor Genoese navigator.
+
+Only one hundred and ninety-two Athenians perished in the battle of
+Marathon, but Europe was saved from a host which is said to have drunk
+rivers dry, and to have shaken the solid earth as they marched.
+
+Great men are noted for their attention to trifles.  Goethe once asked
+a monarch to excuse him, during an interview, while he went to an
+adjoining room to jot down a stray thought.  Hogarth would make
+sketches of rare faces and characteristics upon his finger-nails upon
+the streets.  Indeed, to a truly great mind there are no little things.
+"The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you
+may see objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great
+axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances," said Bacon.
+Trifles light as air suggest to the keen observer the solution of
+mighty problems.  Bits of glass arranged to amuse children led to the
+discovery of the kaleidoscope.  Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize
+rubber by forgetting, until it became red hot, a skillet containing a
+compound which he had before considered worthless.  Confined in the
+house by typhoid fever, Helmholtz, with a little money which he had
+saved by great economy, bought a microscope which led him into the
+field of science where he became so famous.  A ship-worm boring a piece
+of wood suggested to Sir Isambard Brunei the idea of a tunnel under the
+Thames at London.  Tracks of extinct animals in the old red sandstone
+led Hugh Miller on and on until he became the greatest geologist of his
+time.  Sir Walter Scott once saw a shepherd boy plodding sturdily
+along, and asked him to ride.  This boy was George Kemp, who became so
+enthusiastic in his study of sculpture that he walked fifty miles and
+back to see a beautiful statue.  He did not forget the kindness of Sir
+Walter, and, when the latter died, threw his soul into the design of
+the magnificent monument erected in Edinburgh to the memory of the
+author of "Waverley."
+
+A poor boy applied for a situation at a bank in Paris, but was refused.
+As he left the door, he picked up a pin.  The bank president saw this,
+called the boy back, and gave him a situation from which he rose until
+he became the greatest banker of Paris,--Laffitte.
+
+It was the turning point in Theodore Parker's life when he picked up a
+stone to throw at a turtle.  Something within him said, "Don't do it,"
+and he didn't.  He went home and asked his mother what it was in him
+that said "Don't;" and she taught him the purpose of that inward
+monitor which he ever after chose as his guide.  It is said that David
+Hume became a deist by being appointed in a debating society to take
+the side of infidelity.  Voltaire could not erase from his mind the
+impression of a poem on infidelity committed at the age of five.  The
+"Arabian Nights" aroused the genius of Coleridge.  A Massachusetts
+soldier in the Civil War observed a bird hulling rice, and shot it;
+taking its bill for a model, he invented a hulling machine which has
+revolutionized the rice business.  A war between France and England,
+costing more than a hundred thousand lives, grew out of a quarrel as to
+which of two vessels should first be served with water.  The quarrel of
+two Indian boys over a grasshopper led to the "Grasshopper War."
+George IV. of England fell in a fit, and a village apothecary bled him,
+restoring him to consciousness.  The king made him his physician, a
+position of great honor and profit.
+
+Many a noble ship has stranded because of one defective timber, when
+all other parts were strong.  Guard the weak point.
+
+No object the eye ever beheld, no sound however slight caught by the
+ear, or anything once passing the turnstile of any of the senses, is
+ever let go.  The eye is a perpetual camera imprinting upon the
+sensitive mental plates, and packing away in the brain for future use
+every face, every tree, every plant, flower, hill, stream, mountain,
+every scene upon the street, in fact, everything which comes within its
+range.  There is a phonograph in our natures which catches, however
+thoughtless and transient, every syllable we utter, and registers
+forever the slightest enunciation, and renders it immortal.  These
+notes may appear a thousand years hence, reproduced in our descendants,
+in all their beautiful or terrible detail.
+
+All the ages that have been are rounded up into the small space we call
+"To-day."  Every life spans all that precedes it.  To-day is a book
+which contains everything that has transpired in the world up to the
+present moment.  The millions of the past whose ashes have mingled with
+the dust for centuries still live in their destinies through the laws
+of heredity.
+
+Nothing has ever been lost.  All the infinitesimals of the past are
+amassed into the present.
+
+The first acorn had wrapped up in it all the oak forests on the globe.
+
+"Least of all seeds, greatest of all harvests," seems to be one of the
+great laws of nature.  All life comes from microscopic beginnings.  In
+nature there is nothing small.  The microscope reveals as great a world
+below as the telescope above.  All of nature's laws govern the smallest
+atoms, and a single drop of water is a miniature ocean.
+
+The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, however large and
+strong all the others may be.  We are all inclined to be proud of our
+strong points, while we are sensitive and neglectful of our weaknesses.
+Yet it is our greatest weakness which measures our real strength.  A
+soldier who escapes the bullets of a thousand battles may die from the
+scratch of a pin, and many a ship has survived the shocks of icebergs
+and the storms of ocean only to founder in a smooth sea from holes made
+by tiny insects.  Drop by drop is instilled into the mind the poison
+which blasts many a precious life.
+
+How often do we hear people say, "Oh, it's only ten minutes, or twenty
+minutes, till dinner time; there's no use doing anything," or use other
+expressions of a like effect?  Why, it is just in these little spare
+bits of time, these odd moments, which most people throw away, that men
+who have risen have gained their education, written their books, and
+made themselves immortal.
+
+_Small things become great when a great soul sees them_.  The noble or
+heroic act of one man has sometimes elevated a nation.  Many an
+honorable career has resulted from a kind word spoken in season or the
+warm grasp of a friendly hand.
+
+  It is the little rift within the lute,
+  That by and by will make the music mute,
+  And, ever widening, slowly silence all.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+  "It was only a glad 'good-morning,'
+  As she passed along the way,
+  But it spread the morning's glory
+  Over the livelong day."
+
+  "Only a thought in passing--a smile, or encouraging word,
+  Has lifted many a burden no other gift could have stirred.
+          Only!--But then the onlys
+          Make up the mighty all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+SELF-MASTERY.
+
+          Give me that man
+  That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
+  In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+Strength of character consists of two things,--power of will and power
+of self-restraint.  It requires two things, therefore, for its
+existence,--strong feelings and strong command over them.--F. W.
+ROBERTSON.
+
+  "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
+  These three alone lead life to sovereign power."
+
+  The bravest trophy ever man obtained
+  Is that which o'er himself himself hath gained.
+        EARL OF STIRLING.
+
+Real glory springs from the conquest of ourselves; and without that the
+conqueror is naught but the veriest slave.--THOMSON.
+
+Whatever day makes man a slave takes half his worth away.--ODYSSEY.
+
+Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast.  Lead thine own captivity
+captive, and be Caesar within thyself.--THOMAS BROWNE.
+
+He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears,
+is more than a king.--MILTON.
+
+He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty: and he that ruleth
+his spirit than he that taketh a city.--BIBLE.
+
+Self-trust is of the essence of heroism.--EMERSON.
+
+  Man who man would be
+  Must rule the empire of himself.
+        P. B. SHELLEY.
+
+
+"Ah!  Diamond, you little know the mischief you have wrought," said Sir
+Isaac Newton, returning from supper to find that his dog had upset a
+lighted taper upon the laborious calculations of years, which lay in
+ashes before him.  Then he went calmly to work to reproduce them.  The
+man who thus excelled in self-mastery surpassed all his predecessors
+and contemporaries in mastering the laws of nature.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL]
+
+  "We rise by the things that are under our feet;
+  By what we have mastered of good or gain:
+  By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
+  And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The sun was high in the heavens when a man called at the house of
+Pericles to abuse him.  The man's anger knew no bounds.  He vented his
+spite in violent language until he paused from sheer exhaustion, and
+saw that it was quite dark without.  He turned to go home, when
+Pericles calmly called a servant, and said, "Bring a lamp and attend
+this man home."  Is any argument needed to show the superiority of
+Pericles?
+
+The gladiators who were trained to tight in the Coliseum were compelled
+to practice the most graceful postures of falling and the finest
+attitudes to assume in dying, in case they were vanquished.  They were
+obliged to eat food which would make the blood thick in order that they
+should not die quickly when wounded, thus giving the spectators
+prolonged gratification by the spectacle of their agonies.  Each had to
+take this oath: "We swear that we will suffer ourselves to be bound,
+scourged, burned, or killed by the sword, or whatever Eumolpus ordains,
+and thus, like freeborn gladiators, we religiously devote both our
+souls and our bodies to our master."  They were trained to exercise
+sublime self-control even when dying a cruel death.
+
+The American Minister at St. Petersburg was summoned one morning to
+save a young, dissolute, reckless American youth, Poe, from the
+penalties incurred in a drunken debauch.  By the Minister's aid young
+Poe returned to the United States.  Not long after this the author of
+the best story and poem competed for in the "Baltimore Visitor" was
+sent for, and behold, the youth who had taken both prizes was that same
+dissolute, reckless, penniless, orphan youth, who had been arrested in
+St. Petersburg,--pale, ragged, with no stockings, and with his
+threadbare but well brushed coat buttoned to the chin to conceal the
+lack of a shirt.  Young Poe took fresh courage and resolution, and for
+a while showed that he was superior to the appetite which was striving
+to drag him down.  But, alas, that fatal bottle! his mind was stored
+with riches, yet he died in moral poverty.  This was a soldier's
+epitaph:--
+
+  "Here lies a soldier whom all must applaud,
+  Who fought many battles at home and abroad!
+  But the hottest engagement he ever was in,
+  Was the conquest of self, in the battle of sin."
+
+
+In 1860, when a committee visited Abraham Lincoln at his home in
+Springfield, Ill., to notify him of his nomination as President, he
+ordered a pitcher of water and glasses, "that they might drink each
+other's health in the best beverage God ever gave to man."  "Let us,"
+he continued, "make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the
+temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets in
+church, and instances will be as rare in one case as the other."
+
+Burns exercised no control over his appetites, but gave them the rein:--
+
+  "Thus thoughtless follies laid him low
+  And stained his name."
+
+
+"The first and best of victories," says Plato, "is for a man to conquer
+himself; to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most
+shameful and vile."
+
+Self-control is at the root of all the virtues.  Let a man yield to his
+impulses and passions, and from that moment he gives up his moral
+freedom.
+
+"Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasurable," says Walter
+Scott, "and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever
+issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer."
+
+Stonewall Jackson, early in life, determined to conquer every weakness
+he had, physical, mental, and moral.  He held all of his powers with a
+firm hand.  To his great self-discipline and self-mastery he owed his
+success.  So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he
+could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter.  "I will not give
+in to the cold," he said.  For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he
+lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body
+because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the
+idea.  This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military
+Institute.  His doctor advised him to retire at nine o'clock; and, no
+matter where he was, or who was present, he always sought his bed on
+the minute.  He adhered rigidly through life to this stern system of
+discipline.  Such self-training, such self-conquest, gives one great
+power over others.  It is equal to genius itself.
+
+It is a good plan to form the habit of ranking our various qualities,
+marking our strongest point one hundred and all the others in
+proportion, in order to make the lowest mark more apparent, and
+enabling us to try to raise or strengthen it.  A man's industry, for
+example, may be his strongest point, one hundred, his physical courage
+may be fifty; his moral courage, seventy-five; his temper, twenty-five;
+with but ten for self-control,--which, if he has strong appetites and
+passions, will be likely to be the rock on which he will split.  He
+should strive in every way to raise it from one of the weakest
+qualities to one of the strongest.  It would take but two or three
+minutes a day to rank ourselves in such a table by noting the exercise
+of each faculty for the day.  If you have worked hard and faithfully,
+mark industry one hundred.  If you have lost your temper, and, in
+consequence, lost your self-control, and made a fool of yourself,
+indicate it by a low mark.  This will be an incentive to try to raise
+it the next day.  If you have been irritable, indicate it by a
+corresponding mark, and redeem yourself on the morrow.  If you have
+been cowardly where you should have been brave, hesitating where you
+should have shown decision, false where you should have been true,
+foolish where you should have been wise, tardy where you should have
+been prompt; if you have prevaricated where you should have told the
+exact truth; if you have taken the advantage where you should have been
+fair, have been unjust where you should have been just, impatient where
+you should have been patient, cross where you should have been
+cheerful, so indicate by your marks.  You will find this a great aid to
+character building.
+
+It is a subtle and profound remark of Hegel's that the riddle which the
+Sphinx, the Egyptian symbol of the mysteriousness of Nature, propounds
+to Oedipus is only another way of expressing the command of the Delphic
+oracle, "Know thyself."  And when the answer is given the Sphinx casts
+herself down from her rock.  When man knows himself, the mysteriousness
+of Nature and her terrors vanish.
+
+The command by the ancient oracle at Delphos is of eternal
+significance.  Add to it its natural complement--Help thyself--and the
+path to success is open to those who obey.
+
+_Guard your weak point_.  Moral contagion borrows fully half its
+strength from the weakness of its victims.  Have you a hot, passionate
+temper?  If so, a moment's outbreak, like a rat-hole in a dam, may
+flood all the work of years.  One angry word sometimes raises a storm
+that time itself cannot allay.  A single angry word has lost many a
+friend.
+
+A Quaker was asked by a merchant whom he had conquered by his patience
+how he had been able to bear the other's abuse, and replied: "Friend, I
+will tell thee.  I was naturally as hot and violent as thou art.  I
+observed that men in a passion always speak loud, and I thought if I
+could control my voice I should repress my passion.  I have therefore
+made it a rule never to let my voice rise above a certain key, and by a
+careful observance of this rule, I have, by the blessing of God,
+entirely mastered my natural tongue."  Mr. Christmas of the Bank of
+England explains that the secret of his self-control under very trying
+circumstances was due to a rule learned from the great Pitt, never to
+lose his temper during banking hours from nine to three.
+
+When Socrates found in himself any disposition to anger, he would check
+it by speaking low, in opposition to the motions of his displeasure.
+If you are conscious of being in a passion, keep your mouth shut, lest
+you increase it.  Many a person has dropped dead in a rage.  Fits of
+anger bring fits of disease.  "Whom the gods would destroy they first
+make mad."  "Keep cool," says Webster, "anger is not argument."  "Be
+calm in arguing," says George Herbert, "for fierceness makes error a
+fault, and truth discourtesy."
+
+To be angry with a weak man is to prove that you are not strong
+yourself.  "Anger," says Pythagoras, "begins with folly and ends with
+repentance."  You must measure the strength of a man by the power of
+the feelings he subdues, not by the power of those which subdue him.
+
+De Leon, a distinguished Spanish poet, after lying years in dungeons of
+the Inquisition, dreary, and alone, without light, for translating part
+of the Scriptures into his native tongue, was released and restored to
+his professorship.  A great crowd thronged to hear his first lecture,
+out of curiosity to learn what he might say about his imprisonment.
+But the great man merely resumed the lecture which had been so cruelly
+broken off five years before, just where he left it, with the words
+"Heri discebamus" (Yesterday we were teaching).  What a lesson in this
+remarkable example of self-control for those who allow their tongues to
+jabber whatever happens to be uppermost in their minds!
+
+Did you ever see a man receive a flagrant insult, and only grow a
+little pale, bite his quivering lip, and then reply quietly?  Did you
+ever see a man in anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock,
+mastering himself?  Have you not seen one bearing a hopeless daily
+trial remain silent and never tell the world what cankered his home
+peace?  That is strength.  "He who, with strong passions, remains
+chaste; he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in
+him, can be provoked, and yet restrain himself and forgive,--these are
+strong men, the spiritual heroes."
+
+"You will be remembered only as the man who broke my nose," said young
+Michael Angelo to the man Torrigiano, who struck him in anger.  What
+sublime self-control for a quick-tempered man!
+
+"You ask whether it would not be manly to resent a great injury," said
+Eardley Wilmot: "I answer that it would be manly to resent it, but it
+would be Godlike to forgive it."
+
+That man has conquered his tongue who can allow the ribald jest or
+scurrilous word to die unspoken on his lips, and maintain an indignant
+silence amid reproaches and accusations and sneers and scoffs.  "He is
+a fool who cannot be angry," says English, "but he is a wise man who
+will not."
+
+Peter the Great made a law in 1722 that a nobleman who should beat his
+slave should be regarded as insane, and a guardian appointed to look
+after his property and person.  This great monarch once struck his
+gardener, who took to his bed and died.  Peter, hearing of this,
+exclaimed with tears in his eyes, "Alas!  I have civilized my own
+subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet have I not been able to
+civilize or conquer myself."  The same monarch, when drunk, rushed upon
+Admiral Le Fort with a sword.  Le Fort, with great self-possession,
+bared his breast to receive the stroke.  This sobered Peter, and
+afterwards he asked the pardon of Le Fort.  Peter said, "I am trying to
+reform my country, and I am not yet able to reform myself."
+Self-conquest is man's last and greatest victory.
+
+A medical authority of highest repute affirms that excessive labor,
+exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of
+necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth and
+intemperance, are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none
+of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passion,--that men and women
+have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these, but that
+instances are very rare where people of irascible tempers live to
+extreme old age.
+
+It was the self-discipline of a man who had never looked upon war until
+he was forty that enabled Oliver Cromwell to create an army which never
+fought without annihilating, yet which retired into the ranks of
+industry as soon as the government was established, each soldier being
+distinguished from his neighbors only by his superior diligence,
+sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace.
+
+How sweet the serenity of habitual self-command!  When does a man feel
+more a master of himself than when he has passed through a sudden and
+severe provocation in silence or in undisturbed good humor?
+
+Whether teaching the rules of an exact morality, answering his corrupt
+judges, receiving sentence of death, or swallowing the poison, Socrates
+was still calm, quiet, undisturbed, intrepid.
+
+It is a great thing to have brains, but it is vastly greater to be able
+to command them.  The Duke of Wellington had great power over himself,
+although his natural temper was extremely irritable.  He remained at
+the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning
+of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful," although he
+knew that a desperate battle was awaiting him.  On the field of
+Waterloo he gave his orders at the most critical moments without the
+slightest excitement.
+
+Napoleon, having made his arrangements for the terrible conflict of the
+next day (Jena and Auerstadt), retired to his tent about midnight, and
+calmly sat down to draw up a plan of study and discipline for Madame
+Campan's female school.  "Keep cool, and you command everybody," says
+St. Just.
+
+  "He that would govern others first should be
+  The master of himself,"
+
+says Massinger.
+
+He who has mastered himself, who is his own Caesar, will be stronger
+than his passion, superior to circumstances, higher than his calling,
+greater than his speech.  Self-control is the generalship which turns a
+mob of raw recruits into a disciplined army.  The rough man has become
+the polished and dignified soldier, in other words, the man has got
+control of himself, and knows how to use himself.  The human race is
+under constant drill.  Our occupations, difficulties, obstacles,
+disappointments, if used aright, are the great schoolmasters which help
+us to possess ourselves.  The man who is master of himself will not be
+a slave to drudgery, but will keep in advance of his work.  He will not
+rob his family of that which is worth more than money or position; he
+will not be the slave of his occupation, not at the mercy of
+circumstances.  His methods and system will enable him to accomplish
+wonders, and yet give him leisure for self-culture.  The man who
+controls himself works to live rather than lives for work.
+
+The man of great self-control, the man who thinks a great deal and says
+little, who is self-centred, well balanced, carries a thousand times
+more weight than the man of weak will, always wavering and undecided.
+
+If a man lacks self-control he seems to lack everything.  Without it he
+can have no patience, no power to govern himself, he can have no
+self-reliance, for he will always be at the mercy of his strongest
+passion.  If he lacks self-control, the very backbone, pith, and nerve
+of character are lacking also.
+
+The discipline which is the main end in education is simply control
+acquired over one's mental faculties; without this discipline no man is
+a strong and accurate thinker.  "Prove to me," says Mrs. Oliphant,
+"that you can control yourself, and I'll say you're an educated man;
+and, without this, all other education is good for next to nothing."
+
+The wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, was a woman of a most fantastical and
+furious spirit.  At one time, having vented all the reproaches upon
+Socrates her fury could suggest, he went out and sat before the door.
+His calm and unconcerned behavior but irritated her so much the more;
+and, in the excess of her rage, she ran upstairs and emptied a vessel
+upon his head, at which he only laughed and said that "so much thunder
+must needs produce a shower."  Alcibiades his friend, talking with him
+about his wife, told him he wondered how he could bear such an
+everlasting scold in the same house with him.  He replied, "I have so
+accustomed myself to expect it, that it now offends me no more than the
+noise of carriages in the street."
+
+How many men have in their chain of character one weak link.  They may
+be weak in the link of truthfulness, politeness, trustworthiness,
+temper, chastity, temperance, courage, industry, or may have some other
+weakness which wrecks their success and thwarts a life's endeavor.  He
+who would succeed must hold all his faculties under perfect control;
+they must be disciplined, drilled, until they obey the will.
+
+Think of a young man just starting out in life to conquer the world
+being at the mercy of his own appetites and passions!  He cannot stand
+up and look the world in the face when he is the slave of what should
+be his own servants.  He cannot lead who is led.  There is nothing
+which gives certainty and direction to the life of a man who is not his
+own master.  If he has mastered all but one appetite, passion, or
+weakness, he is still a slave; it is the weakest point that measures
+the strength of character.
+
+Seneca, one of the greatest of the ancient philosophers, said that "we
+should every night call ourselves to account.  What infirmity have I
+mastered to-day? what passion opposed? what temptation resisted? what
+virtue acquired?" and then he follows with the profound truth that "our
+vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the
+shrift."  If you cannot at first control your anger, learn to control
+your tongue, which, like fire, is a good servant, but a hard master.
+
+Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks' silence.  There is many a man
+whose tongue might govern multitudes if he could only govern his
+tongue.  Anger, like too much wine, hides us from ourselves, but
+exposes us to others.
+
+General von Moltke, perhaps the greatest strategist of this century,
+had, as a foundation for his other talents, the power to "hold his
+tongue in seven languages."  A young man went to Socrates to learn
+oratory.  On being introduced, he talked so incessantly that Socrates
+asked for double fees.  "Why charge me double?" asked the young fellow.
+"Because," said the orator, "I must teach you two sciences: the one how
+to hold your tongue, the other how to speak."  The first is the more
+difficult.
+
+Half the actual trouble of life would be saved if people would remember
+that silence is golden, when they are irritated, vexed, or annoyed.
+
+To feel provoked or exasperated at a trifle, when the nerves are
+exhausted, is, perhaps, natural to us in our imperfect state.  But why
+put into the shape of speech the annoyance which, once uttered, is
+remembered; which may burn like a blistering wound, or rankle like a
+poisoned arrow?  If a child be crying or a friend capricious, or a
+servant unreasonable, be careful what you say.  Do not speak while you
+feel the impulse of anger, for you will be almost certain to say too
+much, to say more than your cooler judgment will approve, and to speak
+in a way that you will regret.  Be silent until the "sweet by and by,"
+when you will be calm, rested, and self-controlled.
+
+"Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words?  There is more hope of a
+fool than of him."
+
+"Silence," says Zimmerman, "is the safest response for all the
+contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy."
+
+In rhetoric, as Emerson truly says, this art of omission is the chief
+secret of power.  "Everything tells in favor of the man who talks but
+little.  The presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in point
+of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is that he
+is very superior indeed."  Grant was master of the science of silence.
+
+The self-controlled are self-possessed.  "Sir, the house is on fire!"
+shrieked a frightened servant, running into Dr. Lawson's study.  "Go
+and tell your mistress," said the preoccupied professor, without
+looking up from the book he was reading; "you know I have no charge of
+household matters."  A woman whose house was on fire threw a
+looking-glass out of the window, and carried a pair of andirons several
+rods to a safe place beside a stone wall.  "Presence of mind and
+courage in distress are more than armies to procure success."
+
+Xenophon tells us that at one time the Persian princes had for their
+teachers the four best men in the kingdom.  (1) The wisest man to teach
+wisdom.  (2) The bravest to teach courage.  (3) The most just to train
+the moral nature.  (4) The most temperate to teach self-control.  We
+have them all in the Bible, and in Christ our teacher, an example.  "If
+it is a small sacrifice to discontinue the use of wine," said Samuel J.
+May, "do it for the sake of others; if it is a great sacrifice, do it
+for your own sake."  How many of nature's noblemen, who might be kings
+if they could control themselves, drink away their honor, reputation,
+and money in glasses of "wet damnation," more costly than the vinegar
+in which Cleopatra dissolved her pearls.
+
+Experience shows that, quicker than almost any other physical agency,
+alcohol breaks down a man's power of self-control.  But the physical
+evils of intemperance, great as they are, are slight, compared with the
+moral injury it produces.  It is not simply that vices and crimes
+almost inevitably follow the loss of rational self-direction, which is
+the invariable accompaniment of intoxication; manhood is lowered and
+finally lost by the sensual tyranny of appetite.  The drunken man has
+given up the reins of his nature to a fool or a fiend, and he is driven
+fast to base or unutterably foolish ends.
+
+With almost palsied hand, at a temperance meeting, John B. Gough signed
+the pledge.  For six days and nights in a wretched garret, without a
+mouthful of food, with scarcely a moment's sleep, he fought the fearful
+battle with appetite.  Weak, famished, almost dying, he crawled into
+the sunlight; but he had conquered the demon, which had almost killed
+him.  Gough used to describe the struggles of a man who tried to leave
+off using tobacco.  He threw away what he had, and said that was the
+end of it; but no, it was only the beginning of it.  He would chew
+camomile, gentian, toothpicks, but it was of no use.  He bought another
+plug of tobacco and put it in his pocket.  He wanted a chew awfully,
+but he looked at it and said, "You are a weed, and I am a _man_.  I'll
+master you if I die for it;" and he did, while carrying it in his
+pocket daily.
+
+Natural appetites, if given rein, will not only grow monstrous and
+despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a
+ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and
+then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock
+his efforts to free himself from this slavery.  The victim of strong
+drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he becomes half
+beast, or half demon.  Oh, the silent, suffering tongues that whisper
+"Don't," but the will lies prostrate, and the debauch goes on.  What a
+mute confession of degradation there is in the very appearance of a
+confirmed sot.  Behold a man no longer in possession of himself; the
+flesh is master; the spiritual nature is sunk in the mire of
+sensuality, and the mental faculties are a mere mob of enfeebled powers
+under bondage to a bestial or mad tyrant.  As Challis says:--
+
+  "Once the demon enters,
+    Stands within the door;
+  Peace and hope and gladness
+    Dwell there nevermore."
+
+
+Many persons are intemperate in their feelings; they are emotionally
+prodigal.  Passion is intemperance; so is caprice.  There is an
+intemperance even in melancholy and mirth.  The temperate man is not
+mastered by his moods; he will not be driven or enticed into excess;
+his steadfast will conquers despondency, and is not unbalanced by
+transient exhilarations, for ecstasy is as fatal as despair.  Temper is
+subjected to reason and conscience.  How many people excuse themselves
+for doing wrong or foolish acts by the plea that they have a quick
+temper.  But he who is king of himself rules his temper, turning its
+very heat and passion into energy that works good instead of evil.
+Stephen Girard, when he heard of a clerk with a strong temper, was glad
+to employ him.  He believed that such persons, taught self-control,
+were the best workers.  Controlled temper is an element of strength;
+wisely regulated, it expends itself as energy in work, just as heat in
+an engine is transmuted into force that drives the wheels of industry.
+Cromwell, William the Silent, Wordsworth, Faraday, Washington, and
+Wellington were men of prodigious tempers, but they were also men whose
+self-control was nearly perfect.
+
+George Washington's faculties were so well balanced and combined that
+his constitution was tempered evenly with all the elements of activity,
+and his mind resembled a well organized commonwealth.  His passions,
+which had the intensest vigor, owed allegiance to reason; and with all
+the fiery quickness of his spirit, his impetuous and massive will was
+held in check by consummate judgment.  He had in his composition a calm
+which was a balance-wheel, and which gave him in moments of highest
+excitement the power of self-control, and enabled him to excel in
+patience, even when he had most cause for disgust.
+
+It was said by an enemy of William the Silent that an arrogant or
+indiscreet word never fell from his lips.
+
+How brilliantly could Carlyle write of heroism, courage, self-control,
+and yet fly into a rage at a rooster crowing in a neighbor's yard.
+
+A self-controlled mind is a free mind, and freedom is power.
+
+"I call that mind free," says Channing, "which jealously guards its
+intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does
+not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens
+itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as
+an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still
+more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad,
+not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt its own energies.  I call
+that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances,
+which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the
+creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own
+improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles
+which it has deliberately espoused.  I call that mind free which
+protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not
+cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher
+tribunal than man's, which respects a higher law than fashion, which
+respects itself too much to be the slave or tool of the many or the
+few.  I call that mind free which through confidence in God and in the
+power of virtue has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no
+menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults,
+and possesses itself though all else be lost.  I call that mind free
+which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat
+itself and copy the past, which does not live on its old virtues, which
+does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is
+behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and
+rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.  I call
+that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself
+from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as
+nobler than the empire of the world."
+
+  Be free--not chiefly from the iron chain
+  But from the one which passion forges--be
+  The master of thyself.  If lost, regain
+  The rule o'er chance, sense, circumstance.  Be free.
+        EPHRAIM PEABODY.
+
+
+"It is not enough to have great qualities," says La Rochefoucauld; "we
+should also have the management of them."  No man can call himself
+educated until every voluntary muscle obeys his will.
+
+Every human being is conscious of two natures.  One is ever reaching up
+after the good, the true, and the noble,--is aspiring after all that
+uplifts, elevates, and purifies.  It is the God-side of man, the image
+of the Creator, the immortal side, the spiritual side.  It is the
+gravitation of the soul faculties toward their Maker.  The other is the
+bestial side which gravitates downward.  It does not aspire, it
+grovels; it wallows in the mire of sensualism.  Like the beast, it
+knows but one law, and is led by only one motive, self-indulgence,
+self-gratification.  When neither hungry nor thirsty, or when gorged
+and sated by over-indulgence, it lies quiet and peaceful as a lamb, and
+we sometimes think it subdued.  But when its imperious passion
+accumulates, it clamors for satisfaction.  You cannot reason with it,
+for it has no reason, only an imperious instinct for gratification.
+You cannot appeal to its self-respect, for it has none.  It cares
+nothing for character, for manliness, for the spiritual.
+
+These two natures are ever at war, one pulling heavenward, the other,
+earthward.  Nor do they ever become reconciled.  Either may conquer,
+but the vanquished never submits.  The higher nature may be compelled
+to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always
+rebels and enters its protest.  It can never forget that it bears the
+image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism.
+The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed.  If
+the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to
+look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he could
+only hush the voice which haunts him and condemns him when he is bound
+in slavery, if he could only enjoy his indulgences without the mockery
+of remorse, he thinks he would be content to remain a brute.  But the
+ghost of his better self rises as he is about to partake of his
+delight, and robs him of the expected pleasure.  He has sold his better
+self for pleasure which is poison, and he cannot lose the consciousness
+of the fearful sacrifice he has made.  The banquet may be ready, but
+the hand on the wall is writing his doom.
+
+  Give me that soul, superior power,
+  That conquest over fate,
+  Which sways the weakness of the hour,
+  Rules little things as great:
+  That lulls the human waves of strife
+  With words and feelings kind,
+  And makes the trials of our life
+  The triumphs of our mind.
+        CHARLES SWAIN.
+
+  Reader, attend--whether thy soul
+    Soars fancy's flights above the pole,
+    Or darkly grubs this earthly hole,
+          In low pursuits:
+  Know prudent, cautious self-control
+          Is wisdom's root.
+        BURNS.
+
+The king is the man who can.--CARLYLE.
+
+I have only one counsel for you--Be master.--NAPOLEON.
+
+  Ah, silly man, who dream'st thy honor stands
+  In ruling others, not thyself.  Thy slaves
+  Serve thee, and thou thy slave: in iron bands
+  Thy servile spirit, pressed with wild passions, raves.
+  Wouldst thou live honored?--clip ambition's wing:
+  To reason's yoke thy furious passions bring:
+  Thrice noble is the man who of himself is king.
+        PHINEAS FLETCHER.
+
+  "Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
+  Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
+  But in ourselves are triumph and defeat."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
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+Architects of Fate, or, Steps to Success and Power
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Architects of Fate
+       or, Steps to Success and Power
+
+Author: Orison Swett Marden
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2007 [EBook #21622]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCHITECTS OF FATE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="Phillips Brooks" BORDER="2" WIDTH="360" HEIGHT="526">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 360px">
+Phillips Brooks
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"The best-loved man in New England."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"The ideal life, the life full of completion, haunts
+us all.  We feel the thing we
+ought to be beating beneath the thing we are."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"<I>First, be a man.</I>"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE
+</H1>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+OR, STEPS TO SUCCESS AND POWER
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A BOOK DESIGNED TO INSPIRE YOUTH TO<BR>
+CHARACTER BUILDING, SELF-CULTURE<BR>
+AND NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ORISON SWETT MARDEN
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+AUTHOR OF "PUSHING TO THE FRONT<BR>
+OR, SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES"<BR>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+<I>ILLUSTRATED WITH SIXTEEN FINE<BR>
+PORTRAITS OF EMINENT PERSONS</I><BR>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"All are architects of fate<BR>
+Working in these walls of time."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Our to-days and yesterdays<BR>
+Are the blocks with which we build."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Let thy great deed be thy prayer to thy God."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+TORONTO
+<BR>
+WILLIAM BRIGGS
+<BR>
+WESLEY BUILDINGS
+<BR>
+MONTREAL: C. W. COATES
+<BR>
+HALIFAX: S. F. HUESTIS
+<BR>
+1897
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Copyright, 1895,
+<BR>
+BY ORISON SWETT MARDEN.
+<BR><BR>
+<I>All rights reserved.</I>
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PREFACE.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The demand for more than a dozen editions of "Pushing to the Front"
+during its first year and its universally favorable reception, both at
+home and abroad, have encouraged the author to publish this companion
+volume of somewhat similar scope and purpose.  The two books were
+prepared simultaneously, and the story of the first, given in its
+preface, applies equally well to this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Inspiration to character-building and worthy achievement is the keynote
+of the present volume, its object, to arouse to honorable exertion
+youth who are drifting without aim, to awaken dormant ambitions in
+those who have grown discouraged in the struggle for success, to
+encourage and stimulate to higher resolve those who are setting out to
+make their own way, with perhaps neither friendship nor capital other
+than a determination to get on in the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nothing is so fascinating to a youth with high purpose, life, and
+energy throbbing in his young blood as stories of men and women who
+have brought great things to pass.  Though these themes are as old as
+the human race, yet they are ever new, and more interesting to the
+young than any fiction.  The cry of youth is for life! more life!  No
+didactic or dogmatic teaching, however brilliant, will capture a
+twentieth-century boy, keyed up to the highest pitch by the pressure of
+an intense civilization.  The romance of achievement under
+difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant ends; the story of
+how great men started, their struggles, their long waitings, amid want
+and woe, the obstacles overcome, the final triumphs; examples, which
+explode excuses, of men who have seized common situations and made them
+great, of those of average capacity who have succeeded by the use of
+ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose:
+these will most inspire the ambitious youth.  The author teaches that
+there are bread and success for every youth under the American flag who
+has the grit to seize his chance and work his way to his own loaf; that
+the barriers are not yet erected which declare to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther"; that the most forbidding circumstances
+cannot repress a longing for knowledge, a yearning for growth; that
+poverty, humble birth, loss of limbs or even eyesight, have not been
+able to bar the progress of men with grit; that poverty has rocked the
+cradle of the giants who have wrung civilization from barbarism, and
+have led the world up from savagery to the Gladstones, the Lincolns,
+and the Grants.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The book shows that it is the man with one unwavering aim who cuts his
+way through opposition and forges to the front; that in this electric
+age, where everything is pusher or pushed, he who would succeed must
+hold his ground and push hard; that what are stumbling-blocks and
+defeats to the weak and vacillating, are but stepping-stones and
+victories to the strong and determined.  The author teaches that every
+germ of goodness will at last struggle into bloom and fruitage, and
+that true success follows every right step.  He has tried to touch the
+higher springs of the youth's aspiration; to lead him to high ideals;
+to teach him that there is something nobler in an occupation than
+merely living-getting or money-getting; that a man may make millions
+and be a failure still; to caution youth not to allow the maxims of a
+low prudence, dinned daily into his ears in this money-getting age, to
+repress the longings for a higher life; that the hand can never safely
+reach higher than does the heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The author's aim has been largely through concrete illustrations which
+have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in
+a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more
+pertinent than novel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The author wishes to acknowledge valuable assistance from Mr. Arthur W.
+Brown, of W. Kingston, R. I.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+O. S. M.
+<BR>
+43 BOWDOIN ST., BOSTON, MASS.
+<BR>
+December 2, 1896.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS.
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="100%">
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="15%">CHAPTER</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="85%">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap01">WANTED&mdash;A MAN</A>
+<BR>
+God after a <I>man</I>.  Wealth is nothing, fame is nothing.  <I>Manhood is
+everything</I>.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">DARE</A>
+<BR>
+Dare to live thy creed.  Conquer your place in the world.  All things
+serve a brave soul.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">THE WILL AND THE WAY</A>
+<BR>
+Find a way or make one.  Everything is either pusher or pushed.  The
+world always listens to a man with a will in him.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES</A>
+<BR>
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to recognition through detraction, calumny, and persecution.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">USES OR OBSTACLES</A>
+<BR>
+The Great Sculptor cares little for the human block as such; it is the
+statue He is after; and He will blast, hammer, and chisel with poverty,
+hardships, anything to get out the man.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">ONE UNWAVERING AIM</A>
+<BR>
+Find your purpose and fling your life out to it.  Try to be somebody
+with all your might.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VII.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap07">SOWING AND REAPING</A>
+<BR>
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.
+<I>Start right</I>.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VIII.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap08">SELF-HELP</A>
+<BR>
+Self-made or never made.  The greatest men have risen from the ranks.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IX.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap09">WORK AND WAIT</A>
+<BR>
+Don't risk a life's superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">X.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap10">CLEAR GRIT</A>
+<BR>
+The goddess of fame or of fortune has been won by many a poor boy who
+had no friends, no backing, or anything but pure grit and invincible
+purpose to commend him.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XI. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap11">THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD</A>
+<BR>
+Manhood is above all riches and overtops all titles; character is
+greater than any career.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XII.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap12">WEALTH IN ECONOMY</A>
+<BR>
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach,
+are disagreeable; but debt is infinitely worse than all."
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XIII.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap13">RICH WITHOUT MONEY</A>
+<BR>
+To have nothing is not poverty.  Whoever uplifts civilization is rich
+though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XIV.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap14">OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE</A>
+<BR>
+"How speaks the present hour?  <I>Act</I>."  Don't wait for great
+opportunities.  <I>Seize common occasions and make them great</I>.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XV.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap15">THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS</A>
+<BR>
+There is nothing small in a world where a mud-crack swells to an
+Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XVI.  </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap16">SELF-MASTERY</A>
+<BR>
+Guard your weak point.  Be lord over yourself.
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+LIST OF PORTRAITS.
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">CHAP.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="80%">&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">  I. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-front">Phillips Brooks </A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top"><I>Frontispiece</I></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     II. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-010">Oliver Hazard Perry</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">    III. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-038">Walter Scott</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     IV. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-060">William Hickling Prescott</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">      V. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-086">John Bunyan</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     VI. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-112">Richard Arkwright</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">    VII. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-124">Victor Hugo</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">   VIII. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+James A. Garfield (missing from book)
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     IX. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-166">Thomas Alva Edison</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">      X. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-186">Andrew Jackson</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     XI. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">    XII. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-226">Alexander Hamilton</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">   XIII. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-238">Ralph Waldo Emerson</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">    XIV. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-256">Thomas Jefferson</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">     XV. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-268">Louis Agassiz</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">    XVI. </TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#img-288">James Russell Lowell</A>
+</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE.
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+WANTED&mdash;A MAN.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Wanted; men:<BR>
+Not systems fit and wise,<BR>
+Not faiths with rigid eyes,<BR>
+Not wealth in mountain piles,<BR>
+Not power with gracious smiles,<BR>
+Not even the potent pen:<BR>
+Wanted; men."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and
+know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a
+man.&mdash;JEREMIAH.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us?  We want a man!
+Don't look so far for this man.  You have him at hand.  This man,&mdash;it
+is you, it is I, it is each one of us!&#8230;  How to constitute one's
+self a man?  Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
+easier, if one wills it.&mdash;ALEXANDRE DUMAS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'Tis life, not death for which we pant!<BR>
+'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant:<BR>
+More life and fuller, that we want."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I do not wish in attempting to paint a man to describe an air-fed,
+unimpassioned, impossible ghost.  My eyes and ears are revolted by any
+neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+But nature, with a matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born,<BR>
+And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn;<BR>
+She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine,<BR>
+And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?"<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ELIZA COOK.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"In a thousand cups of life," says Emerson, "only one is the right
+mixture.  The fine adjustment of the existing elements, where the
+well-mixed man is born with eyes not too dull, nor too good, with fire
+enough and earth enough, capable of receiving impressions from all
+things, and not too susceptible, then no gift need be bestowed on him.
+He brings his fortune with him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Diogenes sought with a lantern at noontide in ancient Athens for a
+perfectly honest man, and sought in vain.  In the market place he once
+cried aloud, "Hear me, O men;" and, when a crowd collected around him,
+he said scornfully: "I called for men, not pygmies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world has a standing advertisement over the door of every
+profession, every occupation, every calling; "Wanted&mdash;A Man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
+has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
+though all the world say "Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
+permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
+manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one facility to
+stunt or paralyze his other faculties.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
+estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
+living.  Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and
+culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A thousand pulpits vacant in a single religious denomination, a
+thousand preachers standing idle in the market place, while a thousand
+church committees scour the land for men to fill those same vacant
+pulpits, and scour in vain, is a sufficient indication, in one
+direction at least, of the largeness of the opportunities of the age,
+and also of the crying need of good men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little
+defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his
+powers.  Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any part of
+his nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development,
+who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow
+specialty, and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and
+die.  Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of
+things.  Wanted, a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who
+does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day
+life; a man who prefers substance to show, who regards his good name as
+a priceless treasure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
+whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a
+tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of
+nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as
+himself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, but he also calls
+him to be intelligent and skillful and strong and brave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world wants a man who is educated all over; whose nerves are
+brought to their acutest sensibility, whose brain is cultured, keen,
+incisive, penetrating, broad, liberal, deep; whose hands are deft;
+whose eyes are alert, sensitive, microscopic, whose heart is tender,
+broad, magnanimous, true.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The whole world is looking for such a man.  Although there are millions
+out of employment, yet it is almost impossible to find just the right
+man in almost any department of life.  Every profession and every
+occupation has a standing advertisement all over the world: "Wanted&mdash;A
+Man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on education, says: "According to the
+order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the
+profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the
+duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices
+that have a relation to him.  It matters little to me whether my pupil
+be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.  Nature has destined
+us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination
+concerning society.  To live is the profession I would teach him.  When
+I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a
+lawyer, nor a divine.  <I>Let him first be a man</I>; Fortune may remove him
+from one rank to another as she pleases, he will be always found in his
+place."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A little, short doctor of divinity in a large Baptist convention stood
+on a step and said he thanked God he was a Baptist.  The audience could
+not hear and called "Louder."  "Get up higher," some one said.  "I
+can't," he replied.  "To be a Baptist is as high as one can get."  But
+there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
+<I>man</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Emerson says, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he
+rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty?
+is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but is he anybody?
+does he stand for something?  He must be good of his kind.  That is all
+that Talleyrand, all that State Street, all that the common sense of
+mankind asks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Garfield was asked as a young boy, "what he meant to be," he
+answered: "First of all, I must make myself a man, if I do not succeed
+in that, I can succeed in nothing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Montaigne says our work is not to train a soul by itself alone, nor a
+body by itself alone, but to train a man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
+animals.  To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
+coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits.  They must
+have a robustness of health.  Mere absence of disease is not health.
+It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life
+and beauty to the valley below.  Only he is healthy who exults in mere
+animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding
+pulse throughout his body, who feels life in every limb, as dogs do
+when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of
+ice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Pope, the poet, was with Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, one day, when
+the latter's nephew, a Guinea slave-trader, came into the room.
+"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two
+greatest men in the world."  "I don't know how great men you may be,"
+said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks.  I have often bought
+a much better man than either of you, all muscles and bones, for ten
+guineas."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sydney Smith said, "I am convinced that digestion is the great secret
+of life, and that character, virtue and talents, and qualities are
+powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie crust, and rich soups.  I have
+often thought I could feed or starve men into virtues or vices, and
+affect them more powerfully with my instruments of torture than
+Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What more glorious than a magnificent manhood, animated with the
+bounding spirits of overflowing health?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a sad sight to see thousands of students graduated every year
+from our grand institutions, whose object is to make stalwart,
+independent, self-supporting men, turned out into the world saplings
+instead of stalwart oaks, "memory-glands" instead of brainy men,
+helpless instead of self-supporting, sickly instead of robust, weak
+instead of strong, leaning instead of erect.  "So many promising
+youths, and never a finished man!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of
+the body.  A peevish, snarling, ailing man cannot develop the vigor and
+strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust, jolly
+man.  There is an inherent love in the human mind for wholeness, a
+demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an
+inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency.  Nature too
+demands that man be ever at the top of his condition.  The giant's
+strength with the imbecile's brain will not be characteristic of the
+coming man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man has been a dwarf of himself, but a higher type of manhood stands at
+the door of this age knocking for admission.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave
+reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes,
+and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a
+while the whole sea is there and beyond it, so now and then there comes
+a man head and shoulders above his fellow-men, showing that Nature has
+not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man will overtop
+the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points
+of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a
+nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait
+of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.  So the coming man will
+be a composite, many in one.  He will absorb into himself not the
+weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other
+types of men.  He will be a man raised to the highest power.  He will
+be self-centred, equipoised, and ever master of himself.  His
+sensibility will not be deadened or blunted by violation of nature's
+laws.  His whole character will be impressible, and will respond to the
+most delicate touches of nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a piece of work&mdash;this coming man!  "How noble in reason.  How
+infinite in faculties.  In form and motion how express and admirable,
+in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.  The
+beauty of the world.  The paragon of animals."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first requisite of all education and discipline should be
+man-timber.  Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
+Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or
+an exquisite carving.  But it must become timber first.  Time and
+patience develop the sapling into the tree.  So through discipline,
+education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy
+mental, moral, physical timber.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What an aid to character building would be the determination of the
+young man in starting out in life to consider himself his own bank;
+that his notes will be accepted as good or bad, and will pass current
+everywhere or be worthless, according to his individual reputation for
+honor and veracity; that if he lets a note go to protest, his bank of
+character will be suspected; if he lets two or three go to protest,
+public confidence will be seriously shaken; that if they continue to go
+to protest, his reputation will be lost and confidence in him ruined.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every
+statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he
+makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be
+kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other
+men's time, if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure,
+feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate
+a hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a
+stand at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost
+unlimited credit and the confidence of all, and would have developed
+into noble man-timber.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a
+continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce, compared
+with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the
+accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with the fear of
+exposure, with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no
+stain of dishonor?  To have done no man a wrong; to have put your
+signature to no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not
+have been an attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within
+arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire
+and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;&mdash;<I>this is to
+be a man</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"He that of such a height hath built his mind,<BR>
+And reared the dwelling of his thought so strong<BR>
+As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame<BR>
+Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind<BR>
+Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong<BR>
+His settled peace, or to disturb the same;<BR>
+What a fair seat hath he; from whence he may<BR>
+The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">[<I>Lines found in one of the books of Beecher's Library.</I>]</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man is never so happy as when he is <I>totus in se</I>; as when he
+suffices to himself, and can walk without crutches or a guide.  Said
+Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as much out of myself as could be made
+of the stuff, and no man should require more."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man is the only great thing in the universe.  All the ages have been
+trying to produce a perfect model.  Only one complete man has yet been
+evolved.  The best of us are but prophecies of what is to come.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">What constitutes a state?</SPAN><BR>
+Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Thick wall or moated gate;</SPAN><BR>
+Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Not bays and broad-armed ports,</SPAN><BR>
+Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Not starred and spangled courts,</SPAN><BR>
+Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">No: men, high-minded men,</SPAN><BR>
+With powers as far above dull brutes endued<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">In forest, brake, or den,</SPAN><BR>
+As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude,&mdash;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Men who their duties know,</SPAN><BR>
+But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Prevent the long-aimed blow,</SPAN><BR>
+And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">WILLIAM JONES.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+God give us men.  A time like this demands<BR>
+Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands:<BR>
+Men whom the lust of office does not kill;<BR>
+Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;<BR>
+Men who possess opinions and a will;<BR>
+Men who have honor&mdash;men who will not lie;<BR>
+Men who can stand before a demagogue<BR>
+And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;<BR>
+Tall men sun-crowned, who live above the fog<BR>
+In public duty, and in private thinking.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ANON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,<BR>
+And let in manhood&mdash;let in happiness;<BR>
+Admit the boundless theatre of thought<BR>
+From nothing up to God&#8230; which makes a man!<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">YOUNG.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The wisest man could ask no more of fate<BR>
+Than to be simple, modest, manly, true."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+In speech right gentle, yet so wise; princely of mien,<BR>
+Yet softly mannered; modest, deferent,<BR>
+And tender-hearted, though of fearless blood.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">EDWIN ARNOLD.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+DARE.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The Spartans did not inquire how many the enemy are, but where they
+are.&mdash;AGIS II.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What's brave, what's noble, let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+and make death proud to take us.&mdash;SHAKESPEARE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Better, like Hector, in the field to die,<BR>
+Than, like a perfumed Paris, turn and fly.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LONGFELLOW.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Let me die facing the enemy.&mdash;BAYARD.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Who conquers me, shall find a stubborn foe.&mdash;BYRON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Courage in danger is half the battle.&mdash;PLAUTUS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+No great deed is done<BR>
+By falterers who ask for certainty.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">GEORGE ELIOT.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Fortune befriends the bold.&mdash;DRYDEN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Tender handed stroke a nettle,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And it stings you for your pains;</SPAN><BR>
+Grasp it like a man of mettle,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And it soft as silk remains.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">AARON HILL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.&mdash;BOV�E.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Man should dare all things that he knows is right,<BR>
+And fear to do nothing save what is wrong.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">PHEBE CARY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Soft-heartedness, in times like these,<BR>
+Shows softness in the upper story.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LOWELL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+O friend, never strike sail to fear.  Come into port grandly, or sail
+with God the seas.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+To stand with a smile upon your face against a stake from which you
+cannot get away&mdash;that, no doubt, is heroic.  But the true glory is
+resignation to the inevitable.  To stand unchained, with perfect
+liberty to go away, held only by the higher claims of duty, and let the
+fire creep up to the heart,&mdash;this is heroism.&mdash;F. W. ROBERTSON.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Steady, men!  Every man must die where he stands!" said Colin Campbell
+to the Ninety-third Highlanders at Balaklava, as an overwhelming force
+of Russian cavalry came sweeping down.  "Ay, ay, Sir Colin! we'll do
+that!" was the cordial response from men many of whom had to keep their
+word by thus obeying.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-010"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-010.jpg" ALT="COMMODORE PERRY" BORDER="2" WIDTH="362" HEIGHT="540">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 362px">
+COMMODORE PERRY
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"We have met the enemy and they are ours."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"He either fears his fate too much<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Or his deserts too small,</SPAN><BR>
+That dares not put it to the touch,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">To gain or lose it all."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Bring back the colors," shouted a captain at the battle of the Alma,
+when an ensign maintained his ground in front, although the men were
+retreating.  "No," cried the ensign, "bring up the men to the colors."
+"To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare," was Danton's
+noble defiance to the enemies of France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Commons of France have resolved to deliberate," said Mirabeau to
+De Breze, who brought an order from the king for them to disperse, June
+23, 1789.  "We have heard the intentions that have been attributed to
+the king; and you, sir, who cannot be recognized as his organ in the
+National Assembly,&mdash;you, who have neither place, voice, nor right to
+speak,&mdash;you are not the person to bring to us a message of his.  Go,
+say to those who sent you that we are here by the power of the people,
+and that we will not be driven hence, save by the power of the bayonet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the assembled senate of Rome begged Regulus not to return to
+Carthage to fulfill an illegal promise, he calmly replied: "Have you
+resolved to dishonor me?  Torture and death are awaiting me, but what
+are these to the shame of an infamous act, or the wounds of a guilty
+mind?  Slave as I am to Carthage, I still have the spirit of a Roman.
+I have sworn to return.  It is my duty.  Let the gods take care of the
+rest."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave
+way the moment his final doom was announced.  The moral cowardice which
+had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and
+despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive
+recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon.  But pardon was
+impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its
+very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford
+on the 21st of March, to repeat his recantation on the way to the
+stake.  "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before
+him,&mdash;"now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more
+than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is
+the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now
+renounce and refuse as things written by a hand contrary to the truth
+which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my
+life, if it might be.  And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing
+contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished;
+for if I come to the fire it shall be the first burned."  "This was the
+hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it
+shall suffer first punishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame,
+"he never stirred nor cried till life was gone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, if I were only a man!" exclaimed Rebecca Bates, a girl of
+fourteen, as she looked from the window of a lighthouse at Scituate,
+Mass., during the War of 1812, and saw a British warship anchor in the
+harbor.  "What could you do?" asked Sarah Winsor, a young visitor.
+"See what a lot of them the boats contain, and look at their guns!" and
+she pointed to five large boats, filled with soldiers in scarlet
+uniforms, who were coming to burn the vessels in the harbor and destroy
+the town.  "I don't care, I'd fight," said Rebecca.  "I'd use father's
+old shotgun&mdash;anything.  Think of uncle's new boat and the sloop!  And
+how hard it is to sit here and see it all, and not lift a finger to
+help.  Father and uncle are in the village and will do all they can.
+How still it is in the town!  There is not a man to be seen."  "Oh,
+they are hiding till the soldiers get nearer," said Sarah, "then we'll
+hear the shots and the drum."  "The drum!" exclaimed Rebecca, "how can
+they use it?  It is here.  Father brought it home last night to mend.
+See! the first boat has reached the sloop.  Oh! they are going to burn
+her.  Where is that drum?  I've a great mind to go down and beat it.
+We could hide behind the sandhills and bushes."  As flames began to
+rise from the sloop the ardor of the girls increased.  They found the
+drum and an old fife, and, slipping out of doors unnoticed by Mrs.
+Bates, soon stood behind a row of sandhills.  "Rub-a-dub-dub,
+rub-a-dub-dub," went the drum, and "squeak, squeak, squeak," went the
+fife.  The Americans in the town thought that help had come from
+Boston, and rushed into boats to attack the redcoats.  The British
+paused in their work of destruction; and, when the fife began to play
+"Yankee Doodle," they scrambled into their boats and rowed in haste to
+the warship, which weighed anchor and sailed away as fast as the wind
+would carry her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A woman's piercing shriek suddenly startled a party of surveyors at
+dinner in a forest of northern Virginia on a calm, sunny day in 1750.
+The cries were repeated in quick succession, and the men sprang through
+the undergrowth to learn their cause.  "Oh, sir," exclaimed the woman
+as she caught sight of a youth of eighteen, but a man in stature and
+bearing; "you will surely do something for me!  Make these friends
+release me.  My boy,&mdash;my poor boy is drowning, and they will not let me
+go!"  "It would be madness; she will jump into the river," said one of
+the men who was holding her; "and the rapids would dash her to pieces
+in a moment!"  Throwing on his coat, the youth sprang to the edge of
+the bank, scanned for a moment the rocks and whirling currents, and
+then, at sight of part of the boy's dress, plunged into the roaring
+rapids.  "Thank God, he will save my child!" cried the mother, and all
+rushed to the brink of the precipice; "there he is!  Oh, my boy, my
+darling boy!  How could I leave you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But all eyes were bent upon the youth struggling with strong heart and
+hope amid the dizzy sweep of the whirling currents far below.  Now it
+seemed as if he would be dashed against a projecting rock, over which
+the water flew in foam, and anon a whirlpool would drag him in, from
+whose grasp escape would seem impossible.  Twice the boy went out of
+sight, but he had reappeared the second time, although frightfully near
+the most dangerous part of the river.  The rush of waters here was
+tremendous, and no one had ever dared to approach it, even in a canoe,
+lest he should be dashed to pieces.  The youth redoubled his exertions.
+Three times he was about to grasp the child, when some stronger eddy
+would toss it from him.  One final effort he makes; the child is held
+aloft by his strong right arm, but a cry of horror bursts from the lips
+of every spectator as boy and man shoot over the falls and vanish in
+the seething waters below.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There they are!" shouted the mother a moment later, in a delirium of
+joy.  "See! they are safe!  Great God, I thank Thee!"  And sure enough
+they emerged unharmed from the boiling vortex, and in a few minutes
+reached a low place in the bank and were drawn up by their friends, the
+boy senseless, but still alive, and the youth almost exhausted.  "God
+will give you a reward," solemnly spoke the grateful woman.  "He will
+do great things for you in return for this day's work, and the
+blessings of thousands besides mine will attend you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The youth was George Washington.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your Grace has not the organ of animal courage largely developed,"
+said a phrenologist, who was examining Wellington's head.  "You are
+right," replied the Iron Duke, "and but for my sense of duty I should
+have retreated in my first fight."  That first fight, on an Indian
+field, was one of the most terrible on record.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the reverses which followed Napoleon, he met the allies at Arcis.  A
+live shell having fallen in front of one of his young battalions, which
+recoiled and wavered in expectation of an explosion, Napoleon, to
+reassure them, spurred his charger toward the instrument of
+destruction, made him smell the burning match, waited unshaken for the
+explosion, and was blown up.  Rolling in the dust with his mutilated
+steed, and rising without a wound amid the plaudits of his soldiers, he
+calmly called for another horse, and continued to brave the grape-shot,
+and to fly into the thickest of the battle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When General Jackson was a judge and was holding court in a small
+settlement, a border ruffian, a murderer and desperado, came into the
+court-room with brutal violence and interrupted the court.  The judge
+ordered him to be arrested.  The officer did not dare to approach him.
+"Call a posse," said the judge, "and arrest him."  But they also shrank
+in fear from the ruffian.  "Call me, then," said Jackson; "this court
+is adjourned for five minutes."  He left the bench, walked straight up
+to the man, and with his eagle eye actually cowed the ruffian, who
+dropped his weapons, afterwards saying, "There was something in his eye
+I could not resist."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the last official acts of the late President Carnot, of France,
+was the sending of a medal of the French Legion of Honor to a little
+American girl, who lives in Indiana.  While a train on the Pan Handle
+Railroad, having on board several distinguished Frenchmen, was bound to
+Chicago and the World's Fair, Jennie Carey, who was then ten years old,
+discovered that a trestle was on fire, and that if the train, which was
+nearly due, entered it a dreadful wreck would take place.  Thereupon
+she ran out upon the track to a place where she could be seen from some
+little distance.  Then she took off her red flannel skirt and, when the
+train came in view, waved it back and forth across the track.  It was
+seen, and the train stopped.  On board of it were seven hundred people,
+many of whom must have suffered death but for Jennie's courage and
+presence of mind.  When they returned to France, the Frenchmen brought
+the occurrence to the notice of President Carnot, and the result was
+the sending of the medal of this famous French society, the purpose of
+which is the honoring of bravery and merit, wherever they may be found.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After the battle of Fort Donelson, the wounded were hauled down the
+hill in rough board wagons, and most of them died before they reached
+St. Louis.  One blue-eyed boy of nineteen, with both arms and both legs
+shattered, had lain a long time and was neglected.  He said, "Why, you
+see they couldn't stop to bother with us because they had to take the
+fort.  When they took it we all forgot our sufferings and shouted for
+joy, even to the dying."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Louis IX. of France was captured by the Turks at the battle of
+Mansoora, during the Seventh Crusade, and his wife Marguerite, with a
+babe at the breast, was in Damietta, many miles away.  The Infidels
+surrounded the city, and pressed the garrison so hard that it was
+decided to capitulate.  The queen summoned the knights, and told them
+that she at least would die in armor upon the ramparts before the enemy
+should become masters of Damietta.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Before her words they thrilled like leaves<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">When winds are in the wood;</SPAN><BR>
+And a deepening murmur told of men<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Roused to a loftier mood."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Grasping lance and shield, they vowed to defend their queen and the
+cross to the last.  Damietta was saved.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Pyrrhus marched to Sparta to reinstate the deposed Cleonymus, and
+quietly pitched his tents before Laconia, not anticipating resistance.
+In consternation, the Spartans in council decided to send their women
+to Crete for safety.  But the women met and asked Queen Archidamia to
+remonstrate.  She went to the council, sword in hand, and told the men
+that their wives did not care to live after Sparta was destroyed.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"We are brave men's mothers, and brave men's wives;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">We are ready to do and dare;</SPAN><BR>
+We are ready to man your walls with our lives,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And string your bows with our hair."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+They hurried to the walls and worked all night, aiding the men in
+digging trenches.  When Pyrrhus attacked the city next day, his repulse
+was so emphatic that he withdrew from Laconia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Charles V. of Spain passed through Thuringia in 1547, on his return to
+Swabia after the battle of Muehlburg.  He wrote to Catherine, Countess
+Dowager of Schwartzburg, promising that her subjects should not be
+molested in their persons or property if they would supply the Spanish
+soldiers with provisions at a reasonable price.  On approaching
+Eudolstadt, General Alva and Prince Henry of Brunswick, with his sons,
+invited themselves, by a messenger sent forward, to breakfast with the
+Countess, who had no choice but to ratify so delicate a request from
+the commander of an army.  Just as the guests were seated at a generous
+repast, the Countess was called from the hall and told that the
+Spaniards were using violence and driving away the cattle of the
+peasants.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Quietly arming all her retinue, she bolted and barred all the gates and
+doors of the castle, and returned to the banquet to complain of the
+breach of faith.  General Alva told her that such was the custom of
+war, adding that such trifling disorders were not to be heeded.  "That
+we shall presently see," said Catharine; "my poor subjects must have
+their own again, or, as God lives, prince's blood for oxen's blood!"
+The doors were opened, and armed men took the places of the waiters
+behind the chairs of the guests.  Henry changed color; then, as the
+best way out of a bad scrape, laughed loudly, and ended by praising the
+splendid acting of his hostess, and promising that Alva should order
+the cattle restored at once.  Not until a courier returned, saying that
+the order had been obeyed, and all damages settled satisfactorily, did
+the armed waiters leave.  The Countess then thanked her guests for the
+honor they had done her castle, and they retired with protestations of
+their distinguished consideration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the heroic devotion of an Indian girl that saved the life of
+Captain John Smith, when the powerful King Powhatan had decreed his
+death.  Ill could the struggling colony spare him at that time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the consul shouted that the bridge was tottering, Lartius and
+Herminius sought safety in flight.  But Horatius strode still nearer
+the foe, the single champion of his country and liberty, and dared the
+ninety thousand to come on.  Dead stillness fell upon the Tuscans, so
+astonished were they at the audacity of the Roman.  He first broke the
+awful silence, so deep that his clear, strong voice could be heard by
+thousands in both armies, between which rolled the Tiber, as he
+denounced the baseness and perfidy of the invaders.  Not until his
+words were drowned by the loud crash of fiercely disrupturing timbers,
+and the sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their
+showers of arrows and javelins.  Then, dexterously warding off the
+missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber.  Although stabbed
+in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he swam in
+safety to Rome.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is a bad omen," said Eric the Red, when his horse slipped and fell
+on the way to his ship, moored on the coast of Greenland, in readiness
+for a voyage of discovery.  "Ill-fortune would be mine should I dare
+venture now upon the sea."  So he returned to his house, but his young
+son Leif decided to go, and, with a crew of thirty-five men, sailed
+southward in search of the unknown shore upon which Captain Biarni had
+been driven by a storm, while sailing in another Viking ship two or
+three years before.  The first land that they saw was probably
+Labrador, a barren, rugged plain.  Leif called this country Heluland,
+or the land of flat stones.  Sailing onward many days, he came to a
+low, level coast thickly covered with woods, on account of which he
+called the country Markland, probably the modern Nova Scotia.  Sailing
+onward, they came to an island which they named Vinland on account of
+the abundance of delicious wild grapes in the woods.  This was in the
+year 1000.  Here where the city of Newport, R. I., stands, they spent
+many months, and then returned to Greenland with their vessel loaded
+with grapes and strange kinds of wood.  The voyage was successful, and
+no doubt Eric was sorry he had been frightened by the bad omen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+May 10, 1796, Napoleon carried the bridge at Lodi, in the face of the
+Austrian batteries.  Fourteen cannon&mdash;some accounts say thirty&mdash;were
+trained upon the French end of the structure.  Behind them were six
+thousand troops.  Napoleon massed four thousand grenadiers at the head
+of the bridge, with a battalion of three hundred carbineers in front.
+At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover
+of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and
+attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge.  The front ranks went down
+like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled
+backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before
+them.  Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at
+their head, and his aids and generals rushed to his side.  Forward
+again, this time over heaps of dead that choked the passage, and a
+quick run, counted by seconds only, carried the column across two
+hundred yards of clear space, scarcely a shot from the Austrians taking
+effect beyond the point where the platoons wheeled for the first leap.
+So sudden and so miraculous was it all that the Austrian artillerists
+abandoned their guns instantly, and their supports fled in a panic
+instead of rushing to the front and meeting the French onslaught.  This
+Napoleon had counted on in making the bold attack.  The contrast
+between Napoleon's slight figure and the massive grenadiers suggested
+the nickname "Little Corporal."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The great secret of the success of Joan of Arc was the boldness of her
+attacks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Stephen of Colonna fell into the hands of base assailants, and
+they asked him in derision, "Where is now your fortress?"  "Here," was
+his bold reply, placing his hand upon his heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was after the Mexican War when General McClellan was employed as a
+topographical engineer in surveying the Pacific coast.  From his
+headquarters at Vancouver he had gone south to the Columbia River with
+two companions, a soldier and a servant.  One evening he received word
+that the chiefs of the Columbia River tribes desired to confer with
+him.  From the messenger's manner he suspected that the Indians meant
+mischief.  He warned his companions that they must be ready to leave
+camp at a moment's notice.  Mounting his horse, he rode boldly into the
+Indian village.  About thirty chiefs were holding council.  McClellan
+was led into the circle, and placed at the right hand of Saltese.  He
+was familiar with the Chinook jargon, and could understand every word
+spoken in the council.  Saltese made known the grievance of the tribes.
+Two Indians had been captured by a party of white pioneers and hanged
+for theft.  Retaliation for this outrage seemed indispensable.  The
+chiefs pondered long, but had little to say.  McClellan had been on
+friendly terms with them, and was not responsible for the forest
+executions.  Still, he was a white man, and the chiefs had vowed
+vengeance against the race.  The council was prolonged for hours before
+sentence was passed, and then Saltese, in the name of the head men of
+the tribes, decreed that McClellan should immediately be put to death
+in retaliation for the hanging of the two Indian thieves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+McClellan had said nothing.  He had known that argument and pleas for
+justice or mercy would be of no avail.  He had sat motionless,
+apparently indifferent to his fate.  By his listlessness he had thrown
+his captors off their guard.  When the sentence was passed he acted
+like a flash.  Flinging his left arm around the neck of Saltese, he
+whipped out his revolver and held it close to the chief's temple.
+"Revoke that sentence, or I shall kill you this instant!" he cried,
+with his fingers clicking the trigger.  "I revoke it!" exclaimed
+Saltese, fairly livid from fear.  "I must have your word that I can
+leave this council in safety."  "You have the word of Saltese," was the
+quick response.  McClellan knew how sacred was the pledge which he had
+received.  The revolver was lowered.  Saltese was released from the
+embrace of the strong arm.  McClellan strode out of the tent with his
+revolver in his hand.  Not a hand was raised against him.  He mounted
+his horse and rode to his camp, where his two followers were ready to
+spring into the saddle and to escape from the villages.  He owed his
+life to his quickness of perception, and to his accurate knowledge of
+Indian character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1866, Rufus Choate spoke to an audience of nearly five thousand in
+Lowell in favor of the candidacy of James Buchanan for the presidency.
+The floor of the great hall began to sink, settling more and more as he
+proceeded with his address, until a sound of cracking timber below
+would have precipitated a stampede with fatal results but for the
+coolness of B. F. Butler, who presided.  Telling the people to remain
+quiet, he said that he would see if there were any cause for alarm.  He
+found the supports of the floor in so bad a condition that the
+slightest applause would be likely to bury the audience in the ruins of
+the building.  Returning rather leisurely to the platform, he whispered
+to Choate as he passed, "We shall all be in &mdash;&mdash; in five minutes," then
+he told the crowd that there was no immediate danger if they would
+slowly disperse, although he thought it prudent to adjourn to a place
+where there would be no risk whatever.  The post of danger, he added,
+was on the platform, which was most weakly supported, therefore he and
+those with him would be the last to leave.  No doubt many lives were
+saved by his coolness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many distinguished foreign and American statesmen were present at a
+fashionable dinner party where wine was freely poured, but Schuyler
+Colfax, then vice-president of the United States, declined to drink
+from a proffered cup.  "Colfax dares not drink," sneered a Senator who
+had already taken too much.  "You are right," said the Vice-President,
+"I dare not."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Grant was in Houston several years ago, he was given a rousing
+reception.  Naturally hospitable, and naturally inclined to like a man
+of Grant's make-up, the Houstonites determined to go beyond any other
+Southern city in the way of a banquet and other manifestations of their
+good-will and hospitality.  They made great preparations for the
+dinner, the committee taking great pains to have the finest wines that
+could be procured for the table that night.  When the time came to
+serve the wine, the head-waiter went first to Grant.  Without a word
+the general quietly turned down all the glasses at his plate.  This
+movement was a great surprise to the Texans, but they were equal to the
+occasion.  Without a single word being spoken, every man along the line
+of the long tables turned his glasses down, and there was not a drop of
+wine taken that night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A deep sewer at Noyon, France, had been opened for repairs, and
+carelessly left at night without covering or lights to warn people of
+danger.  Late at night four men stumbled in, and lay some time before
+their situation was known in the town.  No one dared go to the aid of
+the men, then unconscious from breathing noxious gases, except
+Catherine Vassen, a servant girl of eighteen.  She insisted on being
+lowered at once.  Fastening a rope around two of the men, she aided in
+raising them and restoring them to consciousness.  Descending again,
+she had just tied a rope around a third man, when she felt her breath
+failing.  Tying another rope to her long, curly hair, she swooned, but
+was drawn up with the man, to be quickly revived by fresh air and
+stimulants.  The fourth man was dead when his body was pulled up, on
+account of the delay from the fainting of Catherine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two French officers at Waterloo were advancing to charge a greatly
+superior force.  One, observing that the other showed signs of fear,
+said, "Sir, I believe you are frightened."  "Yes, I am," was the reply,
+"and if you were half as much frightened, you would run away."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a brave man," said Wellington, when he saw a soldier turn pale
+as he marched against a battery; "he knows his danger, and faces it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There are many cardinals and bishops at Worms," said a friend to
+Luther, "and they will burn your body to ashes as they did that of John
+Huss."  Luther replied: "Although they should make a fire that should
+reach from Worms to Wittenberg, and that should flame up to heaven, in
+the Lord's name I would pass through it and appear before them."  He
+said to another: "I would enter Worms though there were as many devils
+there as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses."  Another said:
+"Duke George will surely arrest you."  He replied: "It is my duty to
+go, and I will go, though it rain Duke Georges for nine days together."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me," exclaimed Luther at
+the Diet of Worms, facing his foes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A Western paper recently invited the surviving Union and Confederate
+officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during
+the Civil War.  Colonel Thomas W. Higginson said that at a dinner at
+Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were
+bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told
+that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung
+a song.  He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although
+I must drink it in water.  It is 'Our Mothers.'"  The men were so
+affected and ashamed that some took him by the hand and thanked him for
+displaying courage greater than that required to walk up to the mouth
+of a cannon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It took great courage for the commercial Quaker, John Bright, to
+espouse a cause which called down upon his head the derision and scorn
+and hatred of the Parliament.  For years he rested under a cloud of
+obloquy, but Bright was made of stern stuff.  It was only his strength
+of character and masterly eloquence, which saved him from political
+annihilation.  To a man who boasted that his ancestors came over with
+the Conquerors, he replied, "I never heard that they did anything
+else."  A Tory lordling said, when Bright was ill, that Providence had
+inflicted upon Bright, for the measure of his talents, disease of the
+brain.  When Bright went back into the Commons he replied: "This may be
+so, but it will be some consolation to the friends and family of the
+noble lord to know that that disease is one which even Providence
+cannot inflict upon him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World,
+and takes him boldly by the beard," says Holmes, "he is often surprised
+to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare
+away timid adventurers."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It takes courage for a young man to stand firmly erect while others are
+bowing and fawning for praise and power.  It takes courage to wear
+threadbare clothes while your comrades dress in broadcloth.  It takes
+courage to remain in honest poverty when others grow rich by fraud.  It
+takes courage to say "No" squarely when those around you say "Yes."  It
+takes courage to do your duty in silence and obscurity while others
+prosper and grow famous although neglecting sacred obligations.  It
+takes courage to unmask your true self, to show your blemishes to a
+condemning world, and to pass for what you really are.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It takes courage and pluck to be outvoted, beaten, laughed at, scoffed,
+ridiculed, derided, misunderstood, misjudged, to stand alone with all
+the world against you, but
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"They are slaves who dare not be<BR>
+In the right with two or three."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"There is never wanting a dog to bark at you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"An honest man is not the worse because a dog barks at him."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Let any man show the world that he feels<BR>
+Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels.<BR>
+Let him fearlessly face it, 't will leave him alone,<BR>
+And 't will fawn at his feet if he fling it a bone."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We live ridiculously for fear of being thought ridiculous.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'Tis he is the coward who proves false to his vows,<BR>
+To his manhood, his honor, for a laugh or a sneer:<BR>
+'Tis he is the hero who stands firm, though alone,<BR>
+For the truth and the right without flinching or fear."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The youth who starts out by being afraid to speak what he thinks will
+usually end by being afraid to think what he wishes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How we shrink from an act of our own.  We live as others live.  Custom
+or fashion dictates, or your doctor or minister, and they in turn dare
+not depart from their schools.  Dress, living, servants, carriages,
+everything must conform, or be ostracized.  Who dares conduct his
+household or business affairs in his own way, and snap his fingers at
+Dame Grundy?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a man has marched up to the cannon's mouth in battle who dared not
+face public opinion or oppose Mrs. Grundy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It takes courage for a public man not to bend the knee to popular
+prejudice.  It takes courage to refuse to follow custom when it is
+injurious to his health and morals.  To espouse an unpopular cause in
+Congress requires more courage than to lead a charge in battle.  How
+much easier for a politician to prevaricate and dodge an issue than to
+stand squarely on his feet like a man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As a rule, eccentricity is a badge of power, but how many women would
+not rather strangle their individuality than be tabooed by Mrs. Grundy?
+Yet fear is really the only thing to fear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whoever you may be," said Sainte-Beuve, "great genius, distinguished
+talent, artist honorable or amiable, the qualities for which you
+deserve to be praised will all be turned against you.  Were you a
+Virgil, the pious and sensible singer <I>par excellence</I>, there are
+people who will call you an effeminate poet.  Were you a Horace, there
+are people who will reproach you with the very purity and delicacy of
+your taste.  If you were a Shakespeare, some one will call you a
+drunken savage.  If you were a Goethe, more than one Pharisee will
+proclaim you the most selfish of egotists."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the strongest man has a weakness somewhere, so the greatest hero is
+a coward somewhere.  Peter was courageous enough to draw his sword to
+defend his master, but he could not stand the ridicule and the finger
+of scorn of the maidens in the high priest's hall, and he actually
+denied even the acquaintance of the master he had declared he would die
+for.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will take the responsibility," said Andrew Jackson, on a memorable
+occasion, and his words have become proverbial.  Not even Congress
+dared to oppose the edicts of John Quincy Adams.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If a man would accomplish anything in this world, he must not be afraid
+of assuming responsibilities.  Of course it takes courage to run the
+risk of failure, to be subjected to criticism for an unpopular cause,
+to expose one's self to the shafts of everybody's ridicule, but the man
+who is not true to himself, who cannot carry out the sealed orders
+placed in his hands at his birth, regardless of the world's yes or no,
+of its approval or disapproval, the man who has not the courage to
+trace the pattern of his own destiny, which no other soul knows but his
+own, can never rise to the true dignity of manhood.  All the world
+loves courage; youth craves it; they want to hear about it, they want
+to read about it.  The fascination of the "blood and thunder" novels
+and of the cheap story papers for youth are based upon this idea of
+courage.  If the boys cannot get the real article, they will take a
+counterfeit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Don't be like Uriah Heep, begging everybody's pardon for taking the
+liberty of being in the world.  There is nothing attractive in
+timidity, nothing lovable in fear.  Both are deformities and are
+repulsive.  Manly courage is dignified and graceful.  The worst manners
+in the world are those of persons conscious "of being beneath their
+position, and trying to conceal it or make up for it by style."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bruno, condemned to be burned alive in Rome, said to his judge: "You
+are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to receive it."
+Anne Askew, racked until her bones were dislocated, never flinched, but
+looked her tormentor calmly in the face and refused to abjure her faith.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid
+of each other."  "Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage," said
+Emerson.  Physicians used to teach that courage depends on the
+circulation of the blood in the arteries, and that during passion,
+anger, trials of strength, wrestling or fighting, a large amount of
+blood is collected in the arteries, and does not pass to the veins.  A
+strong pulse is a fortune in itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rage," said Shaftesbury, "can make a coward forget himself and fight."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I should have thought fear would have kept you from going so far,"
+said a relative who found the little boy Nelson wandering a long
+distance from home.  "Fear?" said the future admiral, "I don't know
+him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Doubt indulged becomes doubt realized."  To determine to do anything
+is half the battle.  "To think a thing is impossible is to make it so."
+<I>Courage is victory, timidity is defeat</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That simple shepherd-lad, David, fresh from his flocks, marching
+unattended and unarmed, save with his shepherd's staff and sling, to
+confront the colossal Goliath with his massive armor, is the sublimest
+audacity the world has ever seen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dent, I wish you would get down, and see what is the matter with that
+leg there," said Grant, when he and Colonel Dent were riding through
+the thickest of a fire that had become so concentrated and murderous
+that his troops had all been driven back.  "I guess looking after your
+horse's legs can wait," said Dent; "it is simply murder for us to sit
+here."  "All right," said Grant, "if you don't want to see to it, I
+will."  He dismounted, untwisted a piece of telegraph wire which had
+begun to cut the horse's leg, examined it deliberately, and climbed
+into his saddle.  "Dent," said he, "when you've got a horse that you
+think a great deal of, you should never take any chances with him.  If
+that wire had been left there for a little time longer he would have
+gone dead lame, and would perhaps have been ruined for life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wellington said that at Waterloo the hottest of the battle raged round
+a farmhouse, with an orchard surrounded by a thick hedge, which was so
+important a point in the British position that orders were given to
+hold it at any hazard or sacrifice.  At last the powder and ball ran
+short and the hedges took fire, surrounding the orchard with a wall of
+flame.  A messenger had been sent for ammunition, and soon two loaded
+wagons came galloping toward the farmhouse.  "The driver of the first
+wagon, with the reckless daring of an English boy, spurred his
+struggling and terrified horses through the burning heap; but the
+flames rose fiercely round, and caught the powder, which exploded in an
+instant, sending wagon, horses, and rider in fragments into the air.
+For an instant the driver of the second wagon paused, appalled by his
+comrade's fate; the next, observing that the flames, beaten back for
+the moment by the explosion, afforded him one desperate chance, sent
+his horses at the smouldering breach and, amid the deafening cheers of
+the garrison, landed his terrible cargo safely within.  Behind him the
+flames closed up, and raged more fiercely than ever."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the battle of Friedland a cannon-ball came over the heads of the
+French soldiers, and a young soldier instinctively dodged.  Napoleon
+looked at him and smilingly said: "My friend, if that ball were
+destined for you, though you were to burrow a hundred feet under ground
+it would be sure to find you there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the mine in front of Petersburg was finished, the fuse was
+lighted, and the Union troops were drawn up ready to charge the enemy's
+works as soon as the explosion should make a breach.  But seconds,
+minutes, and tens of minutes passed, without a sound from the mine, and
+the suspense became painful.  Lieutenant Doughty and Sergeant Kees
+volunteered to examine the fuse.  Through the long subterranean
+galleries they hurried in silence, not knowing but they were advancing
+to a horrible death.  They found the defect, fired the train anew, and
+soon a terrible upheaval of earth gave the signal to march to victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the battle of Copenhagen, as Nelson walked the deck slippery with
+blood and covered with the dead, he said: "This is warm work, and this
+day may be the last to any of us in a moment.  But, mark me, I would
+not be elsewhere for thousands."  At the battle of Trafalgar, when
+Nelson was shot and was being carried below, he covered his face, that
+those fighting might not know their chief had fallen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a skirmish at Salamanca, while the enemy's guns were pouring shot
+into his regiment, Sir William Napier's men became disobedient.  He at
+once ordered a halt, and flogged four of the ringleaders under fire.
+The men yielded at once, and then marched three miles under a heavy
+cannonade as coolly as if it were a review.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Execute your resolutions immediately.  Thoughts are but dreams till
+their effects be tried.  Does competition trouble you? work away; what
+is your competitor but a man?  <I>Conquer your place in the world</I>, for
+all things serve a brave soul.  Combat difficulty manfully; sustain
+misfortune bravely; endure poverty nobly; encounter disappointment
+courageously.  The influence of the brave man is a magnetism which
+creates an epidemic of noble zeal in all about him.  Every day sends to
+the grave obscure men, who have only remained in obscurity because
+their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who,
+if they could have been induced to begin, would, in all probability,
+have gone great lengths in the career of usefulness and fame.  "No
+great deed is done," says George Eliot, "by falterers who ask for
+certainty."  The brave, cheerful man will survive his blighted hopes
+and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully
+forward in the battle of life.  Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills
+with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded.
+He is the true hero.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,<BR>
+Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;<BR>
+Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,<BR>
+Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LOWELL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">Our doubts are traitors,</SPAN><BR>
+And make us lose the good we oft might win,<BR>
+By fearing to attempt.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEARE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+After the great inward struggle was over, and he had determined to
+remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the
+block.  His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy
+prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his
+doctrines, as some of the bishops had done.  But he preferred death to
+dishonor.  His daughter allowed the power of love to drive away fear.
+She remained true to her father when all others, even her mother, had
+forsaken him.  After his head had been cut off and exhibited on a pole
+on London Bridge, the poor girl begged it of the authorities, and
+requested that it be buried in the coffin with her.  Her request was
+granted, for her death occurred soon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Sir Walter Raleigh came to the scaffold he was very faint, and
+began his speech to the crowd by saying that during the last two days
+he had been visited by two ague fits.  "If, therefore, you perceive any
+weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to
+myself."  He took the axe and kissed the blade, and said to the
+sheriff: "'T is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Don't waste time dreaming of obstacles you may never encounter, or in
+crossing bridges you have not reached.  Don't fool with a nettle!
+Grasp with firmness if you would rob it of its sting.  To half will and
+to hang forever in the balance is to lose your grip on life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Abraham Lincoln's boyhood was one long struggle with poverty, with
+little education, and no influential friends.  When at last he had
+begun the practice of law, it required no little daring to cast his
+fortune with the weaker side in politics, and thus imperil what small
+reputation he had gained.  Only the most sublime moral courage could
+have sustained him as President to hold his ground against hostile
+criticism and a long train of disaster; to issue the Emancipation
+Proclamation; to support Grant and Stanton against the clamor of the
+politicians and the press; and through it all to do the right as God
+gave him to see the right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lincoln never shrank from espousing an unpopular cause when he believed
+it to be right.  At the time when it almost cost a young lawyer his
+bread and butter to defend the fugitive slave, and when other lawyers
+had refused, Lincoln would always plead the cause of the unfortunate
+whenever an opportunity presented.  "Go to Lincoln," people would say,
+when these hounded fugitives were seeking protection; "he's not afraid
+of any cause, if it's right."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Salmon P. Chase left the court room after making an impassioned plea
+for the runaway slave girl Matilda, a man looked at him in surprise and
+said: "There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself."
+But in thus ruining himself Chase had taken the first important step in
+a career in which he became Governor of Ohio, United States Senator
+from Ohio, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and Chief Justice
+of the United States Supreme Court.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the trial of William Penn for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, the
+recorder, not satisfied with the first verdict, said to the jury: "We
+will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."
+"You are Englishmen," said Penn; "mind your privileges, give not away
+your right."  At last the jury, after two days and two nights without
+food, returned a verdict of "Not guilty."  The recorder fined them
+forty marks apiece for their independence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd?  The palsied hand moved,
+the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
+ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
+hisses?  In him "at last the scornful world had met its match."  Were
+Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
+extinguish them?  No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
+thousands to hear and to heed.  Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
+when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head?  She
+silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
+leveled at his head, a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
+or a scaffold erected in front of his door.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Storms may howl around thee,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Foes may hunt and hound thee:</SPAN><BR>
+Shall they overpower thee?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Never, never, never."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
+York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
+thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged more than one man
+to lamp-posts.  Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
+where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
+it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
+murdered your superiors," and the blood-stained crowd quailed before
+the courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando
+Wood could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
+"And we are before them," was the cool reply of Leonidas.  "Deliver
+your arms," came the message from Xerxes.  "Come and take them," was
+the answer Leonidas sent back.  A Persian soldier said: "You will not
+be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows."  "Then we will
+fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian.  What wonder that a
+handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
+trod the earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
+for a daring plan.  "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
+"<I>impossible</I> is the adjective of fools!"  Napoleon went to the edge of
+his possibility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Grant never knew when he was beaten.  When told that he was surrounded
+by the enemy at Belmont, he quietly replied: "Well, then we must cut
+our way out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The courageous man is an example to the intrepid.  His influence is
+magnetic.  He creates an epidemic of nobleness.  Men follow him, even
+to the death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The spirit of courage will transform the whole temper of your life.
+"The wise and active conquer difficulties by daring to attempt them.
+Sloth and folly shiver and sicken at the sight of trial and hazard, and
+make the impossibility they fear."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The hero," says Emerson, "is the man who is immovably centred."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Emin Pasha, the explorer of Africa, was left behind by his exploring
+party under circumstances that were thought certainly fatal, and his
+death was reported with great assurance.  Early the next winter, as his
+troop was on its toilsome but exciting way through Central Africa, it
+came upon a most wretched sight.  A party of natives had been kidnapped
+by the slave-hunters, and dragged in chains thus far toward the land of
+bondage.  But small-pox had set in, and the miserable company had been
+abandoned to their fate.  Emin sent his men ahead, and stayed behind in
+this camp of death to act as physician and nurse.  How many lives he
+saved is not known, though it is known that he nearly lost his own.
+The age of chivalry is not gone by.  This is as knightly a deed as poet
+ever chronicled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A mouse that dwelt near the abode of a great magician was kept in such
+constant distress by its fear of a cat, that the magician, taking pity
+on it, turned it into a cat itself.  Immediately it began to suffer
+from its fear of a dog, so the magician turned it into a dog.  Then it
+began to suffer from fear of a tiger.  The magician therefore turned it
+into a tiger.  Then it began to suffer from fear of hunters, and the
+magician said in disgust: "Be a mouse again.  As you have only the
+heart of a mouse, it is impossible to help you by giving you the body
+of a nobler animal."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men who have dared have moved the world, often before reaching the
+prime of life.  It is astonishing what daring to begin and perseverance
+have enabled even youths to achieve.  Alexander, who ascended the
+throne at twenty, had conquered the known world before dying at
+thirty-three.  Julius Caesar captured eight hundred cities, conquered
+three hundred nations, and defeated three million men, became a great
+orator and one of the greatest statesmen known, and still was a young
+man.  Washington was appointed adjutant-general at nineteen, was sent
+at twenty-one as an ambassador to treat with the French, and won his
+first battle as a colonel at twenty-two.  Lafayette was made general of
+the whole French army at twenty.  Charlemagne was master of France and
+Germany at thirty.  Cond� was only twenty-two when he conquered at
+Rocroi.  Galileo was but eighteen when he saw the principle of the
+pendulum in the swinging lamp in the cathedral at Pisa.  Peel was in
+Parliament at twenty-one.  Gladstone was in Parliament before he was
+twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury.  Elizabeth
+Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De
+Quincey at eleven.  Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean
+order.  Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of
+poems at fifteen.  N. P. Willis won lasting fame as a poet before
+leaving college.  Macaulay was a celebrated author before he was
+twenty-three.  Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous
+thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope.  Nelson was a
+lieutenant in the British Navy before he was twenty.  He was but
+forty-seven when he received his death wound at Trafalgar.  Charles the
+Twelfth was only nineteen when he gained the battle of Narva; at
+thirty-six, Cortez was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty-two, Clive
+had established the British power in India.  Hannibal, the greatest of
+military commanders, was only thirty when, at Cannae, he dealt an
+almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only
+twenty-seven when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneraled and
+defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Equal courage and resolution are often shown by men who have passed the
+allotted limit of life.  Victor Hugo and Wellington were both in their
+prime after they had reached the age of threescore years and ten.
+George Bancroft wrote some of his best historical work when he was
+eighty-five.  Gladstone ruled England with a strong hand at
+eighty-four, and was a marvel of literary and scholarly ability.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of
+Ophir.  But shall it therefore rot in the harbor?  No!  Give its sails
+to the wind!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shakespeare says: "He is not worthy of the honeycomb that shuns the
+hive because the bees have stings."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The brave man is not he who feels no fear,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For that were stupid and irrational;</SPAN><BR>
+But he whose noble soul its fear subdues<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The inscription on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold."  On the second
+gate: "Be bold, be bold, and ever more be bold;" the third gate: "Be
+not too bold."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a bright youth has accomplished nothing of worth simply because he
+did not dare to commence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Begin!  Begin!!  Begin!!!
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Whatever people may think of you, do that which you believe to be
+right.  Be alike indifferent to censure or praise.&mdash;PYTHAGORAS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Fear makes man a slave to others.  This is the tyrant's chain.  Anxiety
+is a form of cowardice embittering life.&mdash;CHANNING.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal
+of the most precious things.  Our blood is nearer and dearer to us than
+our money, and our life than our estate.  Women are more taken with
+courage than with generosity.&mdash;COLTON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em"><I>Merchant of Venice</I>, Inscription on Leaden Casket.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I dare to do all that may become a man:<BR>
+Who dares do more is none.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEAKE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+For man's great actions are performed in minor struggles.  There are
+obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the
+shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude.  There are
+noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, no renown rewards, and
+no flourish of trumpets salutes.  Life, misfortune, isolation,
+abandonment, and poverty are battlefields which have their
+heroes.&mdash;VICTOR HUGO.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Who waits until the wind shall silent keep,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Who never finds the ready hour to sow,</SPAN><BR>
+Who watcheth clouds, will have no time to reap.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">HELEN HUNT JACKSON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Quit yourselves like men.&mdash;1 SAMUEL iv. 9.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE WILL AND THE WAY.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"The 'way' will be found by a resolute will."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"I will find a way or make one."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.&mdash;MIRABEAU.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a
+politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.&mdash;E. P. WHIPPLE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail;<BR>
+A feeble dwarf, dauntlessly resolved, will turn the tide of battle,<BR>
+And rally to a nobler strife the giants that had fled.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">TUPPER.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Man alone can perform the impossible.  They can who think they can.
+Character is a perfectly educated will."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The education of the will is the object of our existence.  For the
+resolute and determined there is time and opportunity.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Invincible determination, and a right nature, are the levers that move
+the world.&mdash;PRESIDENT PORTER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood there
+is no such word as fail.&mdash;BULWER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and
+make a seeming difficulty give way.&mdash;JEREMY COLLIER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+When a firm and decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how
+the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom.&mdash;JOHN
+FOSTER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The star of the unconquered will,<BR>
+He rises in my breast,<BR>
+Serene, and resolute and still,<BR>
+And calm and self-possessed.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LONGFELLOW.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"As well can the Prince of Orange pluck the stars from the sky, as
+bring the ocean to the wall of Leyden for your relief," was the
+derisive shout of the Spanish soldiers when told that the Dutch fleet
+would raise that terrible four months' siege of 1574.  But from the
+parched lips of William, tossing on his bed of fever at Rotterdam, had
+issued the command: "<I>Break down the dikes: give Holland back to
+ocean:</I>" and the people had replied: "Better a drowned land than a lost
+land."  They began to demolish dike after dike of the strong lines,
+ranged one within another for fifteen miles to their city of the
+interior.  It was an enormous task; the garrison was starving; and the
+besiegers laughed in scorn at the slow progress of the puny insects who
+sought to rule the waves of the sea.  But ever, as of old, heaven aids
+those who help themselves.  On the first and second of October a
+violent equinoctial gale rolled the ocean inland, and swept the fleet
+on the rising waters almost to the camp of the Spaniards.  The next
+morning the garrison sallied out to attack their enemies, but the
+besiegers had fled in terror under cover of the darkness.  The next day
+the wind changed, and a counter tempest brushed the water, with the
+fleet upon it, from the surface of Holland.  The outer dikes were
+replaced at once, leaving the North Sea within its old bounds.  When
+the flowers bloomed the following spring, a joyous procession marched
+through the streets to found the University of Leyden, in commemoration
+of the wonderful deliverance of the city.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-038"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-038.jpg" ALT="WALTER SCOTT" BORDER="2" WIDTH="355" HEIGHT="537">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 355px">
+WALTER SCOTT
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"The Wizard of the North."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">So near is God to man,</SPAN><BR>
+When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The youth replies, 'I can.'"</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+At a dinner party given in 1837, at the residence of Chancellor Kent,
+in New York city, some of the most distinguished men in the country
+were invited, and among them was a young and rather melancholy and
+reticent Frenchman.  Professor Morse was one of the guests, and during
+the evening he drew the attention of Mr. Gallatin, then a prominent
+statesman, to the stranger, observing that his forehead indicated great
+intellect.  "Yes," replied Mr. Gallatin, touching his own forehead with
+his finger, "there is a great deal in that head of his: but he has a
+strange fancy.  Can you believe it?  He has the idea that he will one
+day be the Emperor of France.  Can you conceive anything more absurd?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It did seem absurd, for this reserved Frenchman was then a poor
+adventurer, an exile from his country, without fortune or powerful
+connections, and yet, fourteen years later, his idea became a
+fact,&mdash;his dream of becoming Napoleon III. was realized.  True, before
+he accomplished his purpose there were long dreary years of
+imprisonment, exile, disaster, and patient labor and hope, but he
+gained his ambition at last.  He was not scrupulous as to the means
+employed to accomplish his ends, yet he is a remarkable example of what
+pluck and energy can do.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When it was proposed to unite England and America by steam, Dr. Lardner
+delivered a lecture before the Royal Society "proving" that steamers
+could never cross the Atlantic, because they could not carry coal
+enough to produce steam during the whole voyage.  The passage of the
+steamship Sirius, which crossed in nineteen days, was fatal to
+Lardner's theory.  When it was proposed to build a vessel of iron, many
+persons said: "Iron sinks&mdash;only wood can float:" but experiments proved
+that the miracle of the prophet in making iron "swim" could be
+repeated, and now not only ships of war, but merchant vessels, are
+built of iron or steel.  A will found a way to make iron float.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Ingram, publisher of the "London Illustrated News," who lost his
+life on Lake Michigan, walked ten miles to deliver a single paper
+rather than disappoint a customer, when he began life as a newsdealer
+at Nottingham, England.  Does any one wonder that such a youth
+succeeded?  Once he rose at two o'clock in the morning and walked to
+London to get some papers because there was no post to bring them.  He
+determined that his customers should not be disappointed.  This is the
+kind of will that finds a way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is scarcely anything in all biography grander than the saying of
+young Henry Fawcett, Gladstone's last Postmaster-General, to his
+grief-stricken father, who had put out both his eyes by bird-shot
+during a game hunt: "Never mind, father, blindness shall not interfere
+with my success in life."  One of the most pathetic sights in London
+streets, long afterward, was Henry Fawcett, M. P., led everywhere by a
+faithful daughter, who acted as amanuensis as well as guide to her
+plucky father.  Think of a young man, scarcely on the threshold of
+active life, suddenly losing the sight of both eyes and yet, by mere
+pluck and almost incomprehensible tenacity of purpose, lifting himself
+into eminence, in any direction, to say nothing of becoming one of the
+foremost men in a country noted for its great men.  Most youth would
+have succumbed to such a misfortune, and would never have been heard
+from again.  But fortunately for the world, there are yet left many
+Fawcetts, many Prescotts, Parkmans, Cavanaghs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The courageous daughter who was eyes to her father was herself a
+marvelous example of pluck and determination.  For the first time in
+the history of Oxford College, which reaches back centuries, she
+succeeded in winning the post which had only been gained before by
+great men, such as Gladstone,&mdash;the post of senior wrangler.  This
+achievement had had no parallel in history up to that date, and
+attracted the attention of the whole civilized world.  Not only had no
+woman ever held this position before, but with few exceptions it had
+only been held by men who in after life became highly distinguished.
+Who can deny that where there is a will, as a rule, there's a way?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Grant was a boy he could not find "can't" in the dictionary.  It
+is the men who have no "can't" in their dictionaries that make things
+move.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Circumstances," says Milton, "have rarely favored famous men.  They
+have fought their way to triumph through all sorts of opposing
+obstacles."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The true way to conquer circumstances is to be a greater circumstance
+yourself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet, while desiring to impress in the most forcible manner possible the
+fact that will-power is necessary to success, and that, other things
+being equal, the greater the will-power, the grander and more complete
+the success, we cannot indorse the preposterous theory that there is
+nothing in circumstances or environments, or that any man, simply
+because he has an indomitable will, may become a Bonaparte, a Pitt, a
+Webster, a Beecher, a Lincoln.  We must temper determination with
+discretion, and support it with knowledge and common sense, or it will
+only lead us to run our heads against posts.  We must not expect to
+overcome a stubborn fact by a stubborn will.  We merely have the right
+to assume that we can do anything within the limit of our utmost
+faculty, strength, and endurance.  Obstacles permanently insurmountable
+bar our progress in some directions, but in any direction we may
+reasonably hope and attempt to go, we shall find that the obstacles, as
+a rule, are either not insurmountable or else not permanent.  The
+strong-willed, intelligent, persistent man will find or make a way
+where, in the nature of things, a way can be found or made.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every schoolboy knows that circumstances do give clients to lawyers and
+patients to physicians; place ordinary clergymen in extraordinary
+pulpits; place sons of the rich at the head of immense corporations and
+large houses, when they have very ordinary ability and scarcely any
+experience, while poor young men with extraordinary abilities, good
+education, good character, and large experience, often have to fight
+their way for years to obtain even very ordinary situations.  Every one
+knows that there are thousands of young men, both in the city and in
+the country, of superior ability, who seem to be compelled by
+circumstances to remain in very ordinary positions for small pay, when
+others about them are raised by money or family influence into
+desirable places.  In other words, we all know that the best men do not
+always get the best places: circumstances do have a great deal to do
+with our position, our salaries, and our station in life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many young men who are nature's noblemen, who are natural leaders, are
+working under superintendents, foremen, and managers infinitely their
+inferiors, but whom circumstances have placed above them and will keep
+there, unless some emergency makes merit indispensable.  No, the race
+is not always to the swift.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every one knows that there is not always a way where there is a will,
+that labor does not always conquer all things; that there are things
+impossible even to him that wills, however strongly; that one cannot
+always make anything of himself he chooses; that there are limitations
+in our very natures which no amount of will-power or industry can
+overcome; that no amount of sun-staring can ever make an eagle out of a
+crow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually
+striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time
+very far toward his chosen goal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most
+possible out of the stuff that has been given to him.  This is success,
+and there is no other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While it is true that our circumstances or environments do affect us,
+in most things they do not prevent our growth.  The corn that is now
+ripe, whence comes it, and what is it?  Is it not large or small,
+stunted wild maize or well-developed ears, according to the conditions
+under which it has grown?  Yet its environments cannot make wheat of
+it.  Nor can our circumstances alter our nature.  It is part of our
+nature, and wholly within our power, greatly to change and to take
+advantage of our circumstances, so that, unlike the corn, we can rise
+much superior to our natural surroundings simply because we can thus
+vary and improve the surroundings.  In other words, man can usually
+build the very road on which he is to run his race.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not a question of what some one else can do or become, which
+every youth should ask himself, but what can I do?  How can I develop
+myself into the grandest possible manhood?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So far, then, from the power of circumstances being a hindrance to men
+in trying to build for themselves an imperial highway to fortune, these
+circumstances constitute the very quarry out of which they are to get
+paving-stones for the road.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While it is true that the will-power cannot perform miracles, yet that
+it is almost omnipotent, that it can perform wonders, all history goes
+to prove.  As Shakespeare says:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Men at some time are masters of their fates:<BR>
+The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,<BR>
+But in ourselves, that we are underlings."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit
+once in his life: but when she finds he is not ready to receive her,
+she goes in at the door, and out through the window."  Opportunity is
+coy.  The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it,
+or clutch at it when it has gone.  The sharp fellows detect it
+instantly, and catch it when on the wing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Show me a man who is, according to popular prejudice, a victim of bad
+luck, and I will show you one who has some unfortunate crooked twist of
+temperament that invites disaster.  He is ill-tempered, or conceited,
+or trifling; lacks character, enthusiasm, or some other requisite for
+success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Disraeli says that man is not the creature of circumstances, but that
+circumstances are the creatures of men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What has chance ever done in the world?  Has it built any cities?  Has
+it invented any telephones, any telegraphs?  Has it built any
+steamships, established any universities, any asylums, any hospitals?
+Was there any chance in Caesar's crossing the Rubicon?  What had chance
+to do with Napoleon's career, with Wellington's, or Grant's, or Von
+Moltke's?  Every battle was won before it was begun.  What had luck to
+do with Thermopylae, Trafalgar, Gettysburg?  Our successes we ascribe
+to ourselves; our failures to destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man is not a helpless atom in this vast creation, with a fixed
+position, and naught to do but obey his own polarity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Believe in the power of will, which annihilates the sickly, sentimental
+doctrine of fatalism,&mdash;you must but can't, you ought but it is
+impossible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Give me the man
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,<BR>
+And grasps the skirts of happy chance,<BR>
+And breasts the blows of circumstance,<BR>
+And grapples with his evil star."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It is only the ignorant and superficial who believe in fate.  "The
+first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity."  "Fate is
+unpenetrated causes."  "They may well fear fate who have any infirmity
+of habit or aim: but he who rests on what he is has a destiny beyond
+destiny, and can make mouths at fortune."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The indomitable will, the inflexible purpose, will find a way or make
+one.  There is always room for a man of force.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He who has a firm will," says Goethe, "moulds the world to himself."
+"People do not lack strength," says Victor Hugo, "they lack will."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He who resolves upon any great end, by that very resolution has scaled
+the great barriers to it, and he who seizes the grand idea of
+self-cultivation, and solemnly resolves upon it, will find that idea,
+that resolution, burning like fire within him, and ever putting him
+upon his own improvement.  He will find it removing difficulties,
+searching out, or making means; giving courage for despondency, and
+strength for weakness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nearly all great men, those who have towered high above their fellows,
+have been remarkable above all things else for their energy of will.
+Of Julius Caesar it was said by a contemporary that it was his activity
+and giant determination, rather than his military skill, that won his
+victories.  The youth who starts out in life determined to make the
+most of his eyes and let nothing escape him which he can possibly use
+for his own advancement; who keeps his ears open for every sound that
+can help him on his way, who keeps his hands open that he may clutch
+every opportunity, who is ever on the alert for everything which can
+help him to get on in the world, who seizes every experience in life
+and grinds it up into paint for his great life's picture, who keeps his
+heart open that he may catch every noble impulse, and everything which
+may inspire him,&mdash;that youth will be sure to make his life successful;
+there are no "ifs" or "ands" about it.  If he has his health, nothing
+can keep him from final success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No tyranny of circumstances can permanently imprison a determined will.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world always stands aside for the determined man.  Will makes a
+way, even through seeming impossibilities.  "It is the half a neck
+nearer that shows the blood and wins the race; the one march more that
+wins the campaign: the five minutes more of unyielding courage that
+wins the fight."  Again and again had the irrepressible Carter Harrison
+been consigned to oblivion by the educated and moral element of
+Chicago.  Nothing could keep him down.  He was invincible.  A son of
+Chicago, he had partaken of that nineteenth century miracle, that
+phoenix-like nature of the city which, though she was burned, caused
+her to rise from her ashes and become a greater and a grander Chicago,
+a wonder of the world.  Carter Harrison would not down.  He entered the
+Democratic Convention and, with an audacity rarely equaled, in spite of
+their protest, boldly declared himself their candidate.  Every
+newspaper in Chicago, save the "Times," his own paper, bitterly opposed
+his election: but notwithstanding all opposition, he was elected by
+twenty thousand majority.  The aristocrats hated him, the moral element
+feared him, but the poor people believed in him: he pandered to them,
+flattered them, till they elected him.  While we would not by any means
+hold Carter Harrison up to youth as a model, yet there is a great
+lesson in his will-power and wonderful tenacity of purpose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The general of a large army may be defeated," said Confucius, "but you
+cannot defeat the determined mind of a peasant."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The poor, deaf pauper, Kitto, who made shoes in the almshouse, and who
+became the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the
+threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I
+think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere
+rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and
+industry, render himself almost anything he wishes to become."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Years ago, a young mechanic took a bath in the river Clyde.  While
+swimming from shore to shore he discerned a beautiful bank,
+uncultivated, and he then and there resolved to be the owner of it, and
+to adorn it, and to build upon it the finest mansion in all the
+borough, and name it in honor of the maiden to whom he was espoused.
+"Last summer," says a well-known American, "I had the pleasure of
+dining in that princely mansion, and receiving this fact from the lips
+of the great shipbuilder of the Clyde."  That one purpose was made the
+ruling passion of his life, and all the energies of his soul were put
+in requisition for its accomplishment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lincoln is probably the most remarkable example on the pages of
+history, showing the possibilities of our country.  From the poverty in
+which he was born, through the rowdyism of a frontier town, the
+rudeness of frontier society, the discouragement of early bankruptcy,
+and the fluctuations of popular politics, he rose to the championship
+of union and freedom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lincoln's will made his way.  When his friends nominated him as a
+candidate for the legislature, his enemies made fun of him.  When
+making his campaign speeches he wore a mixed jean coat so short that he
+could not sit down on it, flax and tow-linen trousers, straw hat, and
+pot-metal boots.  He had nothing in the world but character and friends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When his friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his
+being a lawyer.  He said he hadn't brains enough.  He read law barefoot
+under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the
+counter in the store where he worked.  He had to borrow money to buy a
+suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature,
+and walked to take his seat at Vandalia,&mdash;one hundred miles.  While he
+was in the legislature, John F. Stuart, an eminent lawyer of
+Springfield, told him how Clay had even inferior chances to his, had
+got all of the education he had in a log schoolhouse without windows or
+doors; and finally induced Lincoln to study law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+See Thurlow Weed, defying poverty and wading through the snow two
+miles, with rags for shoes, to borrow a book to read before the
+sap-bush fire.  See Locke, living on bread and water in a Dutch garret.
+See Heyne, sleeping many a night on a barn floor with only a book for
+his pillow.  See Samuel Drew, tightening his apron strings "in lieu of
+a dinner."  See young Lord Eldon, before daylight copying Coke on
+Littleton over and over again.  History is full of such examples.  He
+who will pay the price for victory needs never fear final defeat.  Why
+were the Roman legionaries victorious?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,<BR>
+Spared neither land nor gold,<BR>
+Nor son, nor wife, nor limb nor life,<BR>
+In the brave days of old."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Fowell Buxton, writing to one of his sons, says: "I am sure that a
+young man may be very much what he pleases."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Mathews has well said that "there is hardly a word in the whole
+human vocabulary which is more cruelly abused than the word 'luck.'  To
+all the faults and failures of men, their positive sins and their less
+culpable shortcomings, it is made to stand a godfather and sponsor.  Go
+talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by
+wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you
+will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the
+steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by
+'circumstances,' and complacently regarding himself as the victim of
+ill-luck.  Go visit the incarcerated criminal, who has imbued his hands
+in the blood of his fellow-man, or who is guilty of less heinous
+crimes, and you will find that, joining the temptations which were easy
+to avoid with those which were comparatively irresistible, he has
+hurriedly patched up a treaty with conscience, and stifles its
+compunctious visitings by persuading himself that, from first to last,
+he was the victim of circumstances.  Go talk with the mediocre in
+talents and attainments, the weak-spirited man who, from lack of energy
+and application, has made but little headway in the world, being
+outstripped in the race of life by those whom he had despised as his
+inferiors, and you will find that he, too, acknowledges the all-potent
+power of luck, and soothes his humbled pride by deeming himself the
+victim of ill-fortune.  In short, from the most venial offense to the
+most flagrant, there is hardly any wrong act or neglect to which this
+too fatally convenient word is not applied as a palliation."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Paris was in the hands of a mob, the authorities were panic-stricken,
+for they did not dare to trust their underlings.  In came a man who
+said, "I know a young officer who has the courage and ability to quell
+this mob."  "Send for him; send for him; send for him," said they.
+Napoleon was sent for, came, subjugated the mob, subjugated the
+authorities, ruled France, then conquered Europe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a lesson is Napoleon's life for the sickly, wishy-washy, dwarfed,
+sentimental "dudes," hanging about our cities, country, and
+universities, complaining of their hard lot, dreaming of success, and
+wondering why they are left in the rear in the great race of life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Success in life is dependent largely upon the willpower, and whatever
+weakens or impairs it diminishes success.  The will can be educated.
+That which most easily becomes a habit in us is the will.  Learn, then,
+to will decisively and strongly; thus fix your floating life, and leave
+it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by
+every wind that blows.  "It is not talent that men lack, it is the will
+to labor; it is the purpose, not the power to produce."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was this insatiable thirst for knowledge which held to his task,
+through poverty and discouragement, John Leyden, a Scotch shepherd's
+son.  Barefoot and alone, he walked six or eight miles daily to learn
+to read, which was all the schooling he had.  His desire for an
+education defied the extremest poverty, and no obstacle could turn him
+from his purpose.  He was rich when he discovered a little bookstore,
+and his thirsty soul would drink in the precious treasures from its
+priceless volumes for hours, perfectly oblivious of the scanty meal of
+bread and water which awaited him at his lowly lodging.  Nothing could
+discourage him from trying to improve himself by study.  It seemed to
+him that an opportunity to get at books and lectures was all that any
+man could need.  Before he was nineteen, this poor shepherd boy with no
+chance had astonished the professors of Edinburgh by his knowledge of
+Greek and Latin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hearing that a surgeon's assistant in the Civil Service was wanted,
+although he knew nothing whatever of medicine, he determined to apply
+for it.  There were only six months before the place was to be filled,
+but nothing could daunt him, and in six months' time he actually took
+his degree with honor.  Walter Scott, who thought this one of the most
+remarkable illustrations of perseverance, helped to fit him out, and he
+sailed for India.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Webster was very poor even after he entered Dartmouth College.  A
+friend sent him a recipe for greasing his boots.  Webster wrote and
+thanked him, and added: "But my boots need other doctoring, for they
+not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones."  Yet he became
+one of the greatest men in the world.  Sydney Smith said: "Webster was
+a living lie, because no man on earth could be as great as he looked."
+Carlyle said of him: "One would incline at sight to back him against
+the world."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What seemed to be luck followed Stephen Girard all his life.  No matter
+what he did, it always seemed to others to turn to his account.  His
+coming to Philadelphia seemed a lucky accident.  A sloop was seen one
+morning off the mouth of Delaware Bay floating the flag of France and a
+signal of distress.  Young Girard was captain of this sloop, and was on
+his way to a Canadian port with freight from New Orleans.  An American
+skipper, seeing his distress, went to his aid, but told him the
+American war had broken out, and that the British cruisers were all
+along the American coast, and would seize his vessel.  He told him his
+only chance was to make a push for Philadelphia.  Girard did not know
+the way, and had no money.  The skipper loaned him five dollars to get
+the service of a pilot who demanded his money in advance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His sloop passed into the Delaware just in time to avoid capture by a
+British war vessel.  He sold the sloop and cargo in Philadelphia, and
+began business on the capital.  Being a foreigner, unable to speak
+English, short, stout, and with a repulsive face, blind in one eye, it
+was hard for him to get a start.  But he was not the man to give up.
+He had begun as a cabin boy at thirteen, and for nine years sailed
+between Bordeaux and the French West Indies.  He improved every leisure
+minute at sea, mastering the art of navigation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the age of eight he first discovered that he was blind in one eye.
+His father, evidently thinking that he would never amount to anything,
+would not help him to an education beyond that of mere reading and
+writing, but sent his younger brothers to college.  The discovery of
+his blindness, the neglect of his father, and the chagrin of his
+brothers' advancement, soured his whole life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When he began business for himself in Philadelphia, there seemed to be
+nothing he would not do for money.  He bought and sold anything, from
+groceries to old junk.  He bottled wine and cider, from which he made a
+good profit.  Everything he touched prospered.  In 1780, he resumed the
+New Orleans and St. Domingo trade, in which he had been engaged at the
+breaking out of the Revolution.  Here great success again attended him.
+He had two vessels lying in one of the St. Domingo ports when the great
+insurrection on that island broke out.  A number of the rich planters
+fled to his vessels with their valuables, which they left for safe
+keeping while they went back to their estates to secure more.  They
+probably fell victims to the cruel negroes, for they never returned,
+and Girard was the lucky possessor of $50,000 which the goods brought
+in Philadephia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Everybody, especially his jealous brother merchants, attributed his
+great success to his luck.  While undoubtedly he was fortunate in
+happening to be at the right place at the right time, yet he was
+precision, method, accuracy, energy itself.  He left nothing to chance.
+His plans and schemes were worked out with mathematical care.  His
+letters, written to his captains in foreign ports, laying out their
+routes and giving detailed instruction from which they were never
+allowed to deviate under any circumstances, are models of foresight and
+systematic planning.  He never left anything of importance to others.
+He was rigidly accurate in his instructions, and would not allow the
+slightest departure from them.  He used to say that while his captains
+might save him money by deviating from instructions once, yet they
+would cause loss in ninety-nine other cases.  Once, when a captain
+returned and had saved him several thousand dollars by buying his cargo
+of cheese in another port than that in which he had been instructed to
+buy, Girard was so enraged, although he was several thousand dollars
+richer, that he discharged the captain on the spot, notwithstanding the
+latter had been faithful in his service for many years, and thought he
+was saving his employer a great deal of money by deviating from his
+instructions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Girard lived in a dingy little house, poorer than that occupied by many
+of his employees.  He married a servant girl of great beauty, but she
+proved totally unfitted for him, and died at last in the insane asylum.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Girard never lost a ship, and many times what brought financial ruin to
+many others, as the War of 1812, only increased his wealth.  What
+seemed luck with him was only good judgment and promptness in seizing
+opportunities, and the greatest care and zeal in improving them to
+their utmost possibilities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Luck is not God's price for success: that is altogether too cheap, nor
+does he dicker with men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The mathematician tells you that if you throw the dice, there are
+thirty chances to one against your turning up a particular number, and
+a hundred to one against your repeating the same throw three times in
+succession: and so on in an augmenting ratio.  What is luck?  Is it, as
+has been suggested, a blind man's buff among the laws? a ruse among the
+elements? a trick of Dame Nature?  Has any scholar defined luck? any
+philosopher explained its nature? any chemist shown its composition?
+Is luck that strange, nondescript fairy, that does all things among men
+that they cannot account for?  If so, why does not luck make a fool
+speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter lectures on philosophy?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a young man who has read the story of John Wanamaker's romantic
+career has gained very little inspiration or help from it toward his
+own elevation and advancement, for he looks upon it as the result of
+good luck, chance, or fate.  "What a lucky fellow," he says to himself
+as he reads; "what a bonanza he fell into."  But a careful analysis of
+Wanamaker's life only enforces the same lesson taught by the analysis
+of most great lives, namely, that a good mother, a good constitution,
+the habit of hard work, indomitable energy, a determination which knows
+no defeat, a decision which never wavers, a concentration which never
+scatters its forces, courage which never falters, a self-mastery which
+can say No, and stick to it, an "ignominious love of detail," strict
+integrity and downright honesty, a cheerful disposition, unbounded
+enthusiasm in one's calling, and a high aim and noble purpose insure a
+very large measure of success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Youth should be taught that there is something in circumstances; that
+there is such a thing as a poor pedestrian happening to find no
+obstruction in his way, and reaching the goal when a better walker
+finds the drawbridge up, the street blockaded, and so fails to win the
+race; that wealth often does place unworthy sons in high positions,
+that family influence does gain a lawyer clients, a physician patients,
+an ordinary scholar a good professorship; but that, on the other hand,
+position, clients, patients, professorships, manager's and
+superintendent's positions do not necessarily constitute success.  He
+should be taught that in the long run, as a rule, <I>the best man does
+win the best place</I>, and that persistent merit does succeed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real
+success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a
+Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of
+Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
+Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their
+shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry,
+irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt
+and detail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The youth should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life
+heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;"
+that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere
+bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless,
+the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or
+seize his opportunity.  Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before
+the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize
+her:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"In idle wishes fools supinely stay:<BR>
+Be there a will and wisdom finds a way."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It has been well said that the very reputation of being strong willed,
+plucky, and indefatigable is of priceless value.  It often cows enemies
+and dispels at the start opposition to one's undertakings which would
+otherwise be formidable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If Eric's in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of
+his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland,"
+says Emerson, "he will steer west and his ships will reach
+Newfoundland.  But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man,
+and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred
+miles further, and reach Labrador and New England.  There is no chance
+in results."  Obstacles tower before the living man like mountain
+chains, stopping his path and hindering his progress.  He surmounts
+them by his energy.  He makes a new path over them.  He climbs upon
+them to mountain heights.  They cannot stop him.  They do not much
+delay him.  He transmutes difficulties into power, and makes temporary
+failures into stepping-stones to ultimate success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How many might have been giants who are only dwarfs.  How many a one
+has died "with all his music in him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is astonishing what men who have come to their senses late in life
+have accomplished by a sudden resolution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Arkwright was fifty years of age when he began to learn English grammar
+and improve his writing and spelling.  Benjamin Franklin was past fifty
+before he began the study of science and philosophy.  Milton, in his
+blindness, was past the age of fifty when he sat down to complete his
+world-known epic, and Scott at fifty-five took up his pen to redeem an
+enormous liability.  "Yet I am learning," said Michael Angelo, when
+threescore years and ten were past, and he had long attained the
+highest triumphs of his art.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even brains are second in importance to will.  The vacillating man is
+always pushed aside in the race of life.  It is only the weak and
+vacillating who halt before adverse circumstances and obstacles.  A man
+with an iron will, with a determination that nothing shall check his
+career, if he has perseverance and grit, is sure to succeed.  We may
+not find time for what we would like, but what we long for and strive
+for with all our strength, we usually approximate if we do not fully
+reach.  Hunger breaks through stone walls; stern necessity will find a
+way or make one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Success is also a great physical as well as mental tonic, and tends to
+strengthen the will-power.  Dr. Johnson says: "Resolutions and success
+reciprocally produce each other."  Strong-willed men, as a rule, are
+successful men, and great success is almost impossible without it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns
+neither to the right nor the left, though a paradise tempt him, who
+keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of
+success.  We could almost classify successes and failures by their
+various degrees of will-power.  Men like Sir James Mackintosh,
+Coleridge, La Harpe, and many others who have dazzled the world with
+their brilliancy, but who never accomplished a tithe of what they
+attempted, who were always raising our expectations that they were
+about to perform wonderful deeds, but who accomplished nothing worthy
+of their abilities, have been deficient in will-power.  One talent with
+a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it.  The great
+linguist of Bologna mastered a hundred languages by taking them singly,
+as the lion fought the bulls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I wish it were possible to show the youth of America the great part
+that the will might play in their success in life and in their
+happiness also.  The achievements of will-power are simply beyond
+computation.  Scarcely anything in reason seems impossible to the man
+who can will strong enough and long enough.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How often we see this illustrated in the case of a young woman who
+suddenly becomes conscious that she is plain and unattractive; who, by
+prodigious exercise of her will and untiring industry, resolves to
+redeem herself from obscurity and commonness; and who not only makes up
+for her deficiencies, but elevates herself into a prominence and
+importance which mere personal attractions could never have given her.
+Charlotte Cushman, without a charm of form or face, climbed to the very
+top of her profession.  How many young men, stung by consciousness of
+physical deformity or mental deficiencies, have, by a strong persistent
+exercise of will-power, raised themselves from mediocrity and placed
+themselves high above those who scorned them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+History is full of examples of men and women who have redeemed
+themselves from disgrace, poverty, and misfortune, by the firm
+resolution of an iron will.  The consciousness of being looked upon as
+inferior, as incapable of accomplishing what others accomplish; the
+sensitiveness at being considered a dunce in school, has stung many a
+youth into a determination which has elevated him far above those who
+laughed at him, as in the case of Newton, of Adam Clark, of Sheridan,
+Wellington, Goldsmith, Dr. Chalmers, Curran, Disraeli, and hundreds of
+others.  "Whatever you wish, that you are; for such is the force of the
+human will, joined to the Divine, that whatever we wish to be
+seriously, and with a true intention, that we become."  While this is
+not strictly true, yet there is a deal of truth in it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is men like Mirabeau, who "trample upon impossibilities;" like
+Napoleon, who do not wait for opportunities, but make them; like Grant,
+who has only "unconditional surrender" for the enemy, who change the
+very front of the world.  "We have but what we make, and every good is
+locked by nature in a granite hand, sheer labor must unclench."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What cares Henry L. Bulwer for the suffocating cough, even though he
+can scarcely speak above a whisper?  In the House of Commons he makes
+his immortal speech on the Irish Church just the same.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can't, it is impossible," said a foiled lieutenant, to Alexander.
+"Be gone," shouted the conquering Macedonian, "there is nothing
+impossible to him who will try."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures
+among those who started out in life with high hopes, I should say
+unhesitatingly, they lacked will-power.  They could not half will.
+What is a man without a will?  He is like an engine without steam, a
+mere sport of chance, to be tossed about hither and thither, always at
+the mercy of those who have wills.  I should call the strength of will
+the test of a young man's possibilities.  Can he will strong enough,
+and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?  It is the iron grip
+that takes the strong hold on life.  What chance is there in this
+crowding, pushing, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or
+pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life?  "The truest
+wisdom," said Napoleon, "is a resolute determination."  An iron will
+without principle might produce a Napoleon; but with character it would
+make a Wellington or a Grant, untarnished by ambition or avarice.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">"The undivided will</SPAN><BR>
+'T is that compels the elements and wrings<BR>
+A human music from the indifferent air."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Victories that are easy are cheap.  Those only are worth having which
+come as the result of hard fighting.&mdash;BEECHER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that
+encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonishing
+to find how often results that seemed impracticable are thus made
+possible.&mdash;EPES SARGENT.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as
+that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, or
+parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but
+wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;<BR>
+The last result of wisdom stamps it true;<BR>
+He only earns his freedom and existence<BR>
+Who daily conquers them anew.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">GOETHE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise
+above them.&mdash;WASHINGTON IRVING.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"I have here three teams that I want to get over to Staten Island,"
+said a boy of twelve one day in 1806 to the innkeeper at South Amboy,
+N. J.  "If you will put us across, I'll leave with you one of my horses
+in pawn, and if I don't send you back six dollars within forty-eight
+hours you may keep the horse."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The innkeeper asked the reason for this novel proposition, and learned
+that the lad's father had contracted to get the cargo of a vessel
+stranded near Sandy Hook, and take it to New York in lighters.  The boy
+had been sent with three wagons, six horses, and three men, to carry
+the cargo across a sand-spit to the lighters.  The work accomplished,
+he had started with only six dollars to travel a long distance home
+over the Jersey sands, and reached South Amboy penniless.  "I'll do
+it," said the innkeeper, as he looked into the bright honest eyes of
+the boy.  The horse was soon redeemed.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-060"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-060.jpg" ALT="WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT" BORDER="2" WIDTH="368" HEIGHT="520">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 368px">
+WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+How can you keep a determined man from success: Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way, and he uses them for stepping-stones.  Imprison him, and he
+produces the "Pilgrim's Progress."  Deprive him of eyesight, and he
+writes the "Conquest of Mexico."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"My son," said this same boy's mother, on the first of May, 1810, when
+he asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat, having
+imbibed a strong liking for the sea; "on the twenty-seventh of this
+month you will be sixteen years old.  If, by that time, you will plow,
+harrow, and plant with corn the eight-acre lot, I will advance you the
+money."  The field was rough and stony, but the work was done in time,
+and well done.  From this small beginning Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the
+foundation of a colossal fortune.  He would often work all night; and,
+as he was never absent from his post by day, he soon had the best
+business in New York harbor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1813, when it was expected that New York would be attacked by
+British ships, all the boatmen except Cornelius put in bids to convey
+provisions to the military posts around New York, naming extremely low
+rates, as the contractor would be exempted from military duty.  "Why
+don't you send in a bid?" asked his father.  "Of what use?" replied
+young Vanderbilt; "they are offering to do the work at half price.  It
+can't be done at such rates."  "Well," said his father, "it can do no
+harm to try for it."  So, to please his father, but with no hope of
+success, Cornelius made an offer fair to both sides, but did not go to
+hear the award.  When his companions had all returned with long faces,
+he went to the commissary's office and asked if the contract had been
+given.  "Oh, yes," was the reply; "that business is settled.  Cornelius
+Vanderbilt is the man.  What?" he asked, seeing that the youth was
+apparently thunderstruck, "is it you?"  "My name is Cornelius
+Vanderbilt," said the boatman.  "Well," said the commissary, "don't you
+know why we have given the contract to you?"  "No."  "Why, it is
+because we want this business <I>done</I>, and we know you'll do it."
+Character gives confidence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1818 he owned two or three of the finest coasting schooners in New
+York harbor, and had a capital of nine thousand dollars.  Seeing that
+steam-vessels would soon win supremacy over those carrying sails only,
+he gave up his fine business to become the captain of a steamboat at
+one thousand dollars a year.  For twelve years he ran between New York
+city and New Brunswick, N. J.  In 1829 he began business as a steamboat
+owner, in the face of opposition so bitter that he lost his last
+dollar.  But the tide turned, and he prospered so rapidly that he at
+length owned over one hundred steamboats.  He early identified himself
+with the growing railroad interests of the country, and became the
+richest man of his day in America.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barnum began the race of business life barefoot, for at the age of
+fifteen he was obliged to buy on credit the shoes he wore at his
+father's funeral.  He was a remarkable example of success under
+difficulties.  There was no keeping him down; no opposition daunted
+him, no obstacles were too great for him to overcome.  Think of a man
+being ruined at fifty years of age; yes, worse than ruined, for he was
+heavily in debt besides.  Yet on the very day of his downfall he begins
+to rise again, wringing victory from defeat by his indomitable
+persistence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.
+Curran.  "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was
+born some three and twenty years and some months after me."  Speaking
+of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up,
+trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but
+imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as
+far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived
+that every eye was turned on me.  There were only six or seven present,
+and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my
+panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature,
+and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.
+I became dismayed and dumb.  My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there
+was nothing to hear."  He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he
+deserve the title until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a
+speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous
+anachronisms."  "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator
+Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend
+him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."
+Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"
+speaking quite fluently in his anger.  Encouraged by this success, he
+took great pains to become a good speaker.  He corrected his habit of
+stuttering by reading favorite passages aloud every day slowly and
+distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to
+cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals.  Gifford wrote his
+first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on
+small scraps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first
+calculated eclipses on his plow handle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him,
+earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.
+Eight cents a day was often all he could earn.  He traveled through
+France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at
+the cottages of the peasantry.  At twenty-eight he was penniless in
+London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane.  In his
+poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London.  He wore a
+second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which
+he adroitly covered with his three-cornered hat during his visits; and
+we have an amusing anecdote of his contest of courtesy with a patient
+who persisted in endeavoring to relieve him of his hat, which only made
+him press it more devoutly to his heart.  He often had to pawn his
+clothes to keep from starving.  He sold his "Life of Voltaire" for
+twenty dollars.  After great hardship he managed to publish his "Polite
+Learning in Europe," and this brought him to public notice.  Next came
+"The Traveller," and the wretched man in a Fleet Street garret found
+himself famous.  His landlady once arrested him for rent, but Dr.
+Johnson came to his relief, took from his desk the manuscript of the
+"Vicar of Wakefield," and sold it for three hundred dollars.  He spent
+two years revising "The Deserted Village" after it was first written.
+Generous to a fault, vain and improvident, imposed on by others, he was
+continually in debt; although for his "History of the Earth and
+Animated Nature" he received four thousand dollars, and some of his
+works, as, for instance, "She Stoops to Conquer," had a large sale.
+But in spite of fortune's frown and his own weakness, he won success
+and fame.  The world, which so often comes too late with its assistance
+and laurels, gave to the weak, gentle, loving author of "The Vicar of
+Wakefield" a monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The poor, scrofulous, and almost blind boy, Samuel Johnson, was taken
+by his mother to receive the touch of Queen Anne, which was supposed to
+heal the "King's Evil."  He entered Oxford as a servant, copying
+lectures from a student's notebooks, while the boys made sport of the
+bare feet showing through great holes in his shoes.  Some one left a
+pair of new shoes at his door, but he was too proud to be helped, and
+threw them out of the window.  He was so poor that he was obliged to
+leave college, and at twenty-six married a widow of forty-eight.  He
+started a private school with his wife's money; but, getting only three
+pupils, was obliged to close it.  He went to London, where he lived on
+nine cents a day.  In his distress he wrote a poem in which appeared in
+capital letters the line, "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,"
+which attracted wide attention.  He suffered greatly in London for
+thirteen years, being arrested once for a debt of thirteen dollars.  At
+forty he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in which were these
+lines:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Then mark what ills the scholar's life assail;<BR>
+Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+When asked how he felt about his failures, he replied:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Like a monument,"&mdash;that is, steadfast, immovable.  He was an
+indefatigable worker.  In the evenings of a single week he wrote
+"Rasselas," a beautiful little story of the search for happiness, to
+get money to pay the funeral expenses of his mother.  With six
+assistants he worked seven years on his Dictionary, which made his
+fortune.  His name was then in everybody's mouth, and when he no longer
+needed help, assistance, as usual, came from every quarter.  The great
+universities hastened to bestow their degrees, and King George invited
+him to the palace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lord Mansfield raised himself by indefatigable industry from oatmeal
+porridge and poverty to affluence and the Lord Chief Justice's Bench.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of five thousand articles sent every year to "Lippincott's Magazine,"
+only two hundred were accepted.  How much do you think Homer got for
+his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise?  Only bitter bread and salt, and
+going up and down other people's stairs.  In science, the man who
+discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a
+dungeon: the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died
+from starvation, driven from his home.  It is very clear indeed that
+God means all good work and talk to be done for nothing.  Shakespeare's
+"Hamlet" was sold for about twenty-five dollars; but his autograph has
+sold for five thousand dollars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac
+Newton could hardly pay two shillings a week to the Royal Society of
+which he was a member.  Some of his friends wanted to get him excused
+from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which
+record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of
+a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount
+(five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education, that he had to mend
+his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his
+friends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who in the days of the First Empire cared to recall the fact that
+Napoleon, Emperor and King, was once forced to borrow a louis from
+Talma, when he lived in a garret on the Quai Conti?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+David Livingstone at ten years of age was put into a cotton factory
+near Glasgow.  Out of his first week's wages he bought a Latin Grammar,
+and studied in the night schools for years.  He would sit up and study
+till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he
+had to be at the factory at six in the morning.  He mastered Virgil and
+Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany.  So
+eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book
+before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of
+machinery would pore over its pages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I
+began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman."  One of Emerson's
+biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising,
+correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over
+again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left.  It did
+not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make
+clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast
+aside."  Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him.  The pains he
+took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were
+incredible.  Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five
+volumes at the rate of one per day.  He tells Edward Fitzgerald that
+for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the
+battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and
+wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of
+perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that
+distant countries are united with canals.  If a man was to compare the
+effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the
+spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed
+by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations,
+incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and
+mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of
+human beings."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a
+sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was
+shot in a duel by Aaron Burr.  Although Nott had managed in some way to
+get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he
+entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat.  His wife
+sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap
+blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun and wove the wool,
+and made it into an overcoat for him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them.  Nor do they
+wait for facilities or favoring circumstances; they seize upon whatever
+is at hand, work out their problem, and master the situation.  A young
+man determined and willing will find a way or make one.  A Franklin
+does not require elaborate apparatus; he can bring electricity from the
+clouds with a common kite.  A Watt can make a model of the condensing
+steam-engine out of an old syringe used to inject the arteries of dead
+bodies previous to dissection.  A Dr. Black can discover latent heat
+with a pan of water and two thermometers.  A Newton can unfold the
+composition of light and the origin of colors with a prism, a lens, and
+a piece of pasteboard.  A Humphry Davy can experiment with kitchen pots
+and pans, and a Faraday can experiment on electricity by means of old
+bottles, in his spare minutes while a book-binder.  When science was in
+its cradle the Marquis of Worcester, an English nobleman, imprisoned in
+the Tower of London, was certainly not in a very good position to do
+anything for the world, but would not waste his time.  The cover of a
+vessel of hot water blown on before his eyes led to a series of
+observations, which he published later in a book called "Century of
+Inventions."  These observations were a sort of text-book on the power
+of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt
+afterward perfected.  A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on
+his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and
+the stars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not in his day of bodily strength and political power, but blind,
+decrepit, and defeated with his party, Milton composed "Paradise Lost."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great men have found no royal road to their triumph.  It is always the
+old route, by way of industry and perseverance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The farmer boy, Elihu B. Washburn, taught school at ten dollars per
+month, and early learned the lesson that it takes one hundred cents to
+make a dollar.  In after years he fought "steals" in Congress, until he
+was called the "Watchdog of the Treasury."  From his long membership he
+became known as the "Father of the House."  He administered the oath to
+Schuyler Colfax as Speaker three times.  He recommended Grant as
+colonel of a regiment of volunteers.  The latter, when President,
+appointed him Secretary of State, and, later, Minister to France.
+During the reign of the Commune, the representatives of nearly all
+other foreign nations fled in dismay, but Washburn remained at his
+post.  Shells exploded close to his office, and fell all around it, but
+he did not leave even when Paris was in flames.  For a time he was
+really the minister of all foreign countries, in Paris; and represented
+Prussia for almost a year.  The Emperor William conferred upon him the
+Order of the Red Eagle, and gave him a jeweled star of great value.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How could the poor boy, Elihu Burritt, working nearly all the daylight
+in a blacksmith's shop, get an education?  He had but one book in his
+library, and carried that in his hat.  But this boy with no chance
+became one of America's wonders.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When teaching school, Garfield was very poor.  He tore his only blue
+jean trousers, but concealed the rents by pins until night, when he
+retired early that his boarding mistress might mend his clothes.  "When
+you get to be a United States Senator," said she, "no one will ask what
+kind of clothes you wore when teaching school."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Although Michael Angelo made himself immortal in three different
+occupations, his fame might well rest upon his dome of St. Peter as an
+architect, upon his "Moses" as a sculptor, and upon his "Last Judgment"
+as a painter; yet we find by his correspondence now in the British
+Museum, that when he was at work on his colossal bronze statue of Pope
+Julius II., he was so poor that he could not have his younger brother
+come to visit him at Bologna, because he had but one bed in which he
+and three of his assistants slept together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was always at the bottom of my purse," said Zola, in describing the
+struggles of his early years of authorship.  "Very often I had not a
+sou left, and not knowing, either, where to get one.  I rose generally
+at four in the morning, and began to study after a breakfast consisting
+of one raw egg.  But no matter, those were good times.  After taking a
+walk along the quays, I entered my garret, and joyfully partaking of a
+dinner of three apples, I sat down to work.  I wrote, and I was happy.
+In winter I would allow myself no fire; wood was too expensive&mdash;only on
+f�te days was I able to afford it.  But I had several pipes of tobacco
+and a candle for three sous.  A three-sous candle, only think of it!
+It meant a whole night of literature to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the "New York Daily
+Express," and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a
+store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of
+New England rum.  He was so eager to go to college that he started for
+Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was
+so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station
+when he went home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Elias Howe, harassed by want and woe, was in London completing his
+first sewing-machine, he had frequently to borrow money to live on.  He
+bought beans and cooked them himself.  He also borrowed money to send
+his wife back to America.  He sold his first machine for five pounds,
+although it was worth fifty, and then he pawned his letters patent to
+pay his expenses home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy Arkwright begins barbering in a cellar, but dies worth a
+million and a half.  The world treated his novelties just as it treats
+everybody's novelties&mdash;made infinite objection, mustered all the
+impediments, but he snapped his fingers at their objections, and lived
+to become honored and wealthy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and
+persecution.  "Everywhere," says Heine, "that a great soul gives
+utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nearly every great discovery or invention that has blessed mankind has
+had to fight its way to recognition, even against the opposition of the
+most progressive men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even Sir Charles Napier fiercely opposed the introduction of steam
+power into the Royal Navy.  In the House of Commons, he exclaimed, "Mr.
+Speaker, when we enter Her Majesty's naval service and face the chances
+of war, we go prepared to be hacked in pieces, to be riddled by
+bullets, or to be blown to bits by shot and shell; but Mr. Speaker, we
+do not go prepared to be boiled alive."  He said this with tremendous
+emphasis.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will any one explain how there can be a light without a wick?" asked a
+member of Parliament, when William Murdock, toward the close of the
+eighteenth century, said that coal gas would give a good light, and
+could be conveyed into buildings in pipes.  "Do you intend taking the
+dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" was the sneering question of even
+the great scientist, Humphry Davy.  Walter Scott ridiculed the idea of
+lighting London by "smoke," but he soon used it at Abbotsford, and Davy
+achieved one of his greatest triumphs by experimenting with gas until
+he had invented his safety lamp.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Titian used to crush the flowers to get their color, and painted the
+white walls of his father's cottage in Tyrol with all sorts of
+pictures, at which the mountaineers gazed in wonder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That boy will beat me one day," said an old painter as he watched a
+little fellow named Michael Angelo making drawings of pot and brushes,
+easel and stool, and other articles in the studio.  The barefoot boy
+did persevere until he had overcome every difficulty and become a
+master of his art.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+William H. Prescott was a remarkable example of what a boy with "no
+chance" can do.  While at college, he lost one eye by a hard piece of
+bread thrown during a "biscuit battle," then so common after meals;
+and, from sympathy, the other eye became almost useless.  But the boy
+had pluck and determination, and would not lead a useless life.  He set
+his heart upon being a historian, and turned all his energies in that
+direction.  By the aid of others' eyes, he spent ten years studying
+before he even decided upon a particular theme for his first book.
+Then he spent ten years more, poring over old archives and manuscripts,
+before he published his "Ferdinand and Isabella."  What a lesson in his
+life for young men!  What a rebuke to those who have thrown away their
+opportunities and wasted their lives!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galileo with an opera-glass," said Emerson, "discovered a more
+splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since with the
+great telescopes.  Columbus found the new world in an undecked boat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Surroundings which men call unfavorable cannot prevent the unfolding of
+your powers.  From the plain fields and lowlands of Avon came the
+Shakespearean genius which has charmed the world.  From among the
+rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire sprang the greatest of American
+orators and statesmen, Daniel Webster.  From the crowded ranks of toil,
+and homes to which luxury is a stranger, have often come the leaders
+and benefactors of our race.  Indeed, when Christ came upon earth, His
+early abode was a place so poor and so much despised that men thought
+He could not be the Christ, asking, in utter astonishment, "Can any
+good thing come out of Nazareth?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I once knew a little colored boy," said Frederick Douglass, "whose
+mother and father died when he was but six years old.  He was a slave,
+and had no one to care for him.  He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel,
+and in cold weather would crawl into a meal-bag head foremost, and
+leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm.  Often he would roast an
+ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he
+crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast
+in the fire and eat.  That boy did not wear pantaloons, as you do, but
+a tow-linen shirt.  Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to
+spell from an old Webster's spelling-book, and to read and write from
+posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him.
+He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known.  He became
+presidential elector, United States marshal, United States recorder,
+United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth.  He wore
+broadcloth, and didn't have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the
+table.  That boy was Frederick Douglass.  What was possible for me is
+possible for you.  Don't think because you are colored you can't
+accomplish anything.  Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge.  So
+long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the
+respect of your fellow-men."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Where shall we find an illustration more impressive than in Abraham
+Lincoln, whose life, career, and death might be chanted by a Greek
+chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial
+theme of modern times?  Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of
+what real parentage we know not, reared in penury, squalor, with no
+gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird
+dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward,
+ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this
+remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity,
+raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the
+destiny of a nation.  The great leaders of his party were made to stand
+aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like
+Seward, and Chase, and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent
+to the rear, while this strange figure was brought by unseen hands to
+the front, and given the reins of power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The story is told of a man in London deprived of both legs and arms,
+who managed to write with his mouth and perform other things so
+remarkable as to enable him to earn a fair living.  He would lay
+certain sheets of paper together, pinning them at the corner to make
+them hold.  Then he would take a pen and write some verses; after which
+he would proceed to embellish the lines by many skillful flourishes.
+Dropping the pen from his mouth, he would next take up a needle and
+thread, also with his mouth, thread the needle, and make several
+stitches.  He also painted with a brush, and was in many other ways a
+wonderful man.  Instead of being a burden to his family he was the most
+important contributor to their welfare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Arthur Cavanagh, M. P., was born without arms or legs, yet it is said
+that he was a good shot, a skillful fisherman and sailor, and one of
+the best cross country riders in Ireland.  He was a good
+conversationalist, and an able member of Parliament.  He ate with his
+fork attached to his stump of an arm, and wrote holding his pen in his
+teeth.  In riding he held the bridle in his mouth, his body being
+strapped to the saddle.  He once lost his means of support in India,
+but went to work with his accustomed energy, and obtained employment as
+a carrier of dispatches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+People thought it strange that Gladstone should appoint blind Henry
+Fawcett Postmaster-General of Great Britain; but never before did any
+one fill the office so well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John B. Herreshoff, of Bristol, R. I., although blind since he was
+fifteen years old, is the founder and head of one of the most noted
+shipbuilding establishments in the world.  He has superintended the
+construction of some of the swiftest torpedo boats and steam and
+sailing yachts afloat.  He frequently takes his turn at the wheel in
+sailing his vessels on trial trips.  He is aided greatly by his younger
+brother Nathaniel, but can plan vessels and conduct business without
+him.  After examining a vessel's hull or a good model of it, he will
+give detailed instructions for building another just like it, and will
+make a more accurate duplicate than can most boat-builders whose sight
+is perfect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Rev. William H. Milburn, who lost his sight when a child, studied
+for the ministry, and was ordained before he attained his majority.  In
+ten years he traveled about 200,000 miles in missionary work.  He has
+written half a dozen books, among them a very careful history of the
+Mississippi Valley.  He has long been chaplain of the lower house of
+Congress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Blind Fanny Crosby, of New York, was a teacher of the blind for many
+years.  She has written nearly three thousand hymns, among which are
+"Pass Me not, O Gentle Saviour," "Rescue the Perishing," "Saviour more
+than Life to Me," and "Jesus keep Me near the Cross."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor are these by any means the only examples of blind people now doing
+their full share of the world's work.  In the United States alone there
+are engaged in musical occupation one hundred and fifty blind piano
+tuners, one hundred and fifty blind teachers of music in schools for
+the blind, five hundred blind private teachers, one hundred blind
+church organists, fifteen or more blind composers and publishers of
+music, and several blind dealers in musical instruments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>There is no open door to the temple of success</I>.  Every one who enters
+makes his own door, which closes behind him to all others, not even
+permitting his own children to pass.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nearly forty years ago, on a rainy, dreary day in November, a young
+widow in Philadelphia sat wondering how she could feed and clothe three
+little ones left dependent by the death of her husband, a naval
+officer.  Happening to think of a box of which her husband had spoken,
+she opened it, and found therein an envelope containing directions for
+a code of colored light signals to be used at night on the ocean.  The
+system was not complete, but she perfected it, went to Washington, and
+induced the Secretary of the Navy to give it a trial.  An admiral soon
+wrote that the signals were good for nothing, although the idea was
+valuable.  For months and years she worked, succeeding at last in
+producing brilliant lights of different colors.  She was paid $20,000
+for the right to manufacture them in our navy.  Nearly all the blockade
+runners captured in the Civil War were taken by the aid of the Coston
+signals, which are also considered invaluable in the Life Saving
+Service.  Mrs. Coston introduced them into several European navies, and
+became wealthy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A modern writer says that it is one of the mysteries of our life that
+genius, that noblest gift of God to man, is nourished by poverty.  Its
+greatest works have been achieved by the sorrowing ones of the world in
+tears and despair.  Not in the brilliant salon, not in the tapestried
+library, not in ease and competence, is genius usually born and
+nurtured; but often in adversity and destitution, amidst the harassing
+cares of a straitened household, in bare and fireless garrets, with the
+noise of squalid children, in the turbulence of domestic contentions,
+and in the deep gloom of uncheered despair.  This is its most frequent
+birthplace, and amid scenes like these unpropitious, repulsive,
+wretched surroundings, have men labored, studied, and trained
+themselves, until they have at last emanated from the gloom of that
+obscurity the shining lights of their times; have become the companions
+of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an
+influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of
+intellectual legislation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chauncey Jerome's education was limited to three months in the district
+school each year until he was ten, when his father took him into his
+blacksmith shop at Plymouth, Conn., to make nails.  Money was a scarce
+article with young Chauncey.  He once chopped a load of wood for one
+cent, and often chopped by moonlight for neighbors at less than a dime
+a load.  His father died when he was eleven, and his mother was forced
+to send Chauncey out, with tears in his eyes and a little bundle of
+clothes in his hand, to earn a living on a farm.  His new employer kept
+him at work early and late chopping down trees all day, his shoes
+sometimes full of snow, for he had no boots until he was nearly
+twenty-one.  At fourteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a
+carpenter, who gave him only board and clothes.  Several times during
+his apprenticeship he carried his tools thirty miles on his back to his
+work at different places.  After he had learned his trade he frequently
+walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back.  One day he
+heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to
+make two hundred clocks in one lot.  "He'll never live long enough to
+finish them," said one.  "If he should," said another, "he could not
+possibly sell so many.  The very idea is ridiculous."  Chauncey
+pondered long over this rumor, for it had long been his dream to become
+a great clock-maker.  He tried his hand at the first opportunity, and
+soon learned to make a wooden clock.  When he got an order to make
+twelve at twelve dollars apiece he thought his fortune was made.  One
+night he happened to think that a cheap clock could be made of brass as
+well as of wood, and would not shrink, swell, or warp appreciably in
+any climate.  He acted on the idea, and became the first great
+manufacturer of brass clocks.  He made millions at the rate of six
+hundred a day, exporting them to all parts of the globe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The History of the English People" was written while J. R. Green was
+struggling against a mortal illness.  He had collected a vast store of
+materials, and had begun to write, when his disease made a sudden and
+startling progress, and his physicians said they could do nothing to
+arrest it.  In the extremity of ruin and defeat he applied himself with
+greater fidelity to his work.  The time that might still be left to him
+for work must henceforth be wrested, day by day, from the grasp of
+death.  The writing occupied five months, while from hour to hour and
+day to day his life was prolonged, his doctors said, by the sheer force
+of his own will and his inflexible determination to finish the "Making
+of England."  He lay, too weak to lift a book, or to hold a pen,
+dictating every word, sometimes through hours of intense suffering.
+Yet so conscientious was he that, driven by death as he was, the
+greater part of the book was rewritten five times.  When it was done he
+began the "Conquest of England," wrote it, reviewed it, and then,
+dissatisfied with it, rejected it all and began again.  As death laid
+its cold fingers on his heart, he said: "I still have some work to do
+that I know is good.  I will try to win but one week more to write it
+down."  It was not until he was actually dying that he said, "I can
+work no more."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered?"  Schiller
+produced his greatest tragedies in the midst of physical suffering
+almost amounting to torture.  Handel was never greater than when,
+warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress
+and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made
+his name immortal in music.  Mozart composed his great operas, and last
+of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a
+fatal disease.  Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy
+sorrow, when oppressed by almost total deafness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps no one ever battled harder to overcome obstacles which would
+have disheartened most men than Demosthenes.  He had such a weak voice,
+and such an impediment in his speech, and was so short of breath, that
+he could scarcely get through a single sentence without stopping to
+rest.  All his first attempts were nearly drowned by the hisses, jeers,
+and scoffs of his audiences.  His first effort that met with success
+was against his guardian, who had defrauded him, and whom he compelled
+to refund a part of his fortune.  He was so discouraged by his defeats
+that he determined to give up forever all attempts at oratory.  One of
+his auditors, however, believed the young man had something in him, and
+encouraged him to persevere.  He accordingly appeared again in public,
+but was hissed down as before.  As he withdrew, hanging his head in
+great confusion, a noted actor, Satyrus, encouraged him still further
+to try to overcome his impediment.  He stammered so much that he could
+not pronounce some of the letters at all, and his breath would give out
+before he could get through a sentence.  Finally, he determined to be
+an orator cost what it might.  He went to the seashore and practiced
+amid the roar of the breakers with small pebbles in his mouth, in order
+to overcome his stammering, and at the same time accustom himself to
+the hisses and tumults of his audience.  He overcame his short breath
+by practicing speaking while running up steep and difficult places on
+the shore.  His awkward gestures were also corrected by long and
+determined drill before a mirror.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Disheartened by the expense of removing the troublesome seeds, Southern
+planters were seriously considering the abandonment of cotton culture.
+To clean a pound of cotton required the labor of a slave for a day.
+Eli Whitney, a young man from New England, teaching school in Georgia,
+saw the state of affairs, and determined to invent a machine to do the
+work.  He worked in secret for many months in a cellar, and at last
+made a machine which cleaned the cotton perfectly and rapidly.  Just as
+success crowned his long labor thieves broke into the cellar and stole
+his model.  He recovered the model, but the principle was stolen, and
+other machines were made without his consent.  In vain he tried to
+protect his right in the courts, for Southern juries would almost
+invariably decide against him.  He had started the South in a great
+industry, and added millions to her wealth, yet the courts united with
+the men who had infringed his patents to rob him of the reward of his
+ingenuity and industry.  At last he abandoned the whole thing in
+disgust, and turned his attention to making improvements in firearms,
+and with such success that he accumulated a fortune.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Robert Collyer, who brought his bride in the steerage when he came to
+America at the age of twenty-seven, worked at the anvil nine years in
+Pennsylvania, and then became a preacher, soon winning national renown.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A shrewd observer says of John Chinaman: "No sooner does he put his
+foot among strangers than he begins to work.  No office is too menial
+or too laborious for him.  He has come to make money, and he will make
+it.  His frugality requires but little: he barely lives, but he saves
+what he gets; commences trade in the smallest possible way, and is
+continually adding to his store.  The native scorns such drudgery, and
+remains poor; the Chinaman toils patiently on, and grows rich.  A few
+years pass by, and he has warehouses; becomes a contractor for produce;
+buys foreign goods by the cargo; and employs his newly imported
+countrymen, who have come to seek their fortune as he did.  He is not
+particularly scrupulous in matters of opinion.  He never meddles with
+politics, for they are dangerous and not profitable; but he will adopt
+any creed, and carefully follow any observances, if, by so doing, he
+can confirm or improve his position.  He thrives with the Spaniard, and
+works while the latter sleeps.  He is too quick for the Dutchman, and
+can smoke and bargain at the same time.  He has harder work with the
+Englishman, but still he is too much for him, and succeeds.  Climate
+has no effect on him: it cannot stop his hands, unless it kills him;
+and if it does, he dies in harness, battling for money till his last
+breath.  Whoever he may be, and in whatever position, whether in his
+own or a foreign country, he is diligent, temperate, and uncomplaining.
+He keeps the word he pledges, pays his debts, and is capable of noble
+and generous actions.  It has been customary to speak lightly of him,
+and to judge a whole people by a few vagabonds in a provincial seaport,
+whose morals and manners have not been improved by foreign society."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Columbus was dismissed as a fool from court after court, but he pushed
+his suit against an incredulous and ridiculing world.  Rebuffed by
+kings, scorned by queens, he did not swerve a hair's breadth from the
+overmastering purpose which dominated his soul.  The words "New World"
+were graven upon his heart; and reputation, ease, pleasure, position,
+life itself if need be, must be sacrificed.  Threats, ridicule,
+ostracism, storms, leaky vessels, mutiny of sailors, could not shake
+his mighty purpose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You cannot keep a determined man from success.  Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way and he takes them for stepping-stones, and on them will
+climb to greatness.  Take away his money, and he makes spurs of his
+poverty to urge him on.  Cripple him, and he writes the Waverley
+Novels.  Lock him up in a dungeon, and he composes the immortal
+"Pilgrim's Progress."  Put him in a cradle in a log cabin in the
+wilderness of America, and in a few years you will find him in the
+Capitol at the head of the greatest nation on the globe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Would it were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that
+all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the
+result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, of common
+every-day industry!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Lavoisier the chemist asked that his execution might be postponed
+for a few days in order to ascertain the results of the experiments he
+was conducting in prison, the communists refused to grant the request,
+saying: "The Republic has no need of philosophers."  Dr. Priestley's
+house was burned and his chemical library destroyed by a mob shouting:
+"No philosophers," and he was forced to flee from his country.  Bruno
+was burned in Rome for revealing the heavens, and Versalius
+[Transcriber's note: Vesalius?] was condemned for dissecting the human
+body; but their names shall live as long as time shall last.  Kossuth
+was two years in prison at Buda, but he kept on working, undaunted.
+John Hunter said: "The few things I have been enabled to do have been
+accomplished under the greatest difficulties, and have encountered the
+greatest opposition."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Roger Bacon, one of the profoundest thinkers the world has produced,
+was terribly persecuted for his studies in natural philosophy, yet he
+persevered and won success.  He was accused of dealing in magic, his
+books were burned in public, and he was kept in prison for ten years.
+Even our own revered Washington was mobbed in the streets because he
+would not pander to the clamor of the people and reject the treaty
+which Mr. Jay had arranged with Great Britain.  But he remained firm,
+and the people adopted his opinion.  The Duke of Wellington was mobbed
+in the streets of London and his windows were broken while his wife lay
+dead in the house; but the "Iron Duke" never faltered in his course, or
+swerved a hair's breadth from his purpose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+William Phips, when a young man, heard some sailors on the street, in
+Boston, talking about a Spanish ship, wrecked off the Bahama Islands,
+which was supposed to have money on board.  Young Phips determined to
+find it.  He set out at once, and, after many hardships, discovered the
+lost treasure.  He then heard of another ship, wrecked off Port De La
+Plata many years before.  He set sail for England and importuned
+Charles II. for aid.  To his delight the king fitted up the ship Rose
+Algier for him.  He searched and searched for a long time in vain.  He
+had to return to England to repair his vessel.  James II. was then on
+the throne, and he had to wait for four years before he could raise
+money to return.  His crew mutinied and threatened to throw him
+overboard, but he turned the ship's guns on them.  One day an Indian
+diver went down for a curious sea plant and saw several cannon lying on
+the bottom.  They proved to belong to the wreck for which he was
+looking, sunk fifty years before.  He had nothing but dim traditions to
+guide him, but he returned to England with $1,500,000.  The King made
+him High Sheriff of New England, and he was afterward made Governor of
+Massachusetts Bay Colony.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's
+Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket.  Joseph
+Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a
+druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons.  Dante and Descartes
+were soldiers.  Andrew Johnson was a tailor.  Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe,
+and Kirke White were butchers' sons.  Faraday was the son of a
+blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an
+apothecary.  Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a
+tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker.  The boy Herschel played
+the oboe for his meals.  Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose
+from the ranks.  His great industry gained for him the name of "The
+Indefatigable."  Soult served fourteen years before he was made a
+sergeant.  When made Foreign Minister of France he knew very little of
+geography, even.  Richard Cobden was a boy in a London warehouse.  His
+first speech in Parliament was a complete failure; but he was not
+afraid of defeat, and soon became one of the greatest orators of his
+day.  Seven shoemakers sat in Congress during the first century of our
+government: Roger Sherman, Henry Wilson, Gideon Lee, William Graham,
+John Halley, H. P. Baldwin, and Daniel Sheffey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man who has not fought his way up to his own loaf, and does not
+bear the scar of desperate conflict, does not know the highest meaning
+of success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The money acquired by those who have thus struggled upward to success
+is not their only, or indeed their chief reward.  When, after years of
+toil, of opposition, of ridicule, of repeated failure, Cyrus W. Field
+placed his hand upon the telegraph instrument ticking a message under
+the sea, think you that the electric thrill passed no further than the
+tips of his fingers?  When Thomas A. Edison demonstrated in Menlo Park
+that the electric light had at last been developed into a commercial
+success, do you suppose those bright rays failed to illuminate the
+inmost recesses of his soul?  Edward Everett said: "There are occasions
+in life in which a great mind lives years of enjoyment in a single
+moment.  I can fancy the emotion of Galileo when, first raising the
+newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand
+prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the
+moon.  It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of
+Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their
+hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through
+the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, beheld the shores of San
+Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself
+to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the
+stiffening fibres of the hemp cord of his kite, that he held the
+lightning in his grasp, like that when Leverrier received back from
+Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Observe yon tree in your neighbor's garden," says Zanoni to Viola in
+Bulwer's novel.  "Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted.  Some
+wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the
+rock.  Choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and
+man, its life has been one struggle for the light.  You see how it has
+writhed and twisted,&mdash;how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has
+labored and worked, stem and branch, towards the clear skies at last.
+What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and
+circumstances&mdash;why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the
+vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open
+sunshine?  My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the
+struggle,&mdash;because the labor for the light won to the light at length.
+So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and
+of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven; this it is that
+gives knowledge to the strong and happiness to the weak."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">"Each petty hand</SPAN><BR>
+Can steer a ship becalmed; but he that will<BR>
+Govern her and carry her to her ends, must know<BR>
+His tides, his currents; how to shift his sails;<BR>
+What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;<BR>
+What her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop them;<BR>
+What strands, what shelves, what rocks to threaten her;<BR>
+The forces and the natures of all winds,<BR>
+Gusts, storms, and tempests; when her keel plows hell,<BR>
+And deck knocks heaven; then to manage her<BR>
+Becomes the name and office of a pilot."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+USES OF OBSTACLES.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Nature, when she adds difficulties, adds brains.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous
+difficulties.&mdash;SPURGEON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The good are better made by ill,<BR>
+As odors crushed are sweeter still.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ROGERS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Aromatic plants bestow<BR>
+No spicy fragrance while they grow;<BR>
+But crushed or trodden to the ground,<BR>
+Diffuse their balmy sweets around.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">GOLDSMITH.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.&mdash;YOUNG.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum:
+force is always aggressive and crowds something.&mdash;HOLMES.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the
+more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will
+be.&mdash;HORACE BUSHMILL.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous
+circumstances would have lain dormant.&mdash;HORACE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity.&mdash;SIRACH.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe,<BR>
+There's wit there ye'll get there, ye'll find no other where.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BURNS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens
+it.&mdash;HAZLITT.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Adversity is the prosperity of the great."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+No man ever worked his way in a dead calm.&mdash;JOHN NEAL.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Many and many a time since," said Harriet Martineau, referring to her
+father's failure in business, "have we said that, but for that loss of
+money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of
+ladies with small means, sewing and economizing and growing narrower
+every year; whereas, by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own
+resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation,
+and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home; in
+short, have truly lived instead of vegetating."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-086"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-086.jpg" ALT="JOHN BUNYAN" BORDER="2" WIDTH="364" HEIGHT="518">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 364px">
+JOHN BUNYAN
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Sculptor of souls, I lift to Thee<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Encumbered heart and hands;</SPAN><BR>
+Spare not the chisel, set me free,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">However dear the bands.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"I do believe God wanted a grand poem of that man," said George
+Macdonald of Milton, "and so blinded him that he might be able to write
+it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two of the three greatest epic poets of the world were blind,&mdash;Homer
+and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if
+not altogether, blind.  It almost seems as though some great characters
+had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they would not
+dissipate their energy, but concentrate it all in one direction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have been beaten, but not cast down," said Thiers, after making a
+complete failure of his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies.  "I am
+making my first essay in arms.  In the tribune, as under fire, a defeat
+is as useful as a victory."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A distinguished investigator in science said that when he encountered
+an apparently insuperable obstacle, he usually found himself upon the
+brink of some discovery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Returned with thanks" has made many an author.  Failure often leads a
+man to success by arousing his latent energy, by firing a dormant
+purpose, by awakening powers which were sleeping.  Men of mettle turn
+disappointments into helps as the oyster turns into pearl the sand
+which annoys it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of
+the storm wind is to the eagle,&mdash;a force against him that lifts him
+higher."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A kite would not fly unless it had a string tying it down.  It is just
+so in life.  The man who is tied down by half a dozen blooming
+responsibilities and their mother will make a higher and stronger
+flight than the bachelor who, having nothing to keep him steady, is
+always floundering in the mud.  If you want to ascend in the world tie
+yourself to somebody.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was the severe preparation for the subsequent harvest," said
+Pemberton Leigh, the eminent English lawyer, speaking of his early
+poverty and hard work.  "I learned to consider indefatigable labor as
+the indispensable condition of success, pecuniary independence as
+essential alike to virtue and happiness, and no sacrifice too great to
+avoid the misery of debt."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Napoleon's companions made sport of him on account of his humble
+origin and poverty he devoted himself entirely to books, and soon
+rising above them in scholarship, commanded their respect.  Soon he was
+regarded as the brightest ornament of the class.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To make his way at the bar," said an eminent jurist, "a young man must
+live like a hermit and work like a horse.  There is nothing that does a
+young lawyer so much good as to be half starved."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thousands of men of great native ability have been lost to the world
+because they have not had to wrestle with obstacles, and to struggle
+under difficulties sufficient to stimulate into activity their dormant
+powers.  No effort is too dear which helps us along the line of our
+proper career.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Poverty and obscurity of origin may impede our progress, but it is only
+like the obstruction of ice or debris in the river temporarily forcing
+the water into eddies, where it accumulates strength and a mighty
+reserve which ultimately sweeps the obstruction impetuously to the sea.
+Poverty and obscurity are not insurmountable obstacles, but they often
+act as a stimulus to the naturally indolent, and develop a firmer fibre
+of mind, a stronger muscle and stamina of body.  If the germ of the
+seed has to struggle to push its way up through the stones and hard
+sod, to fight its way up to sunlight and air, and then to wrestle with
+storm and tempest, with snow and frost, the fibre of its timber will be
+all the tougher and stronger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you wish to live without a trial?" asks a modern teacher.  "Then
+you wish to die but half a man.  Without trial you cannot guess at your
+own strength.  Men do not learn to swim on a table.  They must go into
+deep water and buffet the waves.  Hardship is the native soil of
+manhood and self-reliance.  Trials are rough teachers, but rugged
+schoolmasters make rugged pupils.  A man who goes through life
+prosperous, and comes to his grave without a wrinkle, is not half a
+man.  Difficulties are God's errands.  And when we are sent upon them
+we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.  We should reach after
+the highest good."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you wish to rise," said Talleyrand, "make enemies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is good philosophy in the injunction to love our enemies, for
+they are often our best friends in disguise.  They tell us the truth
+when friends flatter.  Their biting sarcasm and scathing rebuke are
+often mirrors which reveal us to ourselves.  These unkind stings and
+thrusts are spurs which urge us on to grander success and nobler
+endeavor.  Friends cover our faults and rarely rebuke; enemies drag out
+to the light all our weaknesses without mercy.  We dread these thrusts
+and exposures as we do the surgeon's knife, but are the better for
+them.  They reach depths before untouched, and we are led to resolve to
+redeem ourselves from scorn and inferiority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We are the victors of our opponents.  They have developed in us the
+very power by which we overcome them.  Without their opposition we
+could never have braced and anchored and fortified ourselves, as the
+oak is braced and anchored for its thousand battles with the tempests.
+Our trials, our sorrows, and our griefs develop us in a similar way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man who has triumphed over difficulties bears the signs of victory
+in his face.  An air of triumph is seen in every movement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Calvin, who made a theology for the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, was tortured with disease for many years, and so was Robert
+Hall.  The great men who have lifted the world to a higher level were
+not developed in easy circumstances, but were rocked in the cradle of
+difficulties and pillowed on hardships.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The gods look on no grander sight than an honest man struggling with
+adversity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I must learn to sing better," said Anaximander, when told that
+the very boys laughed at his singing.  Strong characters, like the
+palm-tree, seem to thrive best when most abused.  Men who have stood up
+bravely under great misfortune for years are often unable to bear
+prosperity.  Their good fortune takes the spring out of their energy,
+as the torrid zone enervates races accustomed to a vigorous climate.
+Some people never come to themselves until baffled, rebuffed, thwarted,
+defeated, crushed, in the opinion of those around them.  Trials unlock
+their virtues; defeat is the threshold of their victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle
+to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible; it is defeat that
+has made those heroic natures that are now in the ascendency, and that
+has given the sweet law of liberty instead of the bitter law of
+oppression.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Difficulties call out great qualities, and make greatness possible.
+How many centuries of peace would have developed a Grant?  Few knew
+Lincoln until the great weight of the war showed his character.  A
+century of peace would never have produced a Bismarck.  Perhaps
+Phillips and Garrison would never have been known to history had it not
+been for slavery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will he not make a great painter?" was asked in regard to an artist
+fresh from his Italian tour.  "No, never," replied Northcote.  "Why
+not?"  "Because he has an income of six thousand pounds a year."  In
+the sunshine of wealth a man is, as a rule, warped too much to become
+an artist of high merit.  A drenching shower of adversity would
+straighten his fibres out again.  He should have some great thwarting
+difficulty to struggle against.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The best tools receive their temper from fire, their edge from
+grinding; the noblest characters are developed in a similar way.  The
+harder the diamond, the more brilliant the lustre, and the greater the
+friction necessary to bring it out.  Only its own dust is hard enough
+to make this most precious stone reveal its full beauty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The spark in the flint would sleep forever but for friction; the fire
+in man would never blaze but for antagonism.  The friction which
+retards a train upon the track, robbing the engine of a fourth of its
+power, is the very secret of locomotion.  Oil the track, remove the
+friction, and the train will not move an inch.  The moment man is
+relieved of opposition or friction, and the track of his life is oiled
+with inherited wealth or other aids, that moment he often ceases to
+struggle and therefore ceases to grow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is this scantiness of means, this continual deficiency, this
+constant hitch, this perpetual struggle to keep the head above water
+and the wolf from the door, that keeps society from falling to pieces.
+Let every man have a few more dollars than he wants, and anarchy would
+follow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Suddenly, with much jarring and jolting, an electric car came to a
+standstill just in front of a heavy truck that was headed in an
+opposite direction.  The huge truck wheels were sliding uselessly round
+on the car tracks that were wet and slippery from rain.  All the urging
+of the teamster and the straining of the horses in vain,&mdash;until the
+motorman quietly tossed a shovelful of sand on the track under the
+heavy wheels, then the truck lumbered on its way.  "Friction is a very
+good thing," remarked a passenger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The philosopher Kant observes that a dove, inasmuch as the only
+obstacle it has to overcome is the resistance of the air, might suppose
+that if only the air were out of the way it could fly with greater
+rapidity and ease.  Yet if the air were withdrawn, and the bird should
+try to fly in a vacuum, it would fall instantly to the ground unable to
+fly at all.  The very element that offers the opposition to flying is
+at the same time the condition of any flight whatever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rough seas and storms make sailors.  Emergencies make giant men.  But
+for our Civil War the names of its grand heroes would not be written
+among the greatest of our time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The effort or struggle to climb to a higher place in life has strength
+and dignity in it, and cannot fail to leave us stronger for the
+struggle, even though we miss the prize.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From an aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out
+powers and virtues before unknown and suspected.  How often we see a
+young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a
+parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has
+knocked the props and crutches from under him.  The prison has roused
+the slumbering fire in many a noble mind.  "Robinson Crusoe" was
+written in prison.  The "Pilgrim's Progress" appeared in Bedford Jail.
+The "Life and Times" of Baxter, Eliot's "Monarchia of Man," and Penn's
+"No Cross, No Crown," were written by prisoners.  Sir Walter Raleigh
+wrote "The History of the World" during his imprisonment of thirteen
+years.  Luther translated the Bible while confined in the Castle of
+Wartburg.  For twenty years Dante worked in exile, and even under
+sentence of death.  His works were burned in public after his death;
+but genius will not burn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Take two acorns from the same tree, as nearly alike as possible; plant
+one on a hill by itself, and the other in the dense forest, and watch
+them grow.  The oak standing alone is exposed to every storm.  Its
+roots reach out in every direction, clutching the rocks and piercing
+deep into the earth.  Every rootlet lends itself to steady the growing
+giant, as if in anticipation of fierce conflict with the elements.
+Sometimes its upward growth seems checked for years, but all the while
+it has been expending its energy in pushing a root across a large rock
+to gain a firmer anchorage.  Then it shoots proudly aloft again,
+prepared to defy the hurricane.  The gales which sport so rudely with
+its wide branches find more than their match, and only serve still
+further to toughen every minutest fibre from pith to bark.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The acorn planted in the deep forest shoots up a weak, slender sapling.
+Shielded by its neighbors, it feels no need of spreading its roots far
+and wide for support.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Take two boys, as nearly alike as possible.  Place one in the country
+away from the hothouse culture and refinements of the city, with only
+the district school, the Sunday-school, and a few books.  Remove wealth
+and props of every kind; and, if he has the right kind of material in
+him, he will thrive.  Every obstacle overcome lends him strength for
+the next conflict.  If he falls, he rises with more determination than
+before.  Like a rubber ball, the harder the obstacle he meets the
+higher he rebounds.  Obstacles and opposition are but apparatus of the
+gymnasium in which the fibres of his manhood are developed.  He compels
+respect and recognition from those who have ridiculed his poverty.  Put
+the other boy in a Vanderbilt family.  Give him French and German
+nurses; gratify every wish.  Place him under the tutelage of great
+masters and send him to Harvard.  Give him thousands a year for
+spending money, and let him travel extensively.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The two meet.  The city lad is ashamed of his country brother.  The
+plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner
+of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of
+the other.  The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no
+chance in life," and envies the city youth.  He thinks that it is a
+cruel Providence that places such a wide gulf between them.  They meet
+again as men, but how changed!  It is as easy to distinguish the
+sturdy, self-made man from the one who has been propped up all his life
+by wealth, position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder
+to tell the difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak
+and one from the sapling of the forest.  If you think there is no
+difference, place each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in
+a hurricane at sea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When God wants to educate a man, he does not send him to school to the
+Graces, but to the Necessities.  Through the pit and the dungeon Joseph
+came to a throne.  We are not conscious of the mighty cravings of our
+half divine humanity; we are not aware of the god within us until some
+chasm yawns which must be filled, or till the rending asunder of our
+affections forces us to become conscious of a need.  Paul in his Roman
+cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his
+prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of
+revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
+Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
+alone,&mdash;what failures they might all to themselves have seemed to be,
+yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
+humiliations!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
+"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!"  "Tut,
+you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
+if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman."  Just so
+with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties that scare
+and keep out unworthy competitors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
+"If there were no difficulties, there would be no success.  In this
+necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
+advancement,&mdash;the advancement of individuals as of nations.  It has led
+to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
+entering the Birmingham orchestra.  "Don't tell me what you like but
+what you don't like."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
+professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
+their successes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
+way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
+"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
+satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
+discouragements.  But if they are properly met, they are not what they
+seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances.  There is no more
+helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would
+have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
+continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
+will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to
+hear!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote."  He was
+so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
+writing, and had to write on scraps of leather.  A rich Spaniard was
+asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his
+necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world
+rich."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless
+cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something,
+everything.  If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I
+would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she
+would be the greatest singer in Europe."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
+Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is
+spoiled by the ease with which he composes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart
+covets.  Martin Luther did his greatest work, and built up his best
+character, while engaged in sharp controversy with the Pope.  Later in
+life his wife asks, "Doctor, how is it that whilst subject to Papacy we
+prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
+utmost coldness and very seldom?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Lord Eldon was poor, Lord Thurlow withheld a promised
+commissionership of bankruptcy, saying that it was a favor not to give
+it then.  "What he meant was," said Eldon, "that he had learned I was
+by nature very indolent, and it was only want that could make me very
+industrious."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Waters says that the struggle to obtain knowledge and to advance one's
+self in the world strengthens the mind, disciplines the faculties,
+matures the judgment, promotes self-reliance, and gives one
+independence of thought and force of character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The gods in bounty work up storms about us," says Addison, "that give
+mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw out into
+practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth
+seasons and the calms of life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hothouse plant may tempt a pampered appetite or shed a languid
+odor, but the working world gets its food from fields of grain and
+orchards waving in the sun and free air, from cattle that wrestle on
+the plains, from fishes that struggle with currents of river or ocean;
+its choicest perfumes from flowers that bloom unheeded, and in
+wind-tossed forests finds its timber for temples and for ships.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not see," says Emerson, "how any man can afford, for the sake of
+his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.
+It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.  Drudgery, calamity,
+exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.  The true
+scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by as a loss of
+power."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Kossuth called himself "a tempest-tossed soul, whose eyes have been
+sharpened by affliction."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Benjamin Franklin ran away, and George Law was turned out of doors.
+Thrown upon their own resources, they early acquired the energy and
+skill to overcome difficulties.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As soon as young eagles can fly the old birds tumble them out and tear
+the down and feathers from their nest.  The rude and rough experience
+of the eaglet fits him to become the bold king of birds, fierce and
+expert in pursuing his prey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Boys who are bound out, crowded out, kicked out, usually "turn out,"
+while those who do not have these disadvantages frequently fail to
+"come out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was not the victories but the defeats of my life which have
+strengthened me," said the aged Sidenham Poyntz.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Almost from the dawn of history, oppression has been the lot of the
+Hebrews, yet they have given the world its noblest songs, its wisest
+proverbs, its sweetest music.  With them persecution seems to bring
+prosperity.  They thrive where others would starve.  They hold the
+purse-strings of many nations.  To them hardship has been "like spring
+mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin,
+but will let the plant live."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside the
+fort, crashing through a beautiful garden.  But from the ugly chasm
+there burst forth a spring of water which ever afterward flowed a
+living fountain.  From the ugly gashes which misfortunes and sorrows
+make in our hearts, perennial fountains of rich experience and new joys
+often spring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Don't lament and grieve over lost wealth.  The Creator may see
+something grand and mighty which even He cannot bring out as long as
+your wealth stands in the way.  You must throw away the crutches of
+riches and stand upon your own feet, and develop the long unused
+muscles of manhood.  God may see a rough diamond in you which only the
+hard hits of poverty can polish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+God knows where the richest melodies of our lives are, and what drill
+and what discipline are necessary to bring them out.  The frost, the
+snows, the tempests, the lightnings, are the rough teachers that bring
+the tiny acorn to the sturdy oak.  Fierce winters are as necessary to
+it as long summers.  It is its half-century's struggle with the
+elements for existence, wrestling with the storm, fighting for its life
+from the moment that it leaves the acorn until it goes into the ship,
+that gives it value.  Without this struggle it would have been
+character-less, stamina-less, nerve-less, and its grain would have
+never been susceptible of high polish.  The most beautiful as well as
+the strongest woods are found not in tropical climates, but in the
+severe climates, where they have to fight the frosts and the winter's
+cold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a man has never found himself until he has lost his all.
+Adversity stripped him only to discover him.  Obstacles, hardships are
+the chisel and mallet which shape the strong life into beauty.  The
+rough ledge on the hillside complains of the drill, of the blasting
+powder which disturbs its peace of centuries: it is not pleasant to be
+rent with powder, to be hammered and squared by the quarryman.  But
+look again: behold the magnificent statue, the monument, chiseled into
+grace and beauty, telling its grand story of valor in the public square
+for centuries.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The statue would have slept in the marble forever but for the blasting,
+the chiseling, and the polishing.  The angel of our higher and nobler
+selves would remain forever unknown in the rough quarries of our lives
+but for the blastings of affliction, the chiseling of obstacles, and
+the sand-papering of a thousand annoyances.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who has not observed the patience, the calm endurance, the sweet
+loveliness chiseled out of some rough life by the reversal of fortune
+or by some terrible affliction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood,
+have developed their greatest virtues, when the reverses of fortune
+have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had
+robbed them of all they held dear in life.  Often we cannot see the
+angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the
+blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and
+obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and
+beauty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a man has been ruined into salvation.  The lightning which smote
+his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him
+glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered possibilities in his
+nature of patience, endurance, and hope which he never dreamed he
+possessed before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by
+one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better
+too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
+skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This conflict with difficulty
+makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in
+all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their
+personality, and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances.
+You cannot keep them down.  Every obstacle seems only to add to their
+ability to get on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Under different circumstances," says Castelar, "Savonarola would
+undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father, a man unknown to
+history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the
+human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to
+visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy
+which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his
+brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the
+splendor of immortality.  His hopes were centred in the woman he loved,
+his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family
+finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly
+on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come
+upon him, when in truth it was immortality."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks.  It
+is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
+and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a
+professorship in the Royal Academy.  When but ten years old he showed
+the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
+Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer.  Thorwaldsen's parents
+were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what
+their hands found to do, and ennobled their work.  They rose by being
+greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering,
+Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above
+rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning.  By being first-class barbers,
+tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power
+which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
+generals.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties
+of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying
+their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious.  Neither
+do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and
+happiness.  The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the
+faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of
+the voyager.  The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to
+outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism
+worth a lifetime of softness and security.  A man upon whom continuous
+sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry
+and hard and close-grained.  Men have drawn from adversity the elements
+of greatness.  If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and
+sickest families within your knowledge.  The darker the setting, the
+brighter the diamond.  Don't run about and tell acquaintances that you
+have been unfortunate; people do not like to have unfortunate men for
+acquaintances.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he
+produced his greatest works.  Schiller wrote his best books in great
+bodily suffering.  He was not free from pain for fifteen years.  Milton
+wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick.  "Who best
+can suffer," said he, "best can do."  Bunyan said that, if it were
+lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater
+comfort's sake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you know what God puts us on our backs for?" asked Dr. Payson,
+smiling, as he lay sick in bed.  "No," replied the visitor.  "In order
+that we may look upward."  "I am not come to condole but to rejoice
+with you," said the friend, "for it seems to me that this is no time
+for mourning."  "Well, I am glad to hear that," said Dr. Payson, "it is
+not often I am addressed in such a way.  The fact is I never had less
+need of condolence, and yet everybody persists in offering it; whereas,
+when I was prosperous and well, and a successful preacher, and really
+needed condolence, they flattered and congratulated me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A German knight undertook to make an immense Aeolian harp by stretching
+wires from tower to tower of his castle.  When he finished the harp it
+was silent; but when the breezes began to blow he heard faint strains
+like the murmuring of distant music.  At last a tempest arose and swept
+with fury over his castle, and then rich and grand music came from the
+wires.  Ordinary experiences do not seem to touch some lives&mdash;to bring
+out any poetry, any higher manhood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand
+lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London,
+did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and
+mighty city.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Every man who makes a fortune has been more than once a bankrupt, if
+the truth were known," said Albion Tourg�e.  "Grant's failure as a
+subaltern made him commander-in-chief, and for myself, my failure to
+accomplish what I set out to do led me to what I never had aspired to."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The appeal for volunteers in the great battle of life, in exterminating
+ignorance and error, and planting high on an everlasting foundation the
+banner of intelligence and right, is directed to <I>you</I>.  Burst the
+trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope.  Place high thy
+standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
+Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of
+a great character is one of its special necessities.  Many of our best
+poets
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Are cradled into poetry by wrong,<BR>
+And learn in suffering what they teach in song."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
+criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
+but nineteen years of age.  Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
+in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
+reached."  In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
+Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
+genius.  Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
+as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and
+abuse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the crutch age.  "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
+We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
+newspapers, magazines.  Our thinking is done for us.  Our problems are
+all worked out in "explanations" and "keys."  Our boys are too often
+tutored through college with very little study.  "Short roads" and
+"abridged methods" are characteristic of the century.  Ingenious
+methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college
+course.  Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
+Self-help and self-reliance are getting old fashioned.  Nature, as if
+conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her
+wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and
+emancipate him from Eden's curse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But do not misinterpret her edict.  She emancipates from the lower only
+to call to the higher.  She does not bid the world go and play while
+she does the work.  She emancipates the muscles only to employ the
+brain and heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not
+developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on
+trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying
+climate and on a stubborn soil.  It is no chance that returns to the
+Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily
+toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England
+with its granite and ice rich.  It is rugged necessity, it is the
+struggle to obtain, it is poverty the priceless spur, that develops the
+stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism.  Labor found
+the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble
+block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human
+being.  The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has
+little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay.  The sculptor will
+chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel.  Nature will
+chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities.  She
+will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let
+us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways,
+if she can develop a little character.  Everything must give way to
+that.  Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing,
+<I>manhood is everything</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a <I>man</I>, Nature is after.
+In every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure
+which stands out boldly beyond everything else.  Every other idea or
+figure on the canvas is subordinate to it, but pointing to the central
+idea, finds its true expression there.  So in the vast universe of God,
+every object of creation is but a guideboard with an index-finger
+pointing to the central figure of the created universe&mdash;Man.  Nature
+writes this thought upon every leaf, she thunders it in every creation.
+It is exhaled from every flower; it twinkles in every star.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Oh, what price will Nature not pay for a man!  Ages and aeons were
+nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or to make his
+existence possible.  She has rifled the centuries for his development,
+and placed the universe at his disposal.  The world is but his
+kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the
+unseen universe.  Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a
+perfect type of her grandest creation.  To do this she must induce him
+to fight his way up to his own loaf.  She never allows him once to lose
+sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the
+man.  The moment we put our hand upon that which looks so attractive at
+a distance, and which we struggled so hard to reach, Nature robs it of
+its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Life," says a philosopher, "refuses to be so adjusted as to eliminate
+from it all strife and conflict and pain.  There are a thousand tasks
+that, in larger interests than ours, must be done, whether we want them
+or no.  The world refuses to walk upon tiptoe, so that we may be able
+to sleep.  It gets up very early and stays up very late, and all the
+while there is the conflict of myriads of hammers and saws and axes
+with the stubborn material that in no other way can be made to serve
+its use and do its work for man.  And then, too, these hammers and axes
+are not wielded without strain or pang, but swung by the millions of
+toilers who labor with their cries and groans and tears.  Nay, our
+temple-building, whether it be for God or man, exacts its bitter toll,
+and fills life with cries and blows.  The thousand rivalries of our
+daily business, the fiercer animosities when we are beaten, the even
+fiercer exultation when we have beaten, the crashing blows of disaster,
+the piercing scream of defeat,&mdash;these things we have not yet gotten rid
+of, nor in this life ever will.  Why should we wish to get rid of them?
+We are here, my brother, to be hewed and hammered and planed in God's
+quarry and on God's anvil for a nobler life to come."  Only the muscle
+that is used is developed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and
+disappointments, who takes them just for what they are, lessons, and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, is the true hero.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+There is a strength<BR>
+Deep bedded in our hearts of which we reck<BR>
+But little, till the shafts of heaven have pierced<BR>
+Its fragile dwelling.  Must not earth be rent<BR>
+Before her gems are found?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">MRS. HEMANS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"If what shone afar so grand<BR>
+Turns to ashes in the hand,<BR>
+On again, the virtue lies<BR>
+In the struggle, not the prize."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The hero is not fed on sweets,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Daily his own heart he eats;</SPAN><BR>
+Chambers of the great are jails,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And head-winds right for royal sails."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">"So many great</SPAN><BR>
+Illustrious spirits have conversed with woe,<BR>
+Have in her school been taught, as are enough<BR>
+To consecrate distress, and make ambition<BR>
+Even wish the frown beyond the smile of fortune."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Then welcome each rebuff,<BR>
+That turns earth's smoothness rough,<BR>
+Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BROWNING.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ONE UNWAVERING AIM.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Life is an arrow&mdash;therefore you must know<BR>
+What mark to aim at, how to use the bow&mdash;<BR>
+Then draw it to the head and let it go.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">HENRY VAN DYKE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the
+aptitude and perseverance to attain it.&mdash;GOETHE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Concentration alone conquers.&mdash;C. BUXTON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"He who follows two hares is sure to catch neither."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Let every one ascertain his special business and calling, and then
+stick to it if he would be successful.&mdash;FRANKLIN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Digression is as dangerous as stagnation in the career of a young man
+in business."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows
+unconsciously into genius.&mdash;BULWER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Genius is intensity.&mdash;BALZAC.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Why do you lead such a solitary life?" asked a friend of Michael
+Angelo.  "Art is a jealous mistress," replied the artist; "she requires
+the whole man."  During his labors at the Sistine Chapel, according to
+Disraeli, he refused to meet any one, even at his own house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That day we sailed westward, which was our course," were the simple
+but grand words which Columbus wrote in his journal day after day.
+Hope might rise and fall, terror and dismay might seize upon the crew
+at the mysterious variations of the compass, but Columbus, unappalled,
+pushed due west and nightly added to his record the above words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cut an inch deeper," said a member of the Old Guard to the surgeon
+probing his wound, "and you will find the Emperor,"&mdash;meaning his heart.
+By the marvelous power of concentrated purpose Napoleon had left his
+name on the very stones of the capital, had burned it indelibly into
+the heart of every Frenchman, and had left it written in living letters
+all over Europe.  France to-day has not shaken off the spell of that
+name.  In the fair city on the Seine the mystic "N" confronts you
+everywhere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Oh, the power of a great purpose to work miracles!  It has changed the
+face of the world.  Napoleon knew that there were plenty of great men
+in France, but they did not know the might of the unwavering aim by
+which he was changing the destinies of Europe.  He saw that what was
+called the "balance of power" was only an idle dream; that, unless some
+master-mind could be found which was a match for events, the millions
+would rule in anarchy.  His iron will grasped the situation; and like
+William Pitt, he did not loiter around balancing the probabilities of
+failure or success, or dally with his purpose.  There was no turning to
+the right nor to the left; no dreaming away time, nor building
+air-castles; but one look and purpose, forward, upward and onward,
+straight to his goal.  He always hit the bull's-eye.  His great success
+in war was due largely to his definiteness of aim.  He was like a great
+burning-glass, concentrating the rays of the sun upon a single spot; he
+burned a hole wherever he went.  The secret of his power lay in his
+ability to concentrate his forces upon a single point.  After finding
+the weak place in the enemy's ranks, he would mass his men and hurl
+them like an avalanche upon the critical point, crowding volley upon
+volley, charge upon charge, till he made a breach.  What a lesson of
+the power of concentration there is in this man's life!  He was able to
+focus all his faculties upon the smallest detail, as well as upon an
+empire.  But, alas!  Napoleon was himself defeated by violation of his
+own tactics,&mdash;the constantly repeated crushing force of heavy
+battalions upon one point.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To succeed to-day a man must concentrate all the faculties of his mind
+upon one unwavering aim, and have a tenacity of purpose which means
+death or victory.  Every other inclination which tempts him from his
+aim must be suppressed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+New Jersey has many ports, but they are so shallow and narrow that the
+shipping of the entire state amounts to but little.  On the other hand,
+New York has but one ocean port, and yet it is so broad, deep, and
+grand, that it leads America in its enormous shipping trade.  She sends
+her vessels into every port of the world, while the ships of her
+neighbor are restricted to local voyages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man may starve on a dozen half-learned trades or occupations; he may
+grow rich and famous upon one trade thoroughly mastered, even though it
+be the humblest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even Gladstone, with his ponderous yet active brain, says he cannot do
+two things at once; he throws his entire strength upon whatever he
+does.  The intensest energy characterizes everything he undertakes,
+even his recreation.  If such concentration of energy is necessary for
+the success of a Gladstone, what can we common mortals hope to
+accomplish by "scatteration?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All great men have been noted for their power of concentration which
+makes them oblivious of everything outside their aim.  Victor Hugo
+wrote his "Notre Dame" during the revolution of 1830, while the bullets
+were whistling across his garden.  He shut himself up in one room,
+locking his clothes up, lest they should tempt him to go out into the
+street, and spent most of that winter wrapped in a big gray comforter,
+pouring his very life into his work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Genius is intensity.  Abraham Lincoln possessed such power of
+concentration that he could repeat quite correctly a sermon to which he
+had listened in his boyhood.  Dr. O. W. Holmes, when an Andover
+student, riveted his eyes on the book he was studying as though he were
+reading a will that made him heir to a million.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A New York sportsman, in answer to an advertisement, sent twenty-five
+cents for a sure receipt to prevent a shotgun from scattering, and
+received the following; "Dear Sir: To keep a gun from scattering put in
+but a single shot."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the men who do one thing in this world who come to the front.
+Who is the favorite actor?  It is a Jefferson, who devotes a lifetime
+to a "Rip Van Winkle," a Booth, an Irving, a Kean, who plays one
+character until he can play it better than any other man living, and
+not the shallow players who impersonate all parts.  It is the man who
+never steps outside of his specialty or dissipates his individuality.
+It is an Edison, a Morse, a Bell, a Howe, a Stephenson, a Watt.  It is
+Adam Smith, spending ten years on the "Wealth of Nations."  It is
+Gibbon, giving twenty years to his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire."  It is a Hume, writing thirteen hours a day on his "History of
+England."  It is a Webster, spending thirty-six years on his
+dictionary.  It is a Bancroft, working twenty-six years on his "History
+of the United States."  It is a Field, crossing the ocean fifty times
+to lay a cable, while the world ridicules.  It is a Newton, writing his
+"Chronology of Ancient Nations" sixteen times.  It is a Grant, who
+proposes to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  These
+are the men who have written their names prominently in the history of
+the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A one-talent man who decides upon a definite object accomplishes more
+than the ten-talent man who scatters his energies and never knows
+exactly what he will do.  The weakest living creature, by concentrating
+his powers upon one thing, can accomplish something; the strongest, by
+dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.  Drop after
+drop, continually falling, wears a passage through the hardest rock.
+The hasty tempest, as Carlyle points out, rushes over it with hideous
+uproar and leaves no trace behind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A great purpose is cumulative; and, like a great magnet, it attracts
+all that is kindred along the stream of life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A Yankee can splice a rope in many different ways; an English sailor
+only knows one way, but that is the best one.  It is the one-sided man,
+the sharp-edged man, the man of single and intense purpose, the man of
+one idea, who turns neither to the right nor to the left, though a
+paradise tempt him, who cuts his way through obstacles and forges to
+the front.  The time has gone forever when a Bacon can span universal
+knowledge; or when, absorbing all the knowledge of the times, a Dante
+can sustain arguments against fourteen disputants in the University of
+Paris, and conquer in them all.  The day when a man can successfully
+drive a dozen callings abreast is a thing of the past.  Concentration
+is the keynote of the century.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Scientists estimate that there is energy enough in less than fifty
+acres of sunshine to run all the machinery in the world, if it could be
+concentrated.  But the sun might blaze out upon the earth forever
+without setting anything on fire; although these rays focused by a
+burning-glass would melt solid granite, or even change a diamond into
+vapor.  There are plenty of men who have ability enough; the rays of
+their faculties, taken separately, are all right, but they are
+powerless to collect them, to bring them all to bear upon a single
+spot.  Versatile men, universal geniuses, are usually weak, because
+they have no power to concentrate their talents upon one point, and
+this makes all the difference between success and failure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chiseled upon the tomb of a disappointed, heart-broken king, Joseph II.
+of Austria, in the Royal Cemetery at Vienna, a traveler tells us, is
+this epitaph: "Here lies a monarch who, with the best of intentions,
+never carried out a single plan."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sir James Mackintosh was a man of remarkable ability.  He excited in
+every one who knew him the greatest expectations.  Many watched his
+career with much interest, expecting that he would dazzle the world.
+But there was no purpose in his life.  He had intermittent attacks of
+enthusiasm for doing great things, but his zeal all evaporated before
+he could decide what to do.  This fatal defect in his character kept
+him balancing between conflicting motives; and his whole life was
+almost thrown away.  He lacked power to choose one object and persevere
+with a single aim, sacrificing every interfering inclination.  He
+vacillated for weeks trying to determine whether to use "usefulness" or
+"utility" in a composition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One talent utilized in a single direction will do infinitely more than
+ten talents scattered.  A thimbleful of powder behind a ball in a rifle
+will do more execution than a carload of powder unconfined.  The
+rifle-barrel is the purpose that gives direct aim to the powder, which
+otherwise, no matter how good it might be, would be powerless.  The
+poorest scholar in school or college often, in practical life, far
+outstrips the class leader or senior wrangler, simply because what
+little ability he has he employs for a definite object, while the
+other, depending upon his general ability and brilliant prospects,
+never concentrates his powers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A sublime self-confidence," says E. P. Whipple, "springing not from
+self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his
+object, lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, and
+communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-112"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-112.jpg" ALT="RICHARD ARKWRIGHT" BORDER="2" WIDTH="360" HEIGHT="514">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 360px">
+RICHARD ARKWRIGHT
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What a sublime spectacle is that of a man going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles which
+dishearten others, as though they were stepping-stones.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It is fashionable to ridicule the man of one idea, but the men who have
+changed the front of the world have been men of a single aim.  No man
+can make his mark on this age of specialties who is not a man of one
+idea, one supreme aim, one master passion.  The man who would make
+himself felt on this bustling planet, who would make a breach in the
+compact conservatism of our civilization, must play all his guns on one
+point.  A wavering aim, a faltering purpose, has no place in the
+nineteenth century.  "Mental shiftlessness" is the cause of many a
+failure.  The world is full of unsuccessful men who spend their lives
+letting empty buckets down into empty wells.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. A. often laughs at me," said a young American chemist, "because I
+have but one idea.  He talks about everything, aims to excel in many
+things; but I have learned that, if I ever wish to make a breach, I
+must play my guns continually upon one point."  This great chemist,
+when an obscure schoolmaster, used to study by the light of a pine knot
+in a log cabin.  Not many years later he was performing experiments in
+electro-magnetism before English earls, and subsequently he was at the
+head of one of the largest scientific institutes of this country.  This
+man was the late Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution,
+Washington.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Douglas Jerrold once knew a man who was familiar with twenty-four
+languages but could not express a thought in one of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We should guard against a talent which we cannot hope to practice in
+perfection, says Goethe.  Improve it as we may, we shall always, in the
+end, when the merit of the matter has become apparent to us, painfully
+lament the loss of time and strength devoted to such botching.  An old
+proverb says: "The master of one trade will support a wife and seven
+children, and the master of seven will not support himself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>It is the single aim that wins</I>.  Men with monopolizing ambitions
+rarely live in history.  They do not focus their powers long enough to
+burn their names indelibly into the roll of honor.  Edward Everett,
+even with his magnificent powers, disappointed the expectations of his
+friends.  He spread himself over the whole field of knowledge and
+elegant culture; but the mention of the name of Everett does not call
+up any one great achievement as does that of names like Garrison and
+Phillips.  Voltaire called the Frenchman La Harpe an oven which was
+always heating, but which never cooked anything.  Hartley Coleridge was
+splendidly endowed with talent, like Sir James Mackintosh, but there
+was one fatal lack in his character&mdash;he had no definite purpose, and
+his life was a failure.  Unstable as water, he could not excel.
+Southey, his uncle, says:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Coleridge has two left hands."  He was so morbidly shy from living
+alone in his dreamland that he could not open a letter without
+trembling.  He would often rally from his purposeless life, and resolve
+to redeem himself from the oblivion he saw staring him in the face;
+but, like Mackintosh, he remained a man of promise merely to the end of
+his life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world always makes way for the man with a purpose in him, like
+Bismarck or Grant.  Look at Rufus Choate, concentrating all his
+attention first on one juryman, then on another, going back over the
+whole line again and again, until he has burned his arguments into
+their souls; until he has hypnotized them with his purpose; until they
+see with his eyes, think his thoughts, feel his sensations.  He never
+stopped until he had projected his mind into theirs, and permeated
+their lives with his individuality.  There was no escape from his
+concentration of purpose, his persuasive rhetoric, his convincing
+logic.  "Carry the jury at all hazards," he used to say to young
+lawyers; "move heaven and earth to carry the jury, and then fight it
+out with the judge on the law questions as best you can."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man who succeeds has a programme.  He fixes his course and adheres
+to it.  He lays his plans and executes them.  He goes straight to his
+goal.  He is not pushed this way and that every time a difficulty is
+thrown in his path; if he can't get over it he goes through it.
+Constant and steady use of the faculties under a central purpose gives
+strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end
+only weakens them.  The mind must be focused on a definite end, or,
+like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself to pieces.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This age of concentration calls, not for educated men merely, not for
+talented men, not for geniuses, not for jacks-of-all-trades, but for
+men who are trained to do one thing as well as it can be done.
+Napoleon could go through the drill of his soldiers better than any one
+of his men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Stick to your aim</I>.  The constant changing of one's occupation is
+fatal to all success.  After a young man has spent five or six years in
+a dry goods store, he concludes that he would rather sell groceries,
+thereby throwing away five years of valuable experience which will be
+of very little use to him in the grocery business; and so he spends a
+large part of his life drifting around from one kind of employment to
+another, learning part of each, but all of none, forgetting that
+experience is worth more to him than money, and that the years devoted
+to learning his trade or occupation are the most valuable.
+Half-learned trades, no matter if a man has twenty, will never give him
+a good living, much less a competency, while wealth is absolutely out
+of the question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How many young men fail to reach the point of efficiency in one line of
+work before they get discouraged and venture into something else.  How
+easy to see the thorns in one's own profession or vocation, and only
+the roses in that of another.  A young man in business, for instance,
+seeing a physician riding about town in his carriage, visiting his
+patients, imagines that a doctor must have an easy, ideal life, and
+wonders that he himself should have embarked in an occupation so full
+of disagreeable drudgery and hardships.  He does not know of the years
+of dry, tedious study which the physician has consumed, the months and
+perhaps years of waiting for patients, the dry detail of anatomy, the
+endless names of drugs and technical terms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Scientists tell us that there is nothing in nature so ugly and
+disagreeable but intense light will make it beautiful.  The complete
+mastery of one profession will render even the driest details
+interesting.  The consciousness of thorough knowledge, the habit of
+doing everything to a finish, gives a feeling of strength, of
+superiority, which takes the drudgery out of an occupation.  The more
+completely we master a vocation the more thoroughly we enjoy it.  In
+fact, the man who has found his place and become master in it could
+scarcely be induced, even though he be a farmer, or a carpenter, or
+grocer, to exchange places with a governor or congressman.  To be
+successful is to <I>find your sphere and fill it, to get into your place
+and master it</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a sense of great power in a vocation after a man has reached
+the point of efficiency in it, the point of productiveness, the point
+where his skill begins to tell and bring in returns.  Up to this point
+of efficiency, while he is learning his trade, the time seems to have
+been almost thrown away.  But he has been storing up a vast reserve of
+knowledge of detail, laying foundations, forming his acquaintances,
+gaining his reputation for truthfulness, trustworthiness, and
+integrity, and in establishing his credit.  When he reaches this point
+of efficiency, all the knowledge and skill, character, influence, and
+credit thus gained come to his aid, and he soon finds that in what
+seemed almost thrown away lies the secret of his prosperity.  The
+credit he established as a clerk, the confidence, the integrity, the
+friendships formed, he finds equal to a large capital when he starts
+out for himself and takes the highway to fortune; while the young man
+who half learned several trades, and got discouraged and stopped just
+short of the point of efficiency, just this side of success, is a
+failure because he didn't go far enough; he did not press on to the
+point at which his acquisition would have been profitable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In spite of the fact that nearly all very successful men have made a
+life work of one thing, we see on every hand hundreds of young men and
+women flitting about from occupation to occupation, trade to trade, in
+one thing to-day and another to-morrow,&mdash;just as though they could go
+from one thing to another by turning a switch, as if they could run as
+well on another track as on the one they have left, regardless of the
+fact that no two careers have the same gauge, that every man builds his
+own road upon which another's engine cannot run either with speed or
+safety.  This fickleness, this disposition to shift about from one
+occupation to another, seems to be peculiar to American life, so much
+so that, when a young man meets a friend whom he has not seen for some
+time, the commonest question to ask is, "What are you doing now?"
+showing the improbability or uncertainty that he is doing to-day what
+he was doing when they last met.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some people think that if they "keep everlastingly at it" they will
+succeed, but this is not so.  Working without a plan is as foolish as
+going to sea without a compass.  A ship which has broken its rudder in
+mid-ocean may "keep everlastingly at it," may keep on a full head of
+steam, driving about all the time, but it never arrives anywhere, it
+never reaches any port unless by accident, and if it does find a haven,
+its cargo may not be suited to the people, the climate, or conditions
+among which it has accidentally drifted.  The ship must be directed to
+a definite port, for which its cargo is adapted, and where there is a
+demand for it, and it must aim steadily for that port through sunshine
+and storm, through tempest and fog.  So a man who would succeed must
+not drift about rudderless on the ocean of life.  He must not only
+steer straight toward his destined port when the ocean is smooth, when
+the currents and winds serve, but he must keep his course in the very
+teeth of the wind and the tempest, and even when enveloped in the fogs
+of disappointment and mists of opposition.  The Cunarders do not stop
+for fogs or storms; they plow straight through the rough seas with only
+one thing in view, their destined port, and no matter what the weather
+is, no matter what obstacles they encounter, their arrival in port can
+be predicted to within a few hours.  It is practically certain, too,
+that the ship destined for Boston will not turn up at Fort Sumter or at
+Sandy Hook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the prairies of South America there grows a flower that always
+inclines in the same direction.  If a traveler loses his way and has
+neither compass nor chart, by turning to this flower he will find a
+guide on which he can implicitly rely; for no matter how the rains
+descend or the winds blow, its leaves point to the north.  So there are
+many men whose purposes are so well known, whose aims are so constant,
+that no matter what difficulties they may encounter, or what opposition
+they may meet, you can tell almost to a certainty where they will come
+out.  They may be delayed by head winds and counter currents, but they
+will <I>always head for the port</I> and will steer straight towards the
+harbor.  You know to a certainty that whatever else they may lose, they
+will not lose their compass or rudder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whatever may happen to a man of this stamp, even though his sails may
+be swept away and his mast stripped to the deck, though he may be
+wrecked by the storms of life, the needle of his compass will still
+point to the North Star of his hope.  Whatever comes, his life will not
+be purposeless.  Even a wreck that makes its port is a greater success
+than a full-rigged ship with all its sails flying, with every mast and
+rope intact; which merely drifts into an accidental harbor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To fix a wandering life and give it direction is not an easy task, but
+a life which has no definite aim is sure to be frittered away in empty
+and purposeless dreams.  "Listless triflers," "busy idlers,"
+"purposeless busybodies," are seen everywhere.  A healthy, definite
+purpose is a remedy for a thousand ills which attend aimless lives.
+Discontent, dissatisfaction, flee before a definite purpose.  An aim
+takes the drudgery out of life, scatters doubts to the winds, and
+clears up the gloomiest creeds.  What we do without a purpose
+begrudgingly, with a purpose becomes a delight, and no work is well
+done nor healthily done which is not enthusiastically done.  It is just
+that added element which makes work immortal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mere energy is not enough, it must be concentrated on some steady,
+unwavering aim.  What is more common than "unsuccessful geniuses," or
+failures with "commanding talents"?  Indeed, "unrewarded genius" has
+become a proverb.  Every town has unsuccessful educated and talented
+men.  But education is of no value, talent is worthless, unless it can
+do something, achieve something.  Men who can do something at
+everything, and a very little at anything, are not wanted in this age.
+In Paris, a certain Monsieur Kenard announced himself as a "public
+scribe, who digests accounts, explains the language of flowers, and
+sells fried potatoes."  Jacks-at-all-trades are at war with the genius
+of the times.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What this age wants is young men and women who can do one thing without
+losing their identity or individuality, or becoming narrow, cramped, or
+dwarfed.  Nothing can take the place of an all-absorbing purpose;
+education will not, genius will not, talent will not, industry will
+not, will-power will not.  The purposeless life must ever be a failure.
+What good are powers, faculties, unless we can use them for a purpose?
+What good would a chest of tools do a carpenter unless he could use
+them?  A college education, a head full of knowledge, are worth little
+to the men who cannot use them to some definite end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man without a purpose never leaves his mark upon the world.  He has
+no individuality; he is absorbed in the mass, lost in the crowd, weak,
+wavering, incompetent.  His outlines of individuality and angles of
+character have been worn off, planed down to suit the common thought
+until he has, as a man, been lost in the throng of humanity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself
+to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle
+spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a great directness of purpose may be traced in the career of Pitt,
+who lived&mdash;ay, and died&mdash;for the sake of political supremacy.  From a
+child, the idea was drilled into him that he must accomplish a public
+career worthy of his illustrious father.  Even from boyhood he bent all
+his energy to this one great purpose.  He went straight from college to
+the House of Commons.  In one year he was Chancellor of the Exchequer;
+two years later he was Prime Minister of England, and reigned virtually
+king for a quarter of a century.  He was utterly oblivious of
+everything outside his aim; insensible to the claims of love, art,
+literature, living and steadily working for the sole purpose of
+wielding the governing power of the nation.  His whole soul was
+absorbed in the overmastering passion for political power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Consider, my lord," said Rowland Hill to the Prime Minister of
+England, "that a letter to Ireland and the answer back would cost
+thousands upon thousands of my affectionate countrymen more than a
+fifth of their week's wages.  If you shut the post office to them,
+which you do now, you shut out warm hearts and generous affections from
+home, kindred, and friends."  The lad learned that it cost to carry a
+letter from London to Edinburgh, four hundred and four miles, one
+eighteenth of a cent, while the government charged for a simple folded
+sheet of paper twenty-eight cents, and twice as much if there was the
+smallest inclosure.  Against the opposition and contempt of the
+post-office department he at length carried his point, and on January
+10, 1840, penny postage was established throughout Great Britain.  Mr.
+Hill was chosen to introduce the system, at a salary of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year.  His success was most encouraging, but at the end of two
+years a Tory minister dismissed him without paying for his services, as
+agreed.  The public was indignant, and at once contributed sixty-five
+thousand dollars; and, at the request of Queen Victoria, Parliament
+voted him one hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars a year
+for life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Christ knew that one affection rules in man's life when he said, "No
+man can serve two masters."  One affection, one object, will be supreme
+in us.  Everything else will be neglected and done with half a heart.
+One may have subordinate plans, but he can have but one supreme aim,
+and from this aim all others will take their character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a great purpose which gives meaning to life, it unifies all our
+powers, binds them together in one cable; makes strong and united what
+was weak, separated, scattered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Painting is my wife and my works are my children," replied Michael
+Angelo when asked why he did not marry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Smatterers" are weak and superficial.  Of what use is a man who knows
+a little of everything and not much of anything?  It is the momentum of
+constantly repeated acts that tells the story.  "Let thine eyes look
+straight before thee.  Ponder the path of thy feet and let all thy ways
+be established.  Turn not to the right hand nor to the left."  One
+great secret of St. Paul's power lay in his strong purpose.  Nothing
+could daunt him, nothing intimidate.  The Roman Emperor could not
+muzzle him, the dungeon could not appall him, no prison suppress him,
+obstacles could not discourage him.  "This one thing I do" was written
+all over his work.  The quenchless zeal of his mighty purpose burned
+its way down through the centuries, and its contagion will never cease
+to fire the hearts of men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Try and come home somebody," said the fond mother to Gambetta as she
+sent him off to Paris to school.  Poverty pinched this lad hard in his
+little garret study and his clothes were shabby, but what of that?  He
+had made up his mind to get on in the world.  For years this youth was
+chained to his desk and worked like a hero.  At last his opportunity
+came.  Jules Favre was to plead a great cause on a certain day; but,
+being ill, he chose this young man, absolutely unknown, rough and
+uncouth, to take his place.  For many years Gambetta had been preparing
+for such an opportunity, and he was equal to it, for he made one of the
+greatest speeches that up to that time had ever been made in France.
+That night all the papers in Paris were sounding the praises of this
+ragged, uncouth Bohemian, and soon all France recognized him as the
+Republican leader.  This sudden rise was not due to luck or accident.
+He had been steadfastly working and fighting his way up against
+opposition and poverty for just such an occasion.  Had he not been
+equal to it, it would only have made him ridiculous.  What a stride;
+yesterday, poor and unknown, living in a garret, to-day, deputy elect,
+in the city of Marseilles, and the great Republican leader!  The
+gossipers of France had never heard his name before.  He had been
+expelled from the priest-making seminary as totally unfit for a priest
+and an utterly undisciplinable character.  In two weeks, this ragged
+son of an Italian grocer arose in the Chamber, and moved that the
+Napoleon dynasty be disposed of and the Republic be declared
+established.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Louis Napoleon had been defeated at Sedan and had delivered his
+sword to William of Prussia, and when the Prussian army was marching on
+Paris, the brave Gambetta went out of the besieged city in a balloon
+barely grazed by the Prussian guns, landed in Amiens, and by almost
+superhuman skill raised three armies of 800,000 men, provided for their
+maintenance, and directed their military operations.  A German officer
+said, "This colossal energy is the most remarkable event of modern
+history, and will carry down Gambetta's name to remote posterity."
+This youth who was poring over his books in an attic while other youths
+were promenading the Champs �lys�es, although but thirty-two years old,
+was now virtually dictator of France, and the greatest orator in the
+Republic.  What a striking example of the great reserve of personal
+power, which, even in dissolute lives, is sometimes called out by a
+great emergency or sudden sorrow, and ever after leads the life to
+victory!  When Gambetta found that his first speech had electrified all
+France, his great reserve rushed to the front, he was suddenly weaned
+from dissipation, and resolved to make his mark in the world.  Nor did
+he lose his head in his quick leap into fame.  He still lived in the
+upper room in the musty Latin quarter, and remained a poor man, without
+stain of dishonor, though he might easily have made himself a
+millionaire.  When Gambetta died the "Figaro" said, "The Republic has
+lost its greatest man."  American boys should study this great man, for
+he loved our country, and made our Republic the pattern for France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no grander sight in the world than that of a young man fired
+with a great purpose, dominated by one unwavering aim.  He is bound to
+win; the world stands one side and lets him pass; it always makes way
+for the man with a will in him.  He does not have one half the
+opposition to overcome that the undecided, purposeless man has who,
+like driftwood, runs against all sorts of snags to which he must yield,
+because he has no momentum to force them out of his way.  What a
+sublime spectacle it is to see a youth going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles, which
+dishearten others, as though they were but stepping-stones!  Defeat,
+like a gymnasium, only gives him new power; opposition only doubles his
+exertions, dangers only increase his courage.  No matter what comes to
+him, sickness, poverty, disaster, he never turns his eye from his goal.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Duos qui sequitur lepores, neutrum capit."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SOWING AND REAPING.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that
+shall he also reap.&mdash;GALATIANS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a
+character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.&mdash;G. D. BOARDMAN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.&mdash;POPE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+How use doth breed a habit in a man.&mdash;SHAKESPEARE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+All habits gather, by unseen degrees,<BR>
+As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">DRYDEN.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Infinite good comes from good habits which must result from the common
+influence of example, intercourse, knowledge, and actual
+experience&mdash;morality taught by good morals.&mdash;PLATO.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt till they are
+too strong to be broken.&mdash;SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Man is first startled by sin; then it becomes pleasing, then easy, then
+delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed.  Then man is
+impenitent, then obstinate, then he is damned.&mdash;JEREMY TAYLOR.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Rogues differ little.  Each began as a disobedient son."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+In the great majority of things, habit is a greater plague than ever
+afflicted Egypt.&mdash;JOHN FOSTER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+You cannot in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to
+be true if the habit of your life has been insincere.&mdash;F. W. ROBERTSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The tissue of the life to be,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">We weave with colors all our own;</SPAN><BR>
+And in the field of destiny,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">We reap as we have sown.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">WHITTIER.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Gentlemen of the jury, you will now consider your verdict," said the
+great lawyer, Lord Tenterden, as he roused from his lethargy a moment,
+and then closed his eyes forever.  "T�te d'arm�e" (head of the army),
+murmured Napoleon faintly; and then, "on the wings of a tempest that
+raged with unwonted fury, up to the throne of the only power that
+controlled him while he lived, went the fiery soul of that wonderful
+warrior."  "Give Dayrolles a chair," said the dying Chesterfield with
+his old-time courtesy, and the next moment his spirit spread its wings.
+"Young man, keep your record clean," thrilled from the lips of John B.
+Gough as he sank to rise no more.  What power over the mind of man is
+exercised by the dominant idea of his life "that parts not quite with
+parting breath!"  It has shaped his purpose throughout his earthly
+career, and he passes into the Great Unknown, moving in the direction
+of his ideal; impelled still, amid the utter retrocession of the vital
+force, by all the momentum resulting from his weight of character and
+singleness of aim.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-124"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-124.jpg" ALT="VICTOR HUGO" BORDER="2" WIDTH="367" HEIGHT="512">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 367px">
+VICTOR HUGO
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"Every one is the son of his own works."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working
+universe: it is seed-grain that cannot die."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It is a beautiful arrangement in the mental and<BR>
+moral economy of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty
+may, by frequent repetitions, become a habit, and the habit of stern
+virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around the neck like a wreath
+of flowers."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Cholera appeared mysteriously in Toulon, and, after a careful
+examination, the medical inspectors learned that the first victims were
+two sailors on the Montebello, a government transport, long out of
+service, anchored at the entrance to the port.  For many years the
+vessel had been used for storing old, disused military equipments.
+Some of these had belonged to French soldiers who had died before
+Sebastopol.  The doctors learned that the two poor sailors were seized,
+suddenly and mortally, a few days after displacing a pile of equipments
+stored deep in the hold of the Montebello.  The cholera of Toulon came
+in a direct line from the hospital of Varna.  It went to sleep,
+apparently gorged, on a heap of the cast-off garments of its victims,
+to awaken thirty years later to victorious and venomous life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Professor Bonelli, of Turin, punctured an animal with the tooth of a
+rattlesnake.  The head of this serpent had lain in a dry state for
+sixteen years exposed to the air and dust, and, moreover, had
+previously been preserved more than thirty years in spirits of wine.
+To his great astonishment an hour afterward the animal died.  So
+habits, good or bad, that have been lost sight of for years will spring
+into a new life to aid or injure us at some critical moment, as kernels
+of wheat which had been clasped in a mummy's hand four thousand years
+sprang into life when planted.  They only awaited moisture, heat,
+sunlight, and air to develop them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Jefferson's play, Rip Van Winkle, after he had "sworn off," at every
+invitation to drink said, "Well, this time don't count."  True, as
+Professor James says, he may not have counted it, as thousands of
+others have not counted it, and a kind heaven may not count it, but it
+is being counted none the less.  Down among his nerve cells and fibres
+the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes.  Nothing we ever do is in
+strict scientific literalness wiped out.  There is a tendency in the
+nervous system to repeat the same mode of action at regularly recurring
+intervals.  Dr. Combe says that all nervous diseases have a marked
+tendency to observe regular periods.  "If we repeat any kind of mental
+effort at the same hour daily, we at length find ourselves entering
+upon it without premeditation when the time approaches."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our
+ally instead of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our
+acquisition, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.  For this
+we must make automatic and habitual, as soon as possible, as many
+useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that
+are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard against the
+plague."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The nervous system is a living phonograph, infinitely more marvelous
+than that of Edison.  No sound, however feeble, however slight, can
+escape being recorded in its wonderful mechanism.  Although the
+molecules of this living machine may all be entirely changed many times
+during a lifetime, yet these impressions are never erased or lost.
+They become forever fixed in the character.  Like Rip Van Winkle, the
+youth may say to himself, I will do this just once "just to see what it
+is like," no one will ever know it, and "I won't count this time."  The
+country youth says it when he goes to the city.  The young man says it
+when he drinks "just to be social."  Americans, who are good church
+people at home, say it when in Paris and Vienna.  Yes, "just to see
+what it is like" has ruined many a noble life.  Many a man has lost his
+balance and fallen over the precipice into the sink of iniquity while
+just attempting "to see what it was like."  "If you have been pilot on
+these waters twenty-five years," said a young man to the captain of a
+steamer, "you must know every rock and sandbank in the river."  "No, I
+don't, but I know where the deep water is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just one little lie to help me out of this difficulty; "I won't count
+this."  Just one little embezzlement; no one will know it, and I can
+return the money before it will be needed.  Just one little indulgence;
+I won't count it, and a good night's sleep will make me all right
+again.  Just one small part of my work slighted; it won't make any
+great difference, and, besides, I am usually so careful that a little
+thing like this ought not to be counted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, my young friend, it will be counted, whether you will or not; the
+deed has been recorded with an iron pen, even to the smallest detail.
+The Recording Angel is no myth; it is found in ourselves.  Its name is
+Memory, and it holds everything.  We think we have forgotten thousands
+of things until mortal danger, fever, or some other great stimulus
+reproduces them to the consciousness with all the fidelity of
+photographs.  Sometimes all one's past life will seem to pass before
+him in an instant; but at all times it is really, although
+unconsciously, passing before him in the sentiments he feels, in the
+thoughts he thinks, in the impulses that move him apparently without
+cause.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,<BR>
+Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In a fable one of the Fates spun filaments so fine that they were
+invisible, and she became a victim of her cunning, for she was bound to
+the spot by these very threads.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Father Schoenmaker, missionary to the Indians, tried for years to
+implant civilization among the wild tribes.  After fifteen years' labor
+he induced a chief to lay aside his blanket, the token of savagery; but
+he goes on to say, "It took fifteen years to get it off, and just
+fifteen minutes to get it on him again."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Physiologists say that dark-colored stripes similar to those on the
+zebra reappear, after a hundred or a thousand generations, on the legs
+and shoulders of horses, asses, and mules.  Large birds on sea islands
+where there are no beasts to molest them lose the power of flight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After a criminal's head had been cut off his breast was irritated, and
+he raised his hands several times as if to brush away the exciting
+cause.  It was said that the cheek of Charlotte Corday blushed on being
+struck by a rude soldier after the head had been severed from the body.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Humboldt found in South America a parrot which was the only living
+creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe.  The
+bird retained the habit of speech after his teachers had died.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caspar Hauser was confined, probably from birth, in a dungeon where no
+light or sound from the outer world, could reach him.  At seventeen he
+was still a mental infant, crying and chattering without much apparent
+intelligence.  When released, the light was disagreeable to his eyes;
+and, after the babbling youth had been taught to speak a few words, he
+begged to be taken back to the dungeon.  Only cold and dismal silence
+seemed to satisfy him.  All that gave pleasure to others gave his
+perverted senses only pain.  The sweetest music was a source of anguish
+to him, and he could eat only his black crust without violent vomiting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Deep in the very nature of animate existence is that principle of
+facility and inclination, acquired by repetition, which we call habit.
+Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts.  In spite of the
+protests of his weakened will the trained nerves continue to repeat the
+acts even when the doer abhors them.  What he at first chooses, at last
+compels.  Man is as irrevocably chained to his deeds as the atoms are
+chained by gravitation.  You can as easily snatch a pebble from
+gravitation's grasp as you can separate the minutest act of life from
+its inevitable effect upon character and destiny.  "Children may be
+strangled," says George Eliot, "but deeds never, they have an
+indestructible life."  The smirched youth becomes the tainted man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Practically all the achievements of the human race are but the
+accomplishments of habit.  We speak of the power of Gladstone to
+accomplish so much in a day as something marvelous; but when we analyze
+that power we find it composed very largely of the results of habit.
+His mighty momentum has been rendered possible only by the law of the
+power of habit.  He is now a great bundle of habits, which all his life
+have been forming.  His habit of industry no doubt was irksome and
+tedious at first, but, practiced so conscientiously and persistently,
+it has gained such momentum as to astonish the world.  His habit of
+thinking, close, persistent, and strong, has made him a power.  He
+formed the habit of accurate, keen observation, allowing nothing to
+escape his attention, until he could observe more in half a day in
+London than a score of men who have eyes but see not.  Thus he has
+multiplied himself many times.  By this habit of accuracy he has
+avoided many a repetition; and so, during his lifetime, he has saved
+years of precious time, which many others, who marvel at his
+achievements, have thrown away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gladstone early formed the habit of cheerfulness, of looking on the
+bright side of things, which, Sydney Smith says, "is worth a thousand
+pounds a year."  This again has saved him enormous waste of energy, as
+he tells us he has never yet been kept awake a single hour by any
+debate or business in Parliament.  This loss of energy has wasted years
+of many a useful life, which might have been saved by forming the
+economizing habit of cheerfulness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The habit of happy thought would transform the commonest life into
+harmony and beauty.  The will is almost omnipotent to determine habits
+which virtually are omnipotent.  The habit of directing a firm and
+steady will upon those things which tend to produce harmony of thought
+would produce happiness and contentment even in the most lowly
+occupations.  The will, rightly drilled, can drive out all discordant
+thoughts, and produce a reign of perpetual harmony.  Our trouble is
+that we do not half will.  After a man's habits are well set, about all
+he can do is to sit by and observe which way he is going.  Regret it as
+he may, how helpless is a weak man bound by the mighty cable of habit,
+twisted from the tiny threads of single acts which he thought were
+absolutely within his control!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Drop a stone down a precipice.  By the law of gravitation it sinks with
+rapidly increasing momentum.  If it falls sixteen feet the first
+second, it will fall forty-eight feet the next second, and eighty feet
+the third second, and one hundred and forty-four feet the fifth second,
+and if it falls for ten seconds it will in the last second rush through
+three hundred and four feet till earth stops it.  Habit is cumulative.
+After each act of our lives we are not the same person as before, but
+quite another, better or worse, but not the same.  There has been
+something added to, or deducted from, our weight of character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is no fault nor folly of my life," said Ruskin; "that does not
+rise against me and take away my joy, and shorten my power of
+possession, of sight, of understanding; and every past effort of my
+life, every gleam of righteousness or good in it, is with me now to
+help me in my grasp of this hour and its vision."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Many men of genius have written worse scrawls than I do," said a boy
+at Rugby when his teacher remonstrated with him for his bad penmanship;
+"it is not worth while to worry about so trivial a fault."  Ten years
+later, when he had become an officer in the Crimea, his illegible copy
+of an order caused the loss of many brave men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Resist beginning" was an ancient motto which is needed in our day.
+The folly of the child becomes the vice of the youth, and then the
+crime of the man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1880 one hundred and forty-seven of the eight hundred and
+ninety-seven inmates of Auburn State Prison were there on a second
+visit.  What brings the prisoner back the second, third, or fourth
+time?  It is habit which drives him on to commit the deed which his
+heart abhors and which his very soul loathes.  It is the momentum made
+up from a thousand deviations from the truth and right, for there is a
+great difference between going just right and a little wrong.  It is
+the result of that mysterious power which the repeated act has of
+getting itself repeated again and again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When a woman was dying from the effects of her husband's cruelty and
+debauchery from drink she asked him to come to her bedside, and pleaded
+with him again for the sake of their children to drink no more.
+Grasping his hand with her thin, long fingers, she made him promise
+her: "Mary, I will drink no more till I take it out of this hand which
+I hold in mine."  That very night he poured out a tumbler of brandy,
+stole into the room where she lay cold in her coffin, put the tumbler
+into her withered hand, and then took it out and drained it to the
+bottom.  John B. Gough told this as a true story.  How powerless a man
+is in the presence of a mighty habit, which has robbed him of
+will-power, of self-respect, of everything manly, until he becomes its
+slave!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Walpole tells of a gambler who fell at the table in a fit of apoplexy,
+and his companions began to bet upon his chances of recovery.  When the
+physician came they refused to let him bleed the man because they said
+it would affect the bet.  When President Garfield was hanging between
+life and death men bet heavily upon the issue, and even sold pools.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No disease causes greater horror or dread than cholera; yet when it is
+once fastened upon a victim he is perfectly indifferent, and wonders at
+the solicitude of his friends.  His tears are dried; he cannot weep if
+he would.  His body is cold and clammy and feels like dead flesh, yet
+he tells you he is warm, and calls for ice water.  Have you never seen
+similar insensibility to danger in those whose habits are already
+dragging them to everlasting death?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Etherized by the fascinations of pleasure, we are often unconscious of
+pain while the devil amputates the fingers, the feet and hands, or even
+the arms and legs of our character.  But oh, the anguish that visits
+the sad heart when the lethe passes away, and the soul becomes
+conscious of virtue sacrificed, of manhood lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The leper is often the last to suspect his danger, for the disease is
+painless in its early stages.  A leading lawyer and public official in
+the Sandwich Islands once overturned a lighted lamp on his hand, and
+was surprised to find that it caused no pain.  At last it dawned upon
+his mind that he was a leper.  He resigned his offices and went to the
+leper's island, where he died.  So sin in its early stages is not only
+painless but often even pleasant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hardening, deadening power of depraving habits and customs was
+strikingly illustrated by the Romans.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under Nero, the taste of the people had become so debauched and morbid
+that no mere representation of tragedy would satisfy them.  Their
+cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of "a refined, delicate,
+aesthetic age," demanded that the heroes should actually be killed on
+the stage.  The debauched and sanguinary Romans reckoned life worthless
+without the most thrilling experiences of horror or delight.  Tragedy
+must be genuine bloodshed, comedy, actual shame.  When "The
+Conflagration" was represented on the stage they demanded that a house
+be actually burned and the furniture plundered.  When "Laureolus" was
+played they demanded that the actor be really crucified and mangled by
+a bear, and he had to fling himself down and deluge the stage with his
+own blood.  Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in
+very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull, and Orpheus be torn to
+pieces by a real bear, and Icarus was compelled to fly, even though it
+was known he would be dashed to death.  When the heroism of "Mucius
+Scaevola" was represented, a real criminal was compelled to thrust his
+hand into the flame without a murmur, and stand motionless while it was
+being burned.  Hercules was compelled to ascend the funeral pyre, and
+there be burned alive.  The poor slaves and criminals were compelled to
+play their parts heroically until the flames enveloped them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pirate Gibbs, who was executed in New York, said that when he
+robbed the first vessel his conscience made a hell in his bosom; but
+after he had sailed for years under the black flag, he could rob a
+vessel and murder all the crew, and lie down and sleep soundly.  A man
+may so accustom himself to error as to become its most devoted slave,
+and be led to commit the most fearful crimes in order to defend it, or
+to propagate it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Gordon, the celebrated California stage-driver, was dying, he put
+his foot out of the bed and swung it to and fro.  When asked why he did
+so, he replied, "I am on the down grade and cannot get my foot on the
+brake."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In our great museums you see stone slabs with the marks of rain that
+fell hundreds of years before Adam lived, and the footprint of some
+wild bird that passed across the beach in those olden times.  The
+passing shower and the light foot left their prints on the soft
+sediment; then ages went on, and the sediment hardened into stone; and
+there the prints remain, and will remain forever.  So the child, so
+soft, so susceptible to all impressions, so joyous to receive new
+ideas, treasures them all up, gathers them all into itself, and retains
+them forever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A tribe of Indians attacked a white settlement and murdered the few
+inhabitants.  A woman of the tribe, however, carried away a very young
+infant, and reared it as her own.  The child grew up with the Indian
+children, different in complexion, but like them in everything else.
+To scalp the greatest possible number of enemies was, in his view, the
+most glorious thing in the world.  While he was still a youth he was
+seen by some white traders, and by them conducted back to civilized
+life.  He showed great relish for his new life, and especially a strong
+desire for knowledge and a sense of reverence which took the direction
+of religion, so that he desired to become a clergyman.  He went through
+his college course with credit, and was ordained.  He fulfilled his
+function well, and appeared happy and satisfied.  After a few years he
+went to serve in a settlement somewhere near the seat of war which was
+then going on between Britain and the United States, and before long
+there was fighting not far off.  He went forth in his usual
+dress&mdash;black coat and neat white shirt and neckcloth.  When he returned
+he was met by a gentleman of his acquaintance, who was immediately
+struck by an extraordinary change in the expression of his face and the
+flush on his cheek, and also by his unusually shy and hurried manner.
+After asking news of the battle the gentleman observed, "But you are
+wounded?"  "No."  "Not wounded!  Why, there is blood upon the bosom of
+your shirt!"  The young man quickly crossed his hands firmly upon his
+breast; and his friend, supposing that he wished to conceal a wound
+which ought to be looked to, pulled open his shirt, and saw&mdash;what made
+the young man let fall his hands in despair.  From between his shirt
+and his breast the friend took out&mdash;a bloody scalp!  "I could not help
+it," said the poor victim of early habits, in an agonized voice.  He
+turned and ran, too swiftly to be overtaken, betook himself to the
+Indians, and never more appeared among the whites.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An Indian once brought up a young lion, and finding him weak and
+harmless, did not attempt to control him.  Every day the lion gained in
+strength and became more unmanageable, until at last, when excited by
+rage, he fell upon his master and tore him to pieces.  So what seemed
+to be an "innocent" sin has grown until it strangled him who was once
+its easy master.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Beware of looking at sin, for at each view it is apt to become better
+looking.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Habit is practically, for a middle-aged person, fate; for is it not
+practically certain that what I have done for twenty years I shall
+repeat to-day?  What are the chances for a man who has been lazy and
+indolent all his life starting in to-morrow morning to be industrious;
+or a spendthrift, frugal; a libertine, virtuous; a profane,
+foul-mouthed man, clean and chaste?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A Grecian flute-player charged double fees for pupils who had been
+taught by inferior masters, on the ground that it was much harder to
+undo than to form habits.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Habit tends to make us permanently what we are for the moment.  We
+cannot possibly hear, see, feel, or experience anything which is not
+woven in the web of character.  What we are this minute and what we do
+this minute, what we think this minute, will be read in the future
+character as plainly as words spoken into the phonograph can be
+reproduced in the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The air itself," says Babbage, "is one vast library on whose pages are
+written forever all that man has ever said, whispered, or done."  Every
+sin you ever committed becomes your boon companion.  It rushes to your
+lips every time you speak, and drags its hideous form into your
+imagination every time you think.  It throws its shadow across your
+path whichever way you turn.  Like Banquo's ghost, it will not down.
+You are fastened to it for life, and it will cling to you in the vast
+forever.  Do you think yourself free?  You are a slave to every sin you
+ever committed.  They follow your pen and work their own character into
+every word you write.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rectitude is only the confirmed habit of doing what is right.  Some men
+cannot tell a lie: the habit of truth telling is fixed, it has become
+incorporated with their nature.  Their characters bear the indelible
+stamp of veracity.  You and I know men whose slightest word is
+unimpeachable; nothing could shake our confidence in them.  There are
+other men who cannot speak the truth: their habitual insincerity has
+made a twist in their characters, and this twist appears in their
+speech.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never in my life committed more than one act of folly," said
+Rulhi�re one day in the presence of Talleyrand.  "But where will it
+end?" inquired the latter.  It was lifelong.  One mistake too many
+makes all the difference between safety and destruction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How many men would like to go to sleep beggars and wake up Rothschilds
+or Astors?  How many would fain go to bed dunces and wake up Solomons?
+You reap what you have sown.  Those who have sown dunce-seed,
+vice-seed, laziness-seed, always get a crop.  They that sow the wind
+shall reap the whirlwind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Habit, like a child, repeats whatever is done before it.  Oh, the power
+of a repeated act to get itself repeated again and again!  But, like
+the wind, it is a power which we can use to force our way in its very
+teeth as does the ship, and thus multiply our strength, or we can drift
+with it without exertion upon the rocks and shoals of destruction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a great thing it is to "start right" in life.  Every young man can
+see that the first steps lead to the last, with all except his own.
+No, his little prevarications and dodgings will not make him a liar,
+but he can see that they surely will in John Smith's case.  He can see
+that others are idle and on the road to ruin, but cannot see it in his
+own case.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a wonderful relation between bad habits.  They all belong to
+the same family.  If you take in one, no matter how small or
+insignificant it may seem, you will soon have the whole.  A man who has
+formed the habit of laziness or idleness will soon be late at his
+engagements; a man who does not meet his engagements will dodge,
+apologize, prevaricate, and lie.  I have rarely known a perfectly
+truthful man who was always behind time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You have seen a ship out in the bay swinging with the tide and the
+waves; the sails are all up, and you wonder why it does not move, but
+it cannot, for down beneath the water it is anchored.  So we often see
+a young man apparently well equipped, well educated, and we wonder that
+he does not advance toward manhood and character.  But, alas! we find
+that he is anchored to some secret vice, and he can never advance until
+he cuts loose.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The first crime past compels us into more,<BR>
+And guilt grows <I>fate</I> that was but <I>choice</I> before."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Small habits, well pursued betimes,<BR>
+May reach the dignity of crimes."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Thousands can sympathize with David when he cried, "My sins have taken
+such hold upon me that I am not able to look up; my heart faileth me."
+Like the damned spot of blood on Lady Macbeth's hand, these foul spots
+on the imagination will not out.  What a penalty nature exacts for
+physical sins.  The gods are just, and "of our pleasant vices make
+instruments to plague us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Plato wrote over his door, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter
+here."  The greatest value of the study of the classics and mathematics
+comes from the habits of accurate and concise thought which it induces.
+The habit-forming portion of life is the dangerous period, and we need
+the discipline of close application to hold us outside of our studies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Washington at thirteen wrote one hundred and ten maxims of civility and
+good behavior, and was most careful in the formation of all habits.
+Franklin, too, devised a plan of self-improvement and character
+building.  No doubt the noble characters of these two men, almost
+superhuman in their excellence, are the natural result of their early
+care and earnest striving towards perfection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fielding, describing a game of cards between Jonathan Wild, of
+pilfering propensities, and a professional gambler, says: "Such was the
+power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr.
+Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he
+knew they were empty; nor could the count abstain from palming a card,
+though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Habit," says Montaigne, "is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.
+She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of
+her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
+aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
+tyrannic countenance against which we have no more the courage nor the
+power so much as to lift up our eyes."  It led a New York man actually
+to cut off his hand with a cleaver under a test of what he would resort
+to, to get a glass of whiskey.  It has led thousands of nature's
+noblemen to drunkards' and libertines' graves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gough's life is a startling illustration of the power of habit, and of
+the ability of one apparently a hopeless slave to break his fetters and
+walk a free man in the sunlight of heaven.  He came to America when
+nine years old.  Possessed of great powers of song, of mimicry, and of
+acting, and exceedingly social in his tastes, a thousand temptations
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Widened and strewed with flowers the way<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Down to eternal ruin."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"I would give this right hand to redeem those terrible seven years of
+dissipation and death," he would often say in after years when, with
+his soul still scarred and battered from his conflict with blighting
+passion, he tearfully urged young men to free themselves from the
+chains of bestial habits.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the laboratory of Faraday a workman one day knocked into a jar of
+acid a silver cup; it disappeared, was eaten up by the acid, and could
+not be found.  The question came up whether it could ever be found.
+The great chemist came in and put certain chemicals into the jar, and
+every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom.  The mass
+was then sent to a silversmith, and the cup restored.  So a precious
+youth who has fallen into the sink of iniquity, lost, dissolved in sin,
+can only be restored by the Great Chemist.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.  "Out
+of a church of twenty-seven hundred members, I have never had to
+exclude a single one who was received while a child," said Spurgeon.
+It is the earliest sin that exercises the most influence for evil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Benedict Arnold was the only general in the Revolution that disgraced
+his country.  He had great military talent, wonderful energy, and a
+courage equal to any emergency.  But Arnold <I>did not start right</I>.
+Even when a boy he was despised for his cruelty and his selfishness.
+He delighted in torturing insects and birds that he might watch their
+sufferings.  He scattered pieces of glass and sharp tacks on the floor
+of the shop he was tending, to cut the feet of the barefooted boys.
+Even in the army, in spite of his bravery, the soldiers hated him, and
+the officers dared not trust him.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Let no man trust the first false step<BR>
+Of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice,<BR>
+Whose steep descent in last perdition ends.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">YOUNG</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Years ago there was a district lying near Westminster Abbey, London,
+called the "Devil's Acre,"&mdash;a school for vicious habits, where
+depravity was universal; where professional beggars were fitted with
+all the appliances of imposture; where there was an agency for the hire
+of children to be carried about by forlorn widows and deserted wives,
+to move the compassion of street-giving benevolence; where young
+pickpockets were trained in the art and mystery which was to conduct
+them in due course to an expensive voyage for the good of their country
+to Botany Bay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Victor Hugo describes a strange association of men in the seventeenth
+century who bought children and distorted and made monstrosities of
+them to amuse the nobility with; and in cultured Boston there is an
+association of so-called "respectable men," who have opened thousands
+of "places of business" for deforming men, women, and children's souls.
+But we deform ourselves with agencies so pleasant that we think we are
+having a good time, until we become so changed and enslaved that we
+scarcely recognize ourselves.  Vice, the pleasant guest which we first
+invited into our heart's parlor, becomes vulgarly familiar, and
+intrenches herself deep in our very being.  We ask her to leave, but
+she simply laughs at us from the hideous wrinkles she has made in our
+faces, and refuses to go.  Our secret sins defy us from the hideous
+furrows they have cut in our cheeks.  Each impure thought has chiseled
+its autograph deep into the forehead, too deep for erasure, and the
+glassy, bleary eye adds its testimony to our ruined character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The devil does not apply his match to the hard coal; but he first
+lights the shavings of "innocent sins," and the shavings the wood, and
+the wood the coal.  Sin is gradual.  It does not break out on a man
+until it has long circulated through his system.  Murder, adultery,
+theft, are not committed in deed until they have been committed in
+thought again and again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't write there," said a man to a boy who was writing with a diamond
+pin on a pane of glass in the window of a hotel.  "Why not?" inquired
+the boy.  "Because you can't rub it out."  Yet the glass might have
+been broken and all trace of the writing lost, but things written upon
+the human soul can never be removed, for the tablet is immortal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In all the wide range of accepted British maxims," said Thomas Hughes,
+"there is none, take it all in all, more thoroughly abominable than
+this one, as to the sowing of wild oats.  Look at it on what side you
+will, and I defy you to make anything but a devil's maxim of it.  What
+man, be he young, old, or middle-aged, sows, that, and nothing else,
+shall he reap.  The only thing to do with wild oats is to put them
+carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to
+dust, every seed of them.  If you sow them, no matter in what ground,
+up they will come with long, tough roots and luxuriant stalks and
+leaves, as sure as there is a sun in heaven.  The devil, too, whose
+special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody
+else, will have to reap them."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+We scatter seeds with careless hand,<BR>
+And dream we ne'er shall see them more;<BR>
+But for a thousand years<BR>
+Their fruit appears,<BR>
+In weeds that mar the land.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">JOHN KEBLE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Theodora boasted that she could draw Socrates' disciples away from him.
+"That may be," said the philosopher, "for you lead them down an easy
+descent whereas I am forcing them to mount to virtue&mdash;an arduous ascent
+and unknown to most men."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When I am told of a sickly student," said Daniel Wise, "that he is
+'studying himself to death,' or of a feeble young mechanic, or clerk,
+that his hard work is destroying him, I study his countenance, and
+there, too often, read the real, melancholy truth in his dull, averted,
+sunken eye, discolored skin, and timid manner.  These signs proclaim
+that the young man is in some way violating the laws of his physical
+nature.  He is secretly destroying himself.  Yet, say his unconscious
+and admiring friends, 'He is falling a victim to his own diligence!'
+Most lame and impotent conclusion!  He is sapping the very source of
+life, and erelong will be a mind in ruins or a heap of dust.  Young
+man, beware of his example!  'Keep thyself pure;' observe the laws of
+your physical nature, and the most unrelaxing industry will never rob
+you of a month's health, nor shorten the thread of your life; for
+industry and health are companions, and long life is the heritage of
+diligence."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"How shall I a habit break?"<BR>
+As you did that habit make.<BR>
+As you gathered, you must lose;<BR>
+As you yielded, now refuse.<BR>
+Thread by thread the strands we twist<BR>
+Till they bind us neck and wrist.<BR>
+Thread by thread the patient hand<BR>
+Must untwine ere free we stand.<BR>
+As we builded, stone by stone,<BR>
+We must toil, unhelped, alone,<BR>
+Till the wall is overthrown.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+But remember, as we try,<BR>
+Lighter every test goes by;<BR>
+Wading in, the stream grows deep<BR>
+Toward the centre's downward sweep;<BR>
+Backward turn, each step ashore<BR>
+Shallower is than that before.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Ah, the precious years we waste<BR>
+Leveling what we raised in haste;<BR>
+Doing what must be undone,<BR>
+Ere content or love be won!<BR>
+First across the gulf we cast<BR>
+Kite-borne threads till lines are passed,<BR>
+And habit builds the bridge at last.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SELF-HELP.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I learned that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to
+help any other man.&mdash;PESTALOZZI.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What I am I have made myself.&mdash;HUMPHRY DAVY.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Be sure, my son, and remember that the best men always make
+themselves.&mdash;PATRICK HENRY.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not<BR>
+Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BYRON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+God gives every bird its food, but he does not throw it into the
+nest.&mdash;J. G. HOLLAND.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Never forget that others will depend upon you, and that you cannot
+depend upon them.&mdash;DUMAS, FILS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to
+Heaven.&mdash;SHAKESPEARE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The best education in the world is that got by struggling to obtain a
+living.&mdash;WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and
+one, more important, which he gives himself.&mdash;GIBBON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What the superior man seeks is in himself: what the small man seeks is
+in others.&mdash;CONFUCIUS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Who waits to have his task marked out,<BR>
+Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LOWELL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+In battle or business, whatever the game,<BR>
+In law, or in love, it's ever the same:<BR>
+In the struggle for power, or scramble for pelf,<BR>
+Let this be your motto, "Rely on yourself."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SAXE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Let every eye negotiate for itself,<BR>
+And trust no agent.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEARE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Colonel Crockett makes room for himself!" exclaimed a backwoods
+congressman in answer to the exclamation of the White House usher to
+"Make room for Colonel Crockett!"  This remarkable man was not afraid
+to oppose the head of a great nation.  He preferred being right to
+being president.  Though rough, uncultured, and uncouth, Crockett was a
+man of great courage and determination.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garfield was the youngest member of the House of Representatives when
+he entered, but he had not been in his seat sixty days before his
+ability was recognized and his place conceded.  He stepped to the front
+with the confidence of one who belonged there.  He succeeded because
+all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and
+because when once in the front he played his part with an intrepidity
+and a commanding ease that were but the outward evidences of the
+immense reserves of energy on which it was in his power to draw.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+[Illustration: James A. Garfield (missing from book)]
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Take the place and attitude which belong to you," says Emerson, "and
+all men acquiesce.  The world must be just.  It leaves every man with
+profound unconcern to set his own rate."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Grant was no book soldier.  Some of his victories were contrary to all
+instructions in military works.  He did not dare to disclose his plan
+to invest Vicksburg, and he even cut off all communication on the
+Mississippi River for seven days that no orders could reach him from
+General Halleck, his superior officer; for he knew that Halleck went by
+books, and he was proceeding contrary to all military theories.  He was
+making a greater military history than had ever been written up to that
+time.  He was greater than all books of tactics.  The consciousness of
+power is everything.  That man is strongest who owes most to himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Man, it is within yourself," says Pestalozzi, "it is in the inner
+sense of your power that resides nature's instrument for your
+development."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Richard Arkwright, the thirteenth child, in a hovel, with no education,
+no chance, gave his spinning model to the world, and put a sceptre in
+England's right hand such as the queen never wielded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources
+virtually has them," says Livy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Solario, a wandering gypsy tinker, fell deeply in love with the
+daughter of the painter Coll' Antonio del Fiore, but was told that no
+one but a painter as good as the father should wed the maiden.  "Will
+you give me ten years to learn to paint, and so entitle myself to the
+hand of your daughter?"  Consent was given, Coll' Antonio thinking that
+he would never be troubled further by the gypsy.  About the time that
+the ten years were to end the king's sister showed Coll' Antonio a
+Madonna and Child, which the painter extolled in terms of the highest
+praise.  Judge of his surprise on learning that Solario was the artist.
+But later, his son-in-law surprised him even more by his rare skill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Louis Philippe said he was the only sovereign in Europe fit to govern,
+for he could black his own boots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When asked to name his family coat-of-arms, a self-made President of
+the United States replied, "A pair of shirtsleeves."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify," said James A. Garfield;
+"but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young
+man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for
+himself.  In all my acquaintance I have never known a man to be drowned
+who was worth the saving."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not the men who have inherited most, except it be in nobility of
+soul and purpose, who have risen highest; but rather the men with no
+"start" who have won fortunes, and have made adverse circumstances a
+spur to goad them up the steep mount, where
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Fame's proud temple shines afar."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+To such men, every possible goal is accessible, and honest ambition has
+no height that genius or talent may tread, which has not felt the
+impress of their feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You may leave your millions to your son, but have you really given him
+anything?  You cannot transfer the discipline, the experience, the
+power which the acquisition has given you; you cannot transfer the
+delight of achieving, the joy felt only in growth, the pride of
+acquisition, the character which trained habits of accuracy, method,
+promptness, patience, dispatch, honesty of dealing, politeness of
+manner have developed.  You cannot transfer the skill, sagacity,
+prudence, foresight, which lie concealed in your wealth.  It meant a
+great deal for you, but means nothing to your heir.  In climbing to
+your fortune, you developed the muscle, stamina, and strength which
+enabled you to maintain your lofty position, to keep your millions
+intact.  You had the power which comes only from experience, and which
+alone enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height.  Your fortune was
+experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it
+will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him.  It
+was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to
+you and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction,
+lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance.  You have taken the priceless
+spur&mdash;necessity&mdash;away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly
+all the great achievements in the history of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son
+might begin where you left off.  You thought to spare him the drudgery,
+the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meagre
+education, which you had on the old farm.  But you have put a crutch
+into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the
+incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self-discipline
+and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no
+great character is ever possible.  His enthusiasm will evaporate, his
+energy will be dissipated, his ambition, not being stimulated by the
+struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away.  If you do
+everything for your son and fight his battles for him, you will have a
+weakling on your hands at twenty-one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My life is a wreck," said the dying Cyrus W. Field, "my fortune gone,
+my home dishonored.  Oh, I was so unkind to Edward when I thought I was
+being kind.  If I had only had firmness enough to compel my boys to
+earn their living, then they would have known the meaning of money."
+His table was covered with medals and certificates of honor from many
+nations, in recognition of his great work for civilization in mooring
+two continents side by side in thought, of the fame he had won and
+could never lose.  But grief shook the sands of life as he thought only
+of the son who had brought disgrace upon a name before unsullied, the
+wounds were sharper than those of a serpent's tooth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the great financial crisis of 1857 Maria Mitchell, who was
+visiting England, asked an English lady what became of daughters when
+no property was left them.  "They live on their brothers," was the
+reply.  "But what becomes of the American daughters," asked the English
+lady, "when there is no money left?"  "They earn it," was the reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men who have been bolstered up all their lives are seldom good for
+anything in a crisis.  When misfortune comes, they look around for
+somebody to lean upon.  If the prop is not there down they go.  Once
+down, they are as helpless as capsized turtles, or unhorsed men in
+armor.  Many a frontier boy has succeeded beyond all his expectations
+simply because all props were knocked out from under him and he was
+obliged to stand upon his own feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man's best friends are his ten fingers," said Robert Collyer, who
+brought his wife to America in the steerage.  Young men who are always
+looking for something to lean upon never amount to anything.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no manhood mill which takes in boys and turns out men.  What
+you call "no chance" may be your "only chance."  Don't wait for your
+place to be made for you; make it yourself.  Don't wait for somebody to
+give you a lift; lift yourself.  Henry Ward Beecher did not wait for a
+call to a big church with a large salary.  He accepted the first
+pastorate offered him, in a little town near Cincinnati.  He became
+literally the light of the church, for he trimmed the lamps, kindled
+the fires, swept the rooms, and rang the bell.  His salary was only
+about $200 a year,&mdash;but he knew that a fine church and great salary
+cannot make a great man.  It was work and opportunity that he wanted.
+He felt that if there was anything in him work would bring it out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Physiologists tell us," says Waters, "that it takes twenty-eight years
+for the brain to attain its full development.  If this is so, why
+should not one be able, by his own efforts, to give this long-growing
+organ a particular bent, a peculiar character?  Why should the will not
+be brought to bear upon the formation of the brain as well as of the
+backbone?"  The will is merely our steam power, and we may put it to
+any work we please.  It will do our bidding, whether it be building up
+a character, or tearing it down.  It may be applied to building up a
+habit of truthfulness and honesty, or of falsehood and dishonor.  It
+will help build up a man or a brute, a hero or a coward.  It will brace
+up resolution until one may almost perform miracles, or it may be
+dissipated in irresolution and inaction until life is a wreck.  It will
+hold you to your task until you have formed a powerful habit of
+industry and application, until idleness and inaction are painful, or
+it will lead you into indolence and listlessness until every effort
+will be disagreeable and success impossible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The first thing I have to impress upon you is," says J. T. Davidson,
+"that a good name must be the fruit of one's own exertion.  You cannot
+possess it by patrimony; you cannot purchase it with money; you will
+not light on it by chance; it is independent of birth, station,
+talents, and wealth; it must be the outcome of your own endeavor, and
+the reward of good principles and honorable conduct.  Of all the
+elements of success in life none is more vital than self-reliance,&mdash;a
+determination to be, under God, the creator of your own reputation and
+advancement.  If difficulties stand in the way, if exceptional
+disadvantages oppose you, all the better, as long as you have pluck to
+fight through them.  I want each young man here (you will not
+misunderstand me) to have faith in himself and, scorning props and
+buttresses, crutches and life-preservers, to take earnest hold of life.
+Many a lad has good stuff in him that never comes to anything because
+he slips too easily into some groove of life; it is commonly those who
+have a tough battle to begin with that make their mark upon their age."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Beethoven was examining the work of Moscheles, he found written at
+the end "Finis, with God's help."  He wrote under it "Man, help
+yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A young man stood listlessly watching some anglers on a bridge.  He was
+poor and dejected.  At length, approaching a basket filled with fish,
+he sighed, "If now I had these I would be happy.  I could sell them and
+buy food and lodgings."  "I will give you just as many and just as
+good," said the owner, who chanced to overhear his words, "if you will
+do me a trifling favor."  "And what is that?" asked the other.  "Only
+to tend this line till I come back; I wish to go on a short errand."
+The proposal was gladly accepted.  The old man was gone so long that
+the young man began to get impatient.  Meanwhile the fish snapped
+greedily at the hook, and he lost all his depression in the excitement
+of pulling them in.  When the owner returned he had caught a large
+number.  Counting out from them as many as were in the basket, and
+presenting them to the youth, the old fisherman said, "I fulfill my
+promise from the fish you have caught, to teach you whenever you see
+others earning what you need to waste no time in foolish wishing, but
+cast a line for yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A white squall caught a party of tourists on a lake in Scotland, and
+threatened to capsize the boat.  When it seemed that the crisis was
+really come the largest and strongest man in the party, in a state of
+intense fear, said, "Let us pray."  "No, no, my man," shouted the bluff
+old boatman; "<I>let the little man pray.  You take an oar.</I>"  The
+greatest curse that can befall a young man is to lean.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The grandest fortunes ever accumulated or possessed on earth were and
+are the fruit of endeavor that had no capital to begin with save
+energy, intellect, and the will.  From Croesus down to Rockefeller the
+story is the same, not only in the getting of wealth, but also in the
+acquirement of eminence; those men have won most who relied most upon
+themselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has been said that one of the most disgusting sights in this world
+is that of a young man with healthy blood, broad shoulders, presentable
+calves, and a hundred and fifty pounds, more or less, of good bone and
+muscle, standing with his hands in his pockets longing for help.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The male inhabitants in the Township of Loaferdom, in the County of
+Hatework," says a printer's squib, "found themselves laboring under
+great inconvenience for want of an easily traveled road between Poverty
+and Independence.  They therefore petitioned the Powers that be to levy
+a tax upon the property of the entire county for the purpose of laying
+out a macadamized highway, broad and smooth, and all the way down hill
+to the latter place."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create
+themselves," says Irving, "springing up under every disadvantage, and
+working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand
+obstacles."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Every one is the artificer of his own fortune," says Sallust.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man is not merely the architect of his own fortune, but he must lay the
+bricks himself.  Bayard Taylor, at twenty-three, wrote: "I will become
+the sculptor of my own mind's statue."  His biography shows how often
+the chisel and hammer were in his hands to shape himself into his
+ideal.  "I have seen none, known none, of the celebrities of my time,"
+said Samuel Cox.  "All my energy was directed upon one end, to improve
+myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Man exists for culture," says Goethe; "not for what he can accomplish,
+but for what can be accomplished in him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When young Professor Tyndall was in the government service, he had no
+definite aim in life until one day a government official asked him how
+he employed his leisure time.  "You have five hours a day at your
+disposal," said he, "and this ought to be devoted to systematic study.
+Had I at your age some one to advise me as I now advise you, instead of
+being in a subordinate position, I might have been at the head of my
+department."  The very next day young Tyndall began a regular course of
+study, and went to the University of Marburg, where he became noted for
+his indomitable industry.  He was so poor that he bought a cask, and
+cut it open for a bathtub.  He often rose before daylight to study,
+while the world was slumbering about him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Labor is the only legal tender in the world to true success.  The gods
+sell everything for that, nothing without it.  You will never find
+success "marked down."  The door to the temple of success is never left
+open.  Every one who enters makes his own door which closes behind him
+to all others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Circumstances have rarely favored great men.  They have fought their
+way to triumph over the road of difficulty and through all sorts of
+opposition.  A lowly beginning and a humble origin are no bar to a
+great career.  The farmers' boys fill many of the greatest places in
+legislatures, in syndicates, at the bar, in pulpits, in Congress,
+to-day.  Boys of lowly origin have made many of the greatest
+discoveries, are presidents of our banks, of our colleges, of our
+universities.  Our poor boys and girls have written many of our
+greatest books, and have filled the highest places as teachers and
+journalists.  Ask almost any great man in our large cities where he was
+born, and he will tell you it was on a farm or in a small country
+village.  Nearly all of the great capitalists of the city came from the
+country.  "'T is better to be lowly born."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The founder of Boston University left Cape Cod for Boston to make his
+way with a capital of only four dollars.  Like Horace Greeley, he could
+find no opening for a boy; but what of that?  He made an opening.  He
+found a board, and made it into an oyster stand on the street corner.
+He borrowed a wheelbarrow, and went three miles to an oyster smack,
+bought three bushels of oysters, and wheeled them to his stand.  Soon
+his little savings amounted to $130, and then he bought a horse and
+cart.  This poor boy with no chance kept right on till he became the
+millionaire Isaac Rich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chauncey Jerome, the inventor of machine-made clocks, started with two
+others on a tour through New Jersey, they to sell the clocks, and he to
+make cases for them.  On his way to New York he went through New Haven
+in a lumber wagon, eating bread and cheese.  He afterward lived in a
+fine mansion in New Haven.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Self-help has accomplished about all the great things of the world.
+How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose because
+they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good
+luck to give them a lift.  But success is the child of drudgery and
+perseverance.  It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is
+yours.  Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the
+world than Elihu Burritt, apprenticed to a blacksmith, in whose shop he
+had to work at the forge all the daylight, and often by candle-light?
+Yet, he managed, by studying with a book before him at his meals,
+carrying it in his pocket that he might utilize every spare moment, and
+studying nights and holidays, to pick up an excellent education in the
+odds and ends of time which most boys throw away.  While the rich boy
+and the idler were yawning and stretching and getting their eyes open,
+young Burritt had seized the opportunity and improved it.  At thirty
+years of age he was master of every important language in Europe and
+was studying those of Asia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What chance had such a boy for distinction?  Probably not a single
+youth will read this book who has not a better opportunity for success.
+Yet he had a thirst for knowledge, and a desire for self-improvement,
+which overcame every obstacle in his pathway.  A wealthy gentleman
+offered to pay his expenses at Harvard; but no, he said he could get
+his education himself, even though he had to work twelve or fourteen
+hours a day at the forge.  Here was a determined boy.  He snatched
+every spare moment at the anvil and forge as though it were gold.  He
+believed, with Gladstone, that thrift of time would repay him in after
+years with usury, and that waste of it would make him dwindle.  Think
+of a boy working nearly all the daylight in a blacksmith's shop, and
+yet finding time to study seven languages in a single year!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the youth of America who are struggling against cruel circumstances,
+to do something and be somebody in the world, could only understand
+that ninety per cent. of what is called genius is merely the result of
+persistent, determined industry, is in most cases downright hard work,
+that it is the slavery to a single idea which has given to many a
+mediocre talent the reputation of being a genius, they would be
+inspired with new hope.  It is interesting to note that the men who
+talk most about genius are the men who like to work the least.  The
+lazier the man, the more he will have to say about great things being
+done by genius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The greatest geniuses have been the greatest workers.  Sheridan was
+considered a genius, but it was found that the "brilliants" and
+"off-hand sayings" with which he used to dazzle the House of Commons
+were elaborated, polished and repolished, and put down in his
+memorandum book ready for any emergency.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Genius has been well defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.
+If men who have done great things could only reveal to the struggling
+youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard
+digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement
+they would give.  How often I have wished that the discouraged,
+struggling youth could know of the heart-aches, the head-aches, the
+nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears
+and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the
+world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors.  You
+can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book with only
+pleasure and delight, but the days and months of weary plodding over
+details and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger
+belief.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated,
+line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times.
+The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which
+have stood the test of time is almost incredible.  Lucretius worked
+nearly a lifetime on one poem.  It completely absorbed his life.  It is
+said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then
+was not satisfied with it.  John Foster would sometimes linger a week
+over a single sentence.  He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the
+roots, or practice any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it
+gained his consent to exist.  Chalmers was once asked what Foster was
+about in London.  "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a
+week."  Dickens, one of the greatest writers of modern fiction, was so
+worn down by hard work that he looked as "haggard as a murderer."  Even
+Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, left large
+numbers of MSS. filled with "sudden thoughts set down for use."  Hume
+toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of England."  Lord Eldon
+astonished the world with his great legal learning, but when he was a
+student too poor to buy books, he had actually borrowed and copied many
+hundreds of pages of large law books, such as Coke upon Littleton, thus
+saturating his mind with legal principles which afterward blossomed out
+into what the world called remarkable genius.  Matthew Hale for years
+studied law sixteen hours a day.  Speaking of Fox, some one declared
+that he wrote "drop by drop."  Rousseau says of the labor involved in
+his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched,
+interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me.
+There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe
+four or five times before it went to press.&#8230;  Some of my periods I
+have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they
+were fit to be put to paper."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is said that Waller spent a whole summer over ten lines in one of
+his poems.  Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his
+painstaking fidelity and persistent application.  There is scarcely a
+bar in his music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen
+times.  His favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which
+can say to aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'"
+Gibbon wrote his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every
+morning, summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste
+their evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and
+Fall of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years.  Even
+Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived, wrote the first
+sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied
+with it.  Burke's famous "Letter to a Noble Lord," one of the finest
+things in the English language, was so completely blotted over with
+alterations when the proof was returned to the printing-office that the
+compositors refused to correct it as it was, and entirely reset it.
+Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of Hastings
+sixteen times, and Butler wrote his famous "Analogy" twenty times.  It
+took Virgil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to
+write the Aeneid.  He was so displeased with the latter that he
+attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and
+lonely, married a servant girl.  He was sent away from home to act as
+errand boy for a music teacher.  He absorbed a great deal of
+information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a
+barber in Vienna.  Here he blacked boots for an influential man, who
+became a friend to him.  In 1798 this poor boy's oratorio, "The
+Creation," came upon the musical world like the rising of a new sun
+which never set.  He was courted by princes and dined with kings and
+queens; his reputation was made; there was no more barbering, no more
+poverty.  But of his eight hundred compositions, "The Creation"
+eclipsed them all.  He died while Napoleon's guns were bombarding
+Vienna, some of the shot falling in his garden.  The greatest creations
+of musicians were written with an effort, to fill the "aching void" in
+the human heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Frederick Douglass, America's most representative colored man, born a
+slave, was reared in bondage, liberated by his own exertions, educated
+and advanced by sheer pluck and perseverance to distinguished positions
+in the service of his country, and to a high place in the respect and
+esteem of the whole world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When a man like Lord Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put
+himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a
+blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a
+great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the
+most possible out of ourselves and opportunities.  Perhaps ninety-nine
+out of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be content
+to remain helpless objects of charity for life.  If it is your call to
+acquire money power instead of brain power, to acquire business power
+instead of professional power, double your talent just the same, no
+matter what it may be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A glover's apprentice of Glasgow, Scotland, who was too poor to afford
+even a candle or a fire, and who studied by the light of the shop
+windows in the streets, and when the shops were closed climbed the
+lamp-post, holding his book in one hand, and clinging to the lamp-post
+with the other,&mdash;this poor boy, with less chance than almost any boy in
+America, became the most eminent scholar of Scotland.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Francis Parkman, half blind, became one of America's greatest
+historians in spite of everything, because he made himself such.
+Personal value is a coin of one's own minting; one is taken at the
+worth he has put into himself.  Franklin was but a poor printer's boy,
+whose highest luxury at one time was only a penny roll, eaten in the
+streets of Philadelphia.  Richard Arkwright, a barber all his earlier
+life, as he rose from poverty to wealth and fame, felt the need of
+correcting the defects of his early education.  After his fiftieth year
+he devoted two hours a day, snatched from his sleep, to improving
+himself in orthography, grammar, and writing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Michael Faraday was a poor boy, son of a blacksmith, who apprenticed
+him at the age of thirteen to a bookbinder in London.  Michael laid the
+foundations of his future greatness by making himself familiar with the
+contents of the books he bound.  He remained at night, after others had
+gone, to read and study the precious volumes.  Lord Tenterden was proud
+to point out to his son the shop where his father had shaved for a
+penny.  A French doctor once taunted Fl�chier, Bishop of Nismes, who
+had been a tallow-chandler in his youth, with the meanness of his
+origin, to which he replied, "If you had been born in the same
+condition that I was, you would still have been but a maker of candles."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Duke of Argyle, walking in his garden, saw a Latin copy of Newton's
+"Principia" on the grass, and supposing that it had been taken from his
+library, called for some one to carry it back.  Edmund Stone, however,
+the son of the duke's gardener, claimed it.  "Yours?" asked the
+surprised nobleman.  "Do you understand geometry, Latin, and Newton?"
+"I know a little of them," replied Edmund.  "But how," asked the duke,
+"came you by the knowledge of all these things?"  "A servant taught me
+to read ten years since," answered Stone.  "Does one need to know
+anything more than the twenty-four letters, in order to learn
+everything else that one wishes?"  The duke was astonished.  "I first
+learned to read," said the lad; "the masons were then at work upon your
+house.  I approached them one day and observed that the architect used
+a rule and compasses, and that he made calculations.  I inquired what
+might be the meaning and use of these things, and I was informed that
+there was a science called arithmetic.  I purchased a book of
+arithmetic and learned it.  I was told that there was another science
+called geometry; I bought the necessary books and learned geometry.  By
+reading I found that there were good books on these sciences in Latin,
+so I bought a dictionary and learned Latin.  I understood, also, that
+there were good books of the same kind in French; I bought a
+dictionary, and learned French.  This, my lord, is what I have done; it
+seems to me that we may learn everything when we know the twenty-four
+letters of the alphabet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Edwin Chadwick, in his report to the British Parliament, stated that
+children, working on half time, that is, studying three hours a day and
+working the rest of their time out of doors, really made the greatest
+intellectual progress during the year.  Business men have often
+accomplished wonders during the busiest lives by simply devoting one,
+two, three, or four hours daily to study or other literary work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+James Watt received only the rudiments of an education at school, for
+his attendance was irregular on account of delicate health.  He more
+than made up for all deficiencies, however, by the diligence with which
+he pursued his studies at home.  Alexander V. was a beggar; he was
+"born mud, and died marble."  William Herschel, placed at the age of
+fourteen as a musician in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, devoted
+all his leisure to philosophical studies.  He acquired a large fund of
+general knowledge, and in astronomy, a science in which he was wholly
+self-instructed, his discoveries entitle him to rank with the greatest
+astronomers of all time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+George Washington was the son of a widow, born under the roof of a
+Westmoreland farmer; almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an
+orphan.  No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned
+him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his
+degrees in knowledge.  Shakespeare learned little more than reading and
+writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master
+among literary men.  Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education,
+and his youth was passed in almost abject poverty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+James Ferguson, the son of a half-starved peasant, learned to read by
+listening to the recitations of one of his elder brothers.  While a
+mere boy he discovered several mechanical principles, made models of
+mills and spinning-wheels, and by means of beads on strings worked out
+an excellent map of the heavens.  Ferguson made remarkable things with
+a common penknife.  How many great men have mounted the hill of
+knowledge by out-of-the-way paths.  Gifford worked his intricate
+problems with a shoemaker's awl on a bit of leather.  Rittenhouse first
+calculated eclipses on his plow-handle.  <I>A will finds a way</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Julius Caesar, who has been unduly honored for those great military
+achievements in which he appears as the scourge of his race, is far
+more deserving of respect for those wonderful Commentaries, in which
+his military exploits are recorded.  He attained distinction by his
+writings on astronomy, grammar, history, and several other subjects.
+He was one of the most learned men and one of the greatest orators of
+his time.  Yet his life was spent amid the turmoil of a camp or the
+fierce struggle of politics.  If he found abundant time for study, who
+may not?  Frederick the Great, too, was busy in camp the greater part
+of his life, yet whenever a leisure moment came, it was sure to be
+devoted to study.  He wrote to a friend, "I become every day more
+covetous of my time, I render an account of it to myself, and I lose
+none of it but with great regret."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Columbus, while leading the life of a sailor, managed to become the
+most accomplished geographer and astronomer of his time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Peter the Great, a boy of seventeen, became the absolute ruler of
+Russia, his subjects were little better than savages, and in himself,
+even, the passions and propensities of barbarism were so strong that
+they were frequently exhibited during his whole career.  But he
+determined to transform himself and the Russians into civilized people.
+He instituted reforms with great energy, and at the age of twenty-six
+started on a visit to the other countries of Europe for the purpose of
+learning about their arts and institutions.  At Saardam, Holland, he
+was so impressed with the sights of the great East India dockyard, that
+he apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, and helped build the St.
+Peter, which he promptly purchased.  Continuing his travels, after he
+had learned his trade, he worked in England in paper-mills, saw-mills,
+rope-yards, watchmaker's shops, and other manufactories, doing the work
+and receiving the treatment of a common laborer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While traveling, his constant habit was to obtain as much information
+as he could beforehand with regard to every place he was to visit, and
+he would demand, "Let me see all."  When setting out on his
+investigations, on such occasions, he carried his tablets in his hand,
+and whatever he deemed worthy of remembrance was carefully noted down.
+He would often leave his carriage, if he saw the country people at work
+by the wayside as he passed along, and not only enter into conversation
+with them, on agricultural affairs, but accompany them to their houses,
+examine their furniture, and take drawings of their implements of
+husbandry.  Thus he obtained much minute and correct knowledge, which
+he would scarcely have acquired by other means, and which he afterward
+turned to admirable account in the improvement of his own country.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ancients said, "Know thyself;" the nineteenth century says, "Help
+thyself."  Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul.  A liberal
+education is a true regeneration.  When a man is once liberally
+educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor
+dwindle to a brute.  But if he is not properly educated, if he has
+merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a
+broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the
+examination, he will continue to shrink and shrivel and dwindle, often
+below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence
+and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of
+himself, evaporate from his distended memory.  Many a youth has made
+his greatest effort in his graduating essay.  But, alas! the beautiful
+flowers of rhetoric blossomed only to exhaust the parent stock, which
+blossoms no more forever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Strasburg geese are crammed with food several times a day by opening
+their mouths and forcing the pabulum down the throat with the finger.
+The geese are shut up in boxes just large enough to hold them, and are
+not allowed to take any exercise.  This is done in order to increase
+enormously the liver for <I>p�t� de fois gras</I>.  So are our youth
+sometimes stuffed with education.  What are the chances for success of
+students who "cut" recitations or lectures, and gad, lounge about, and
+dissipate in the cities at night until the last two or three weeks,
+sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ
+tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working
+parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not
+to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not
+for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but
+to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed
+facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty per cent. in
+the examination.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+True teaching will create a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to
+quench this thirst will lead the eager student to the Pierian spring.
+"Man might be so educated that all his prepossessions would be truth,
+and all his feelings virtues."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle
+for existence.  The microscope does not create anything new, but it
+reveals marvels.  To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until
+it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness.  It reveals a world
+we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest
+things.  The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds which the uneducated
+eye never dreamed of.  The cultured hand can do a thousand things the
+uneducated hand cannot do.  It becomes graceful, steady of nerve,
+strong, skillful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it
+with intelligence.  The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the
+possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman
+effort.  The educated touch can almost perform miracles.  The educated
+taste can achieve wonders almost past belief.  What a contrast this,
+between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone
+and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his
+reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry
+brick.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Culture comes from the constant choice of the best within our reach,"
+says Bulwer.  "Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise
+the genius, to attempt to delight or instruct your race; and, even
+supposing you fall short of every model you set before you, supposing
+your name moulder with your dust, still you will have passed life more
+nobly than the unlaborious herd.  Grant that you win not that glorious
+accident, 'a name below,' how can you tell but that you may have fitted
+yourself for high destiny and employ, not in the world of men, but of
+spirits?  The powers of the mind cannot be less immortal than the mere
+sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal
+Progress, and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter, in
+proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our
+intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is
+purchased at the expense of moral vigor.  An observant professor of one
+of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and
+polished by education, so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any
+one faculty.  In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency
+and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to
+fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than
+the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to
+prevent consciousness of his ignorance.  While all the faculties of the
+mind should be cultivated, it is yet desirable that it should have two
+or three rough-hewn features of massive strength.  Young men are too
+apt to forget the great end of life which is to be and do, not to read
+and brood over what other men have been and done."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a gymnasium you tug, you expand your chest, you push, pull, strike,
+run, in order to develop your physical self; so you can develop your
+moral and intellectual nature only by continued effort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge but to teach him
+how to acquire it at need," said Rousseau.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All learning is self-teaching.  It is upon the working of the pupil's
+own mind that his progress in knowledge depends.  The great business of
+the master is to teach the pupil to teach himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood," says Isaac Taylor.  "Accustom
+yourself, therefore, to thinking.  Set yourself to understand whatever
+you see or read.  To join thinking with reading is one of the first
+maxims, and one of the easiest operations."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"How few think justly of the thinking few:<BR>
+How many never think who think they do."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+WORK AND WAIT.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we
+already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of
+self-discipline.&mdash;H. P. LIDDON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be
+made.&mdash;CICERO.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I consider a human soul without education like marble in a quarry which
+shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher
+sketches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every
+ornamental cloud, spot, and vein that runs throughout the body of
+it.&mdash;ADDISON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Many a genius has been slow of growth.  Oaks that flourish for a
+thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.&mdash;GEORGE HENRY
+LEWES.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what
+you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.&mdash;ARNOLD.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.&mdash;THOREAU.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The more haste, ever the worse speed.&mdash;CHURCHILL.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.&mdash;SENECA.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed-time
+of character?&mdash;THOREAU.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to
+perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both
+public and private, of peace and war.&mdash;MILTON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The safe path to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of
+appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the
+art and assiduity in practicing it.&mdash;EDWARD EVERETT.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which
+belongs to you, and do more work with less effort.&mdash;CHARLES KINGSLEY.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry
+Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831.  Although but
+eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon
+made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on
+cardboard.  His method was so simple that one could learn in ten
+minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny.  Having
+ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official
+papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a
+perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document.
+At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government
+was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps
+from old parchments and using them again.  The chief also appreciated
+the new danger of easy counterfeiting.  So he offered Bessemer a
+definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at
+eight hundred pounds a year.  Bessemer chose the office, and hastened
+to tell the good news to a young woman with whom he had agreed to share
+his fortune.  In explaining his invention, he told how it would prevent
+any one from taking a valuable stamp from a document a hundred years
+old and using it a second time.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-166"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-166.jpg" ALT="THOMAS ALVA EDISON" BORDER="2" WIDTH="371" HEIGHT="540">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 371px">
+THOMAS ALVA EDISON
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"The Wizard of Menlo Park."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"What the world wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work
+and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all
+stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used
+without detection."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a
+single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved
+the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed,
+that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British
+revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden
+of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year.  And the
+same little word, if published in its connection, would render Henry's
+perforation device of far less value than a last year's bird's nest.
+Henry felt proud of the young woman's ingenuity, and suggested the
+improvement at the stamp office.  As a result his system of perforation
+was abandoned and he was deprived of his promised office, the
+government coolly making use from that day to this, without
+compensation, of the idea conveyed by that little insignificant word.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So Bessemer's financial prospects were not very encouraging; but,
+realizing that the best capital a young man can have is a capital wife,
+he at once entered into a partnership which placed at his command the
+combined ideas of two very level heads.  The result, after years of
+thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel
+cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the
+world.  His method consists simply in forcing hot air from below into
+several tons of melted pig-iron, so as to produce intense combustion;
+and then adding enough spiegel-eisen (looking-glass iron), an ore rich
+in carbon, to change the whole mass to steel.  He discovered this
+simple process only after trying in vain much more difficult and
+expensive methods.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"All things come round to him who will but wait."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The great lack of the age is want of thoroughness.  How seldom you find
+a young man or woman who is willing to take time to prepare for his
+life work.  A little education is all they want, a little smattering of
+books, and then they are ready for business.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can't wait" is characteristic of the century, and is written on
+everything; on commerce, on schools, on society, on churches.  Can't
+wait for a high school, seminary, or college.  The boy can't wait to
+become a youth, nor the youth a man.  Youth rush into business with no
+great reserve of education or drill; of course they do poor, feverish
+work, and break down in middle life, and many die of old age in the
+forties.  Everybody is in a hurry.  Buildings are rushed up so quickly
+that they will not stand, and everything is made "to sell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not long ago a professor in one of our universities had a letter from a
+young woman in the West, asking him if he did not think she could teach
+elocution if she could come to the university and take twelve lessons.
+Our young people of to-day want something, and want it quickly.  They
+are not willing to lay broad, deep foundations.  The weary years in
+preparatory school and college dishearten them.  They only want a
+"smattering" of an education.  But as Pope says,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"A little learning is a dangerous thing;<BR>
+Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:<BR>
+There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,<BR>
+And drinking largely sobers us again."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The shifts to cover up ignorance, and "the constant trembling lest some
+blunder should expose one's emptiness," are pitiable.  Short cuts and
+abridged methods are the demand of the hour.  But the way to shorten
+the road to success is to take plenty of time to lay in your reserve
+power.  You can't stop to forage your provender as the army advances;
+if you do the enemy will get there first.  Hard work, a definite aim,
+and faithfulness, will shorten the way.  Don't risk a life's
+superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the
+opportunity will only make you ridiculous.  A great occasion is
+valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to
+make use of it.  Beware of that fatal facility of thoughtless speech
+and superficial action which has misled many a young man into the
+belief that he could make a glib tongue or a deft hand take the place
+of deep study or hard work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patience is nature's motto.  She works ages to bring a flower to
+perfection.  What will she not do for the greatest of her creation?
+Ages and aeons are nothing to her, out of them she has been carving her
+great statue, a perfect man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Johnson said a man must turn over half a library to write one book.
+When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he
+replied that he would have spent six weeks.  Think of Bishop Hall
+spending thirty years on one of his works.  Owens was working on the
+"Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty years.  Moore
+spent several weeks on one of his musical stanzas which reads as if it
+were a dash of genius.  Carlyle wrote with the utmost difficulty, and
+never executed a page of his great histories till he had consulted
+every known authority, so that every sentence is the quintessence of
+many books, the product of many hours of drudging research in the great
+libraries.  To-day, "Sartor Resartus" is everywhere.  You can get it
+for a mere trifle at almost any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands
+of copies are scattered over the world.  But when Carlyle brought it to
+London in 1851, it was refused almost contemptuously by three prominent
+publishers.  At last he managed to get it into "Fraser's Magazine," the
+editor of which conveyed to the author the pleasing information that
+his work had been received with "unqualified disapprobation."  Henry
+Ward Beecher sent a half dozen articles to the publisher of a religious
+paper to pay for his subscription, but they were respectfully declined.
+The publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly" returned Miss Alcott's
+manuscript, suggesting that she had better stick to teaching.  One of
+the leading magazines ridiculed Tennyson's first poems, and consigned
+the young poet to oblivion.  Only one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books
+had a remunerative sale.  Washington Irving was nearly seventy years
+old before the income from his books paid the expenses of his household.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In some respects it is very unfortunate that the old system of binding
+boys out to a trade has been abandoned.  To-day very few boys learn any
+trade.  They pick up what they know, as they go along, just as a
+student crams for a particular examination, just to "get through,"
+without any effort to see how much he may learn on any subject.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Think of an American youth spending twelve years with Michael Angelo,
+studying anatomy that he might create the masterpiece of all art; or
+with Da Vinci devoting ten years to the model of an equestrian statue
+that he might master the anatomy of the horse.  Most young American
+artists would expect, in a quarter of that time, to sculpture an Apollo
+Belvidere.  While Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel he
+would not allow himself time for meals or to dress or undress; but he
+kept bread within reach that he might eat when hunger impelled, and he
+slept in his clothes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little thing for his album.
+Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs.  "But it took you only
+five minutes," objected the rich man.  "Yes, but it took me thirty
+years to learn how to do it in five minutes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I prepared that sermon," said a young sprig of divinity, "in half an
+hour, and preached it at once, and thought nothing of it."  "In that,"
+said an older minister, "your hearers are at one with you, for they
+also thought nothing of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What the age wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work and
+wait, whether the world applaud or hiss.  It wants a Bancroft, who can
+spend twenty-six years on the "History of the United States;" a Noah
+Webster, who can devote thirty-six years to a dictionary; a Gibbon, who
+can plod for twenty years on the "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire;" a Mirabeau, who can struggle on for forty years before he has
+a chance to show his vast reserve, destined to shake an empire; a
+Farragut, a Von Moltke, who have the persistence to work and wait for
+half a century for their first great opportunities; a Garfield, burning
+his lamp fifteen minutes later than a rival student in his academy; a
+Grant, fighting on in heroic silence, when denounced by his brother
+generals and politicians everywhere; a Field's untiring perseverance,
+spending years and a fortune laying a cable when all the world called
+him a fool; a Michael Angelo, working seven long years decorating the
+Sistine Chapel with his matchless "Creation" and the "Last Judgment,"
+refusing all remuneration therefor, lest his pencil might catch the
+taint of avarice; a Titian, spending seven years on the "Last Supper;"
+a Stephenson, working fifteen years on a locomotive; a Watt, twenty
+years on a condensing engine; a Lady Franklin, working incessantly for
+twelve long years to rescue her husband from the polar seas; a Thurlow
+Weed, walking two miles through the snow with rags tied around his feet
+for shoes, to borrow the history of the French Revolution, and eagerly
+devouring it before the sap-bush fire; a Milton, elaborating "Paradise
+Lost" in a world he could not see, and then selling it for fifteen
+pounds; a Thackeray, struggling on cheerfully after his "Vanity Fair"
+was refused by a dozen publishers; a Balzac, toiling and waiting in a
+lonely garret, whom neither poverty, debt, nor hunger could discourage
+or intimidate; not daunted by privations, not hindered by
+discouragements.  It wants men who can work and wait.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When a young lawyer Daniel Webster once looked in vain through all the
+law libraries near him, and then ordered at an expense of fifty dollars
+the necessary books, to obtain authorities and precedents in a case in
+which his client was a poor blacksmith.  He won his cause, but, on
+account of the poverty of his client, only charged fifteen dollars,
+thus losing heavily on the books bought, to say nothing of his time.
+Years after, as he was passing through New York city, he was consulted
+by Aaron Burr on an important but puzzling case then pending before the
+Supreme Court.  He saw in a moment that it was just like the
+blacksmith's case, an intricate question of title, which he had solved
+so thoroughly that it was to him now as simple as the multiplication
+table.  Going back to the time of Charles II. he gave the law and
+precedents involved with such readiness and accuracy of sequence that
+Burr asked in great surprise if he had been consulted before in the
+case.  "Most certainly not," he replied, "I never heard of your case
+till this evening."  "Very well," said Burr, "proceed," and, when he
+had finished, Webster received a fee that paid him liberally for all
+the time and trouble he had spent for his early client.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Albert Bierstadt first crossed the Rocky Mountains with a band of
+pioneers in 1859, making sketches for the paintings of western scenes
+for which he had become famous.  As he followed the trail to Pike's
+Peak, he gazed in wonder upon the enormous herds of buffaloes which
+dotted the plains as far as the eye could reach, and thought of the
+time when they would have disappeared before the march of civilization.
+The thought haunted him and found its final embodiment in "The Last of
+the Buffaloes" in 1890.  To perfect this great work he had spent twenty
+years.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Everything which endures, which will stand the test of time, must have
+a deep, solid foundation.  In Rome the foundation is often the most
+expensive part of an edifice, so deep must they dig to build on the
+living rock.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fifty feet of Bunker Hill Monument is under ground; unseen and
+unappreciated by those who tread about that historic shaft, but it is
+this foundation, apparently thrown away, which enables it to stand
+upright, true to the plumb-line through all the tempests that lash its
+granite sides.  A large part of every successful life must be spent in
+laying foundation stones under ground.  Success is the child of
+drudgery and perseverance and depends upon "knowing how long it takes
+to succeed."  Havelock joined the army at twenty-eight, and for
+thirty-four years worked and waited for his opportunity; conscious of
+his power, "fretting as a subaltern while he saw drunkards and fools
+put above his head."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But during all these years he was fitting himself to lead that
+marvelous march to Lucknow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was many years of drudgery and reading a thousand volumes that
+enabled George Eliot to get fifty thousand dollars for "Daniel
+Deronda."  How came writers to be famous?  By writing for years without
+any pay at all; by writing hundreds of pages for mere practice work; by
+working like galley-slaves at literature for half a lifetime.  It was
+working and waiting many long and weary years that put one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand dollars into "The Angelus."  Millet's first
+attempts were mere daubs, the later were worth fortunes.  Schiller
+"never could get done."  Dante sees himself "growing lean over his
+Divine Comedy."  It is working and waiting that gives perfection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not remember," said Beecher, "a book in all the depths of
+learning, nor a scrap in literature, nor a work in all the schools of
+art, from which its author has derived a permanent renown, that is not
+known to have been long and patiently elaborated."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Endurance is a much better test of character than any one act of
+heroism, however noble.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pianist Thalberg said he never ventured to perform one of his
+celebrated pieces in public until he had played it at least fifteen
+hundred times.  He laid no claim whatever to genius; he said it was all
+a question of hard work.  The accomplishments of such industry, such
+perseverance, would put to shame many a man who claims genius.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before Edmund Kean would consent to appear in that character which he
+acted with such consummate skill, The Gentleman Villain, he practiced
+constantly before a glass, studying expression for a year and a half.
+When he appeared upon the stage, Byron, who went to see him with Moore,
+said he never looked upon so fearful and wicked a face.  As the great
+actor went on to delineate the terrible consequences of sin, Byron
+fainted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For years I was in my place of business by sunrise," said a wealthy
+banker who had begun without a dollar, "and often I did not leave it
+for fifteen or eighteen hours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Festina lente</I>&mdash;hasten slowly&mdash;is a good Latin motto.  Patience, it is
+said, changes the mulberry leaf to satin.  The giant oak on the
+hillside was detained months or years in its upward growth while its
+roots took a great turn around some rock, in order to gain a hold by
+which the tree was anchored to withstand the storms of centuries.  Da
+Vinci spent four years on the head of Mona Lisa, perhaps the most
+beautiful ever painted, but he left therein, an artistic thought for
+all time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Said Captain Bingham: "You can have no idea of the wonderful machine
+that the German army is and how well it is prepared for war.  A chart
+is made out which shows just what must be done in the case of wars with
+the different nations.  And every officer's place in the scheme is laid
+out beforehand.  There is a schedule of trains which will supersede all
+other schedules the moment war is declared, and this is so arranged
+that the commander of the army here could telegraph to any officer to
+take such a train and go to such a place at a moment's notice.  When
+the Franco-Prussian war was declared, Von Moltke was awakened at
+midnight and told of the fact.  He said coolly to the official who
+aroused him, 'Go to pigeonhole No. &mdash;&mdash; in my safe and take a paper
+from it and telegraph as there directed to the different troops of the
+empire.'  He then turned over and went to sleep and awoke at his usual
+hour in the morning.  Every one else in Berlin was excited about the
+war, but Von Moltke took his morning walk as usual, and a friend who
+met him said, 'General, you seem to be taking it very easy.  Aren't you
+afraid of the situation?  I should think you would be busy.'  'Ah,'
+replied Von Moltke, 'all of my work for this time has been done long
+beforehand and everything that can be done now has been done.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is done soon enough which is done well.  Soon ripe, soon rotten.
+He that would enjoy the fruit must not gather the flower.  He who is
+impatient to become his own master is more likely to become his own
+slave.  Better believe yourself a dunce and work away than a genius and
+be idle.  One year of trained thinking is worth more than a whole
+college course of mental absorption of a vast series of undigested
+facts.  The facility with which the world swallows up the ordinary
+college graduate who thought he was going to dazzle mankind should bid
+you pause and reflect.  But just as certainly as man was created not to
+crawl on all fours in the depths of primeval forests, but to develop
+his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education,
+and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,&mdash;man,
+in the highest sense of the word.  Ignorance is not simply the negation
+of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind.  "One step in
+knowledge," says Bulwer, "is one step from sin; one step from sin is
+one step nearer to Heaven."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A learned clergyman was thus accosted by an illiterate preacher who
+despised education: "Sir, you have been to college, I presume?"  "Yes,
+sir," was the reply.  "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord
+opened my mouth without any learning."  "A similar event," retorted the
+clergyman, "happened in Balaam's time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If a cloth were drawn around the eyes of Praxiteles' statue of Love,"
+says Bulwer, "the face looked grave and sad; but as the bandage was
+removed, a beautiful smile would overspread the countenance.  Even so
+does the removal of the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the mind
+bring radiant happiness to the heart of man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A young man just graduated told the President of Trinity College that
+he had completed his education, and had come to say good-by.  "Indeed,"
+said the President, "I have just begun my education."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many an extraordinary man has been made out of a very ordinary boy; but
+in order to accomplish this we must begin with him while he is young.
+It is simply astonishing what training will do for a rough, uncouth,
+and even dull lad, if he has good material in him, and comes under the
+tutelage of a skilled educator before his habits have become confirmed.
+Even a few weeks' or months' drill of the rawest and roughest recruits
+in the late Civil War so straightened and dignified stooping and
+uncouth soldiers, and made them so manly, erect, and courteous in their
+bearing, that their own friends scarcely knew them.  If this change is
+so marked in the youth who has grown to maturity, what a miracle is
+possible in the lad who is taken early and put under a course of drill
+and systematic training, both physical, mental, and moral.  How many a
+man who is now in the penitentiary, in the poorhouse, or among the
+tramps, or living out a miserable existence in the slums of our cities,
+bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering
+within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man,
+an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he
+only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under efficient
+and systematic training.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Laziness begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains.  The more business
+a man has, the more he can do, for be learns to economize his time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The industry that acquired riches, according to a wise teacher, the
+patience that is required in obtaining them, the reserved self-control,
+the measuring of values, the sympathy felt for fellow-toilers, the
+knowledge of what a dollar costs to the average man, the memory of
+it&mdash;all these things are preservative.  But woe to the young farmer who
+hates farming; does not like sowing and reaping; is impatient with the
+dilatory and slow path to a small though secure fortune in the
+neighborhood where he was born, and comes to the city, hoping to become
+suddenly rich, thinking that he can break into the palace of wealth and
+rob it of its golden treasures!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce
+an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for
+the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.'  I
+said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument
+responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.'  It was enough to drive one mad.  But
+I held firm, and I have succeeded."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and
+hard work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of
+Massachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience
+which can work and wait.  His only inheritance was poverty and hard
+work.  But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a
+determination to get on in the world.  He braided straw to get money to
+buy books which his soul thirsted for.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a
+piano.  Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and
+fortune.  Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared
+with accuracy and knowledge.  He could afford to work and wait, for
+quality, not quantity, was his aim.  Fifty years ago the piano was a
+miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day.
+Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the
+fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the
+player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve
+its purity and truthfulness of tone.  And he strove patiently and
+persistently till he succeeded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no
+idle dream, but a solemn reality," said Carlyle.  "It is thy own.  It
+is all thou hast to comfort eternity with.  Work then like a star,
+unhasting, yet unresting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gladstone was bound to win; although he had spent many years of
+preparation for his life work, in spite of the consciousness of
+marvelous natural endowments which would have been deemed sufficient by
+many young men, and notwithstanding he had gained the coveted prize of
+a seat in Parliament, yet he decided to make himself master of the
+situation; and amid all his public and private duties, he not only
+spent eleven terms more in the study of the law, but he studied Greek
+constantly and read every well written book or paper he could obtain,
+so determined was he that his life should be rounded out to its fullest
+measure, and that his mind should have broad and liberal culture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Emperor William I. was not a genius, but the secret of his power lay in
+tireless perseverance.  A friend says of him, "When I passed the palace
+at Berlin night after night, however late, I always saw that grand
+imperial figure standing beside the green lamp, and I used to say to
+myself, 'That is how the imperial crown of Germany was won.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ole Bull said, "If I practice one day, I can see the result.  If I
+practice two days my friends can see it; if I practice three days the
+great public can see it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The habit of seizing every bit of knowledge, no matter how
+insignificant it may seem at the time, every opportunity, every
+occasion, and grinding them all up into experience, cannot be
+overestimated.  You will find use for all of it.  Webster once repeated
+an anecdote with effect which he heard fourteen years before, and which
+he had not thought of in the mean time.  It exactly fitted the
+occasion.  "It is an ill mason that rejects any stone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Webster was once urged to speak on a subject of great importance, but
+refused, saying he was very busy and had no time to master the subject.
+"But," replied his friend, "a very few words from you would do much to
+awaken public attention to it."  Webster replied, "If there be so much
+weight in my words, it is because I do not allow myself to speak on any
+subject until my mind is imbued with it."  On one occasion Webster made
+a remarkable speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, when
+a book was presented to him, but after he had gone, his "impromptu"
+speech, carefully written out, was found in the book which he had
+forgotten to take away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Demosthenes was once urged to speak on a great and sudden emergency,
+but replied, "I am not prepared."  In fact, it was thought by many that
+Demosthenes did not possess any genius whatever, because he never
+allowed himself to speak on any subject without thorough preparation.
+In any meeting or assembly, when called upon, he would never rise, even
+to make remarks, it was said, without previously preparing himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Alexander Hamilton said, "Men give me credit for genius.  All the
+genius I have lies just in this: when I have a subject in hand I study
+it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  I explore it in all its
+bearings.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.  Then the effort which I
+make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius; it is the
+fruit of labor and thought."  The law of labor is equally binding on
+genius and mediocrity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Are the results so distant that you delay the preparation in the hope
+that fortuitous good luck may make it unnecessary?  As well might the
+husbandman delay sowing his seed until the spring and summer are past
+and the ground hardened by the frosts of a rigorous winter.  As well
+might one who is desirous of enjoying firm health inoculate his system
+with the seeds of disease, and expect at such time as he may see fit to
+recover from its effects, and banish the malady.  Nelaton, the great
+surgeon, said that if he had four minutes in which to perform an
+operation, on which a life depended, he would take one minute to
+consider how best to do it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Many men," says Longfellow, "do not allow their principles to take
+root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do flowers they
+have planted, to see if they are growing."  We must not only work, but
+wait.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his
+mustache and boots and shiny hat, of getting along nicely and easily
+during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast
+horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the
+business and make a man of himself, because he will not join in wasting
+his time in dissipation, will see the day, if his useless life is not
+earlier blasted by vicious indulgences, when he will be glad to accept
+a situation from his fellow-clerk whom he now ridicules and affects to
+despise, when the latter shall stand in the firm, dispensing benefits
+and acquiring fortune."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have been watching the careers of young men by the thousand in this
+busy city of New York for over thirty years," said Dr. Cuyler, "and I
+find that the chief difference between the successful and the failures
+lies in the single element of staying power.  Permanent success is
+oftener won by holding on than by sudden dash, however brilliant.  The
+easily discouraged, who are pushed back by a straw, are all the time
+dropping to the rear&mdash;to perish or to be carried along on the stretcher
+of charity.  They who understand and practice Abraham Lincoln's homely
+maxim of 'pegging away' have achieved the solidest success."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When a man has done his work," says Ruskin, "and nothing can any way
+be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest
+with his fate if he will, but what excuse can you find for willfulness
+of thought at the very lime when every crisis of fortune hangs on your
+decisions?  A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home
+forever depends on the chances or the passions of the hour!  A youth
+thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity
+of a moment!  A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a
+foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a foundation
+of life or death!  Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than
+now&mdash;though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly
+thoughtless, his deathbed.  Nothing should ever be left to be done
+there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Duke of Wellington became so discouraged because he did not advance
+in the army that he applied for a much inferior position in the customs
+department, but was refused.  Napoleon had applied for every vacant
+position for seven years before he was recognized, but meanwhile he
+studied with all his might, supplementing what was considered a
+thorough military education by researches and reflections which in
+later years enabled him easily to teach the art of war to veterans who
+had never dreamed of his novel combinations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Reserves which carry us through great emergencies are the result of
+long working and long waiting.  Collyer declares that reserves mean to
+a man also achievement,&mdash;"the power to do the grandest thing possible
+to your nature when you feel you must, or some precious thing will be
+lost,&mdash;to do well always, but best in the crisis on which all things
+turn; to stand the strain of a long fight, and still find you have
+something left, and so to never know you are beaten, because you never
+are beaten."  Every defeat is a Waterloo to him who has no reserves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in
+preparation and self-culture.  "Not for school, but for life, we
+learn;" and our habits&mdash;of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness,
+or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality&mdash;are the things
+acquired most readily and longest retained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One who reads the chronicles of discoveries is struck with the
+prominent part that accident has played in such annals.  For some of
+the most useful processes and machinery the world is indebted to
+apparently chance occurrences.  Inventors in search of one object have
+failed in their quest, but have stumbled on something more valuable
+than that for which they were looking.  Saul is not the only man who
+has gone in search of asses and found a kingdom.  Astrologers sought to
+read from the heavens the fate of men and the fortune of nations, and
+they led to a knowledge of astronomy.  Alchemists were seeking for the
+philosopher's stone, and from their efforts sprung the science of
+chemistry.  Men explored the heavens for something to explain
+irregularities in the movements of the planets, and discovered a star
+other than the one for which they were looking.  A careless glance at
+such facts might encourage the delusion that aimless straying in
+bypaths is quite as likely to be rewarded as is the steady pressing
+forward, with fixed purpose, towards some definite goal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But it is to be remembered that the men who made the accidental
+discoveries were men who were looking for something.  The unexpected
+achievement was but the return for the toil after what was attained.
+Others might have encountered the same facts, but only the eye made
+eager by the strain of long watching would be quick to note the
+meaning.  If vain search for hidden treasure has no other recompense,
+it at least gives ability to detect the first gleam of the true metal.
+Men may wake at times surprised to find themselves famous, but it was
+the work they did before going to sleep, and not the slumber, that gave
+the eminence.  When the ledge has been drilled and loaded and the
+proper connections have been made, a child's touch on the electric key
+may be enough to annihilate the obstacle, but without the long
+preparation the pressure of a giant's hand would be without effect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In the search for truth and the shaping of character the principle
+remains the same as in science and literature.  Trivial causes are
+followed by wonderful results, but it is only the merchantman who is on
+the watch for goodly pearls who is represented as finding the pearl of
+great price."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To vary the language of another, the three great essentials to success
+in mental and physical labor are Practice, Patience, and Perseverance,
+but the greatest of these is Perseverance.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Let us, then, be up and doing,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">With a heart for any fate;</SPAN><BR>
+Still achieving, still pursuing,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Learn to labor and to wait.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LONGFELLOW.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CLEAR GRIT.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I shall show the cinders of my spirits<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Through the ashes of my chance.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEARE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+What though ten thousand faint,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Desert, or yield, or in weak terror flee!</SPAN><BR>
+Heed not the panic of the multitude;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Thine be the captain's watchword,&mdash;Victory!</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">HORATIUS BONAR.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Better to stem with heart and hand</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The roaring tide of life, than lie,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Unmindful, on its flowery strand,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Of God's occasions drifting by!</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Better with naked nerve to hear</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The needles of this goading air,</SPAN><BR>
+Than in the lap of sensual ease forego<BR>
+The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">WHITTIER.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me,<BR>
+I have a soul that, like an ample shield,<BR>
+Can take in all, and verge enough for more.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">DRYDEN.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+There's a brave fellow!  There's a man of pluck!<BR>
+A man who's not afraid to say his say,<BR>
+Though a whole town's against him.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LONGFELLOW.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we
+fall.&mdash;GOLDSMITH.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Attempt the end and never stand to doubt;<BR>
+Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">HERRICK.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The barriers are not yet erected which shall say to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther."&mdash;BEETHOVEN.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Friends and comrades," said Pizarro, as he turned toward the south,
+after tracing with his sword upon the sand a line from east to west,
+"on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm,
+desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure.  There lies Peru
+with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty.  Choose, each man, what
+best becomes a brave Castilian.  For my part, I go to the south."  So
+saying, he crossed the line and was followed by thirteen Spaniards in
+armor.  Thus, on the little island of Gallo in the Pacific, when his
+men were clamoring to return to Panama, did Pizarro and his few
+volunteers resolve to stake their lives upon the success of a desperate
+crusade against the powerful empire of the Incas.  At the time they had
+not even a vessel to transport them to the country they wished to
+conquer.  Is it necessary to add that all difficulties yielded at last
+to such resolute determination?
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-186"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-186.jpg" ALT="ANDREW JACKSON" BORDER="2" WIDTH="361" HEIGHT="553">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 361px">
+ANDREW JACKSON
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"Old Hickory."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Stick to your aim: the mongrel's hold will slip,<BR>
+But only crowbars loose the bull-dog's grip."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blenches, the thought
+that never wanders,&mdash;these are the masters of victory."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Perseverance is a Roman virtue,<BR>
+That wins each godlike act, and plucks success<BR>
+E'en from the spear-proof crest of rugged danger."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+At a time when abolitionists were dangerously unpopular, a crowd of
+brawny Cape Cod fishermen had made such riotous demonstrations that all
+the speakers announced, except Stephen Foster and Lucy Stone, had fled
+from an open-air platform.  "You had better run, Stephen," said she,
+"they are coming."  "But who will take care of you?" asked Foster.
+"This gentleman will take care of me," she replied, calmly laying her
+hand within the arm of a burly rioter with a club, who had just sprung
+upon the platform.  "Wh&mdash;what did you say?" stammered the astonished
+rowdy, as he looked at the little woman; "yes, I'll take care of you,
+and no one shall touch a hair of your head."  With this he forced a way
+for her through the crowd, and, at her earnest request, placed her upon
+a stump and stood guard with his club while she delivered an address so
+effective that the audience offered no further violence, and even took
+up a collection of twenty dollars to repay Mr. Foster for the damage
+his clothes had received when the riot was at its height.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till
+it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer," said Harriet
+Beecher Stowe, "never give up then, for that's just the place and time
+that the tide'll turn."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Charles Sumner said, "Three things are necessary: first, backbone;
+second, backbone; third, backbone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While digging among the ruins of Pompeii, which was buried by the dust
+and ashes from an eruption of Vesuvius, A. D. 79, the workmen found the
+skeleton of a Roman soldier in the sentry-box at one of the city's
+gates.  He might have found safety under sheltering rocks close by;
+but, in the face of certain death, he had remained at his post, a mute
+witness to the thorough discipline, the ceaseless vigilance and
+fidelity which made the Roman legionaries masters of the known world.
+Bulwer, describing the flight of a party amid the dust, and ashes, and
+streams of boiling water, and huge hurtling fragments of scoria, and
+gusty winds, and lurid lightnings, continues: "The air was now still
+for a few minutes; the lamp from the gate streamed out far and clear;
+the fugitives hurried on.  They gained the gate.  They passed by the
+Roman sentry.  The lightning flashed over his livid face and polished
+helmet, but his stern features were composed even in their awe!  He
+remained erect and motionless at his post.  That hour itself had not
+animated the machine of the ruthless majesty of Rome into the reasoning
+and self-acting man.  There he stood amidst the crashing elements; he
+had not received the permission to desert his station and escape."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The world admires the man who never flinches from unexpected
+difficulties, who calmly, patiently, and courageously grapples with his
+fate, who dies, if need be, at his post.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Clear grit" always commands respect.  It is that quality which
+achieves, and everybody admires achievement.  In the strife of parties
+and principles, backbone without brains will carry against brains
+without backbone.  "A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no
+match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong."  You
+cannot, by tying an opinion to a man's tongue, make him the
+representative of that opinion; at the close of any battle for
+principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the
+wounded, but among the missing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The "London Times" was an insignificant sheet published by Mr. Walter
+and was steadily losing money.  John Walter, Jr., then only
+twenty-seven years old, begged his father to give him full control of
+the paper.  After many misgivings, the father finally consented.  The
+young journalist began to remodel the establishment and to introduce
+new ideas everywhere.  The paper had not attempted to mould public
+opinion, and had no individuality or character of its own.  The
+audacious young editor boldly attacked every wrong, even the
+government, when he thought it corrupt.  Thereupon the public customs,
+printing, and the government advertisements were withdrawn.  The father
+was in utter dismay.  The son he was sure would ruin the paper and
+himself.  But no remonstrance could swerve him from his purpose, to
+give the world a great journal which should have weight, character,
+individuality, and independence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The public soon saw that a new power stood behind the "Times"; that its
+articles meant business; that new life and new blood and new ideas had
+been infused into the insignificant sheet; that a man with brains and
+push and tenacity of purpose stood at the helm,&mdash;a man who could make a
+way when he could not find one.  Among other new features foreign
+dispatches were introduced, and they appeared in the "Times" several
+days before their appearance in the government organs.  The "leading
+article" also was introduced to stay.  But the aggressive editor
+antagonized the government, and his foreign dispatches were all stopped
+at the outpost, while those of the ministerial journalists were allowed
+to proceed.  But nothing could daunt this resolute young spirit.  At
+enormous expense he employed special couriers.  Every obstacle put in
+his way, and all opposition from the government, only added to his
+determination to succeed.  Enterprise, push, grit were behind the
+"Times," and nothing could stay its progress.  Walter was the soul of
+the paper, and his personality pervaded every detail.  In those days
+only three hundred copies of the "Times" could be struck off in an hour
+by the best presses, and Walter had duplicate and even triplicate types
+set.  Then he set his brain to work, and finally the Walter Press,
+throwing off 17,000 copies, both sides printed, per hour, was the
+result.  It was the 29th of November, 1814, that the first steam
+printed paper was given to the world.  Walter's tenacity of purpose was
+remarkable.  He shrank from no undertaking, and neglected no detail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mean natures always feel a sort of terror before great natures, and
+many a base thought has been unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld,
+through the fear inspired by the rebuking presence of one noble man."
+As a rule, pure grit, character, has the right of way.  In the presence
+of men permeated with grit and sound in character, meanness and
+baseness slink out of sight.  Mean men are uncomfortable, dishonesty
+trembles, hypocrisy is uncertain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lincoln, being asked by an anxious visitor what he would do after three
+or four years if the rebellion was not subdued, replied: "Oh, there is
+no alternative but to keep pegging away."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is in me and it shall come out," said Sheridan, when told that he
+would never make an orator, as he had failed in his first speech in
+Parliament.  He became known as one of the foremost orators of his day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When a boy Henry Clay was very bashful and diffident, and scarcely
+dared recite before his class at school, but he determined to become an
+orator.  So he committed speeches and recited them in the cornfields,
+or in the barn with the horse and cows for an audience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Look at Garrison reading this advertisement in a Southern paper: "Five
+thousand dollars will be paid for the head of W. L. Garrison by the
+Governor of Georgia."  Behold him again; a broadcloth mob is leading
+him through the streets of Boston by a rope.  He is hurried to jail.
+See him return calmly and unflinchingly to his work, beginning at the
+point at which he was interrupted.  Note this heading in the
+"Liberator," the type of which he set himself in an attic on State
+Street, in Boston: "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not
+excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."  Was
+Garrison heard?  Ask a race set free largely by his efforts.  Even the
+gallows erected in front of his own door did not daunt him.  He held
+the ear of an unwilling world with that burning word "freedom," which
+was destined never to cease its vibrations until it had breathed its
+sweet secret to the last slave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If impossibilities ever exist, popularly speaking, they ought to have
+been found somewhere between the birth and the death of Kitto, that
+deaf pauper and master of Oriental learning.  But Kitto did not find
+them there.  In the presence of his decision and imperial energy they
+melted away.  Kitto begged his father to take him out of the poorhouse,
+even if he had to subsist like the Hottentots.  He told him that he
+would sell his books and pawn his handkerchief, by which he thought he
+could raise about twelve shillings.  He said he could live upon
+blackberries, nuts, and field turnips, and was willing to sleep on a
+hayrick.  Here was real grit.  What were impossibilities to such a
+resolute will?  Patrick Henry voiced that decision which characterized
+the great men of the Revolution when he said, "Is life so dear, or
+peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
+Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others may take; but
+as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Grit is a permanent, solid quality, which enters into the very
+structure, the very tissues of the constitution.  A weak man, a
+wavering, irresolute man, may be "spunky" upon occasion, he may be
+"plucky" in an emergency; but pure "grit" is a part of the very
+character of strong men alone.  Lord Erskine was a plucky man; he even
+had flashes of heroism, and when he was with weaker men, he was thought
+to have nerve and even grit; but when he entered the House of Commons,
+although a hero at the bar, the imperiousness, the audacious scorn, and
+the intellectual supremacy of Pitt disturbed his equanimity and exposed
+the weak places in his armor.  In Pitt's commanding presence he lost
+his equilibrium.  His individuality seemed off its centre; he felt
+fluttered, weak, and uneasy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many of our generals in the late war exhibited heroism.  They were
+"plucky," and often displayed great determination, but Grant had pure
+"grit" in the most concentrated form.  He could not be moved from his
+base; he was self-centred, immovable.  "If you try to wheedle out of
+him his plans for a campaign, he stolidly smokes; if you call him an
+imbecile and a blunderer, he blandly lights another cigar; if you
+praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff
+from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the presidency,
+it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales
+the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises.
+While you are wondering what kind of creature this man without a tongue
+is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid
+victory, proving that behind the cigar, and behind the face discharged
+of all tell-tale expression, is the best brain to plan and the
+strongest heart to dare among the generals of the Republic."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Demosthenes was a man who could rise to sublime heights of heroism, but
+his bravery was not his normal condition and depended upon his genius
+being aroused.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had "pluck" and "spunk" on occasions, but Lincoln had pure "grit."
+When the illustrated papers everywhere were caricaturing him, when no
+epithet seemed too harsh to heap upon him, when his methods were
+criticised by his own party, and the generals in the war were
+denouncing his "foolish" confidence in Grant, and delegations were
+waiting upon him to ask for that general's removal, the great President
+sat with crossed legs, and was reminded of a story.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lincoln and Grant both had that rare nerve which cares not for
+ridicule, is not swerved by public clamor, can bear abuse and hatred.
+There is a mighty force in truth and in the sublime conviction and
+supreme self-confidence behind it, in the knowledge that truth is
+mighty and the conviction and confidence that it will prevail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Pure grit is that element of character which enables a man to clutch
+his aim with an iron grip, and keep the needle of his purpose pointing
+to the star of his hope.  Through sunshine and storm, through hurricane
+and tempest, through sleet and rain, with a leaky ship, with a crew in
+mutiny, it perseveres; in fact, nothing but death can subdue it, and it
+dies still struggling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man of grit carries in his very presence a power which controls and
+commands.  He is spared the necessity of declaring himself, for his
+grit speaks in his every act.  It does not come by fits and starts, it
+is a part of his very life.  It inspires a sublime audacity and a
+heroic courage.  Many of the failures of life are due to the want of
+grit or business nerve.  It is unfortunate for a young man to start out
+in business life with a weak, yielding disposition, with no resolution
+or backbone to mark his own course and stick to it, with no ability to
+say "No" with an emphasis, obliging this man by investing in hopeless
+speculation, and rather than offend a friend, indorsing a questionable
+note.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A little boy was asked how he learned to skate.  "Oh, by getting up
+every time I fell down," he replied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whipple tells a story of Mass�na which illustrates the masterful
+purpose that plucks victory out of the jaws of defeat.  "After the
+defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his
+beaten army depended on the character of Mass�na, to whom the Emperor
+dispatched a messenger, telling him to keep his position for two hours
+longer at Aspern.  This order, couched in the form of a request,
+required almost an impossibility; but Napoleon knew the indomitable
+tenacity of the man to whom he gave it.  The messenger found Mass�na
+seated on a heap of rubbish, his eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by
+his unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, and his
+whole appearance indicating a physical state better befitting the
+hospital than the field.  But that steadfast soul seemed altogether
+unaffected by bodily prostration; half dead as he was with fatigue, he
+rose painfully and said, 'Tell the Emperor that I will hold out for two
+hours.'  And he kept his word."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Often defeated in battle," said Macaulay of Alexander the Great, "he
+was always successful in war."  He might have said the same of
+Washington, and, with appropriate changes, of all who win great
+triumphs of any kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the battle of Marengo, the Austrians considered the day won.  The
+French army was inferior in numbers, and had given way.  The Austrian
+army extended its wings on the right and on the left, to follow up the
+French.  Then, though the French themselves thought the battle lost,
+and the Austrians were confident it was won, Napoleon gave the command
+to charge; and, the trumpet's blast being given, the Old Guard charged
+down into the weakened centre of the enemy, cut it in two, rolled the
+two wings up on either side, and the battle was won for France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never despair," says Burke, "but if you do, work on in despair."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once when Marshal Ney was going into battle, looking down at his knees
+which were smiting together, he said, "You may well shake; you would
+shake worse yet if you knew where I am going to take you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is victory after victory with the soldier, lesson after lesson with
+the scholar, blow after blow with the laborer, crop after crop with the
+farmer, picture after picture with the painter, and mile after mile
+with the traveler, that secures what all so much desire&mdash;SUCCESS.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A promising Harvard student was stricken with paralysis of both legs.
+Physicians said there was no hope for him.  The lad determined to
+continue his college studies.  The examiners heard him at his bedside,
+and in four years he took his degree.  He resolved to make a critical
+study of Dante, to do which he had to learn Italian and German.  He
+persevered in spite of repeated attacks of illness and partial loss of
+sight.  He was competing for the university prize.  Think of the
+paralytic lad, helpless in bed, competing for a prize, fighting death
+inch by inch.  What a lesson!  Before his book was published or the
+prize awarded, the brave student died, but the book was successful.  He
+meant that his life should not be a burden or a failure, and he was not
+only graduated from the best college in America, but competed
+successfully for the university prize, and made a valuable contribution
+to literature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Professor L. T. Townsend, the famous author of "Credo," is another
+triumph of grit over environment.  He had a hard struggle as a boy, but
+succeeded in working his way through Amherst College, living on
+forty-five cents a week.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Orange Judd was a remarkable example of success through grit.  He
+earned corn by working for farmers, carried it on his back to mill,
+brought back the meal to his room, cooked it himself, milked cows for
+his pint of milk per day, and lived on mush and milk for months
+together.  He worked his way through Wesleyan University, and took a
+three years' post-graduate course at Yale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Congressman William W. Crapo, while working his way through college,
+being too poor to buy a dictionary, actually copied one, walking from
+his home in the village of Dartmouth, Mass., to New Bedford to
+replenish his store of words and definitions from the town library.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Oh, the triumphs of this indomitable spirit of the conqueror!  This it
+was that enabled Franklin to dine on a small loaf in the
+printing-office with a book in his hand.  It helped Locke to live on
+bread and water in a Dutch garret.  It enabled Gideon Lee to go
+barefoot in the snow, half starved and thinly clad.  It sustained
+Lincoln and Garfield on their hard journeys from the log cabin to the
+White House.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+President Chadbourne put grit in place of his lost lung, and worked
+thirty-five years after his funeral had been planned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lord Cavanagh put grit in the place of arms and legs, and went to
+Parliament in spite of his deformity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Henry Fawcett put grit in place of eyesight, and became the greatest
+Postmaster-General England ever had.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Prescott also put grit in place of eyesight, and became one of
+America's greatest historians.  Francis Parkman put grit in place of
+health and eyesight, and became the greatest historian of America in
+his line.  Thousands of men have put grit in place of health, eyes,
+ears, hands, legs, and yet have achieved marvelous success.  Indeed,
+most of the great things of the world have been accomplished by grit
+and pluck.  You cannot keep a man down who has these qualities.  He
+will make stepping-stones out of his stumbling-blocks, and lift himself
+to success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At fifty, Barnum was a ruined man, owing thousands more than he
+possessed, yet he resolutely resumed business once more, fairly
+wringing success from adverse fortune, and paying his notes at the same
+time.  Again and again he was ruined, but phoenix-like, he rose
+repeatedly from the ashes of his misfortune each time more determined
+than before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the last three days of the first voyage of Columbus that told.
+All his years of struggle and study would have availed nothing if he
+had yielded to the mutiny.  It was all in those three days.  But what
+days!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is all very well," said Charles J. Fox, "to tell me that a young
+man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech.  He may go
+on, or he may be satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young
+man who has not succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on, and I
+will back that young man to do better than most of those who have
+succeeded at the first trial."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Cobden broke down completely the first time he appeared on a platform
+in Manchester, and the chairman apologized for him.  But he did not
+give up speaking till every poor man in England had a larger, better,
+and cheaper loaf.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+See young Disraeli, sprung from a hated and persecuted race; without
+opportunity, pushing his way up through the middle classes, up through
+the upper classes, until he stands self-poised upon the topmost round
+of political and social power.  Scoffed, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed
+from the House of Commons, he simply says, "The time will come when you
+will hear me."  The time did come, and the boy with no chance swayed
+the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the most remarkable examples in history is Disraeli, forcing his
+leadership upon that very party whose prejudices were deepest against
+his race, and which had an utter contempt for self-made men and
+interlopers.  Imagine England's surprise when she awoke to find this
+insignificant Hebrew actually Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was
+easily master of all the tortures supplied by the armory of rhetoric;
+he could exhaust the resources of the bitterest invective; he could
+sting Gladstone out of his self-control; he was absolute master of
+himself and his situation.  You can see that this young man intends to
+make his way in the world.  A determined audacity is in his very face.
+He is a gay fop.  Handsome, with the hated Hebrew blood in his veins,
+after three defeats in parliamentary elections he was not the least
+daunted, for he knew his day would come, as it did.  Lord Melbourne,
+the great Prime Minister, when this gay young fop was introduced to
+him, asked him what he wished to be.  "Prime Minister of England," was
+his audacious reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the greatest preachers of modern times, Lacordaire, failed again
+and again.  Everybody said he would never make a preacher, but he was
+determined to succeed, and in two years from his humiliating failures
+he was preaching in Notre Dame to immense congregations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy Thorwaldsen, whose father died in the poor-house, and whose
+education was so scanty that he had to write his letters over many
+times before they could be posted, by his indomitable perseverance,
+tenacity, and grit, fascinated the world with the genius which neither
+his discouraging father, poverty, nor hardship could suppress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+William H. Seward was given a thousand dollars by his father to go to
+college with; this was all he was to have.  The son returned at the end
+of the freshman year with extravagant habits and no money.  His father
+refused to give him more, and told him he could not stay at home.  When
+the youth found the props all taken out from under him, and that he
+must now sink or swim, he left home moneyless, returned to college,
+graduated at the head of his class, studied law, was elected Governor
+of New York, and became Lincoln's great Secretary of State during the
+Civil War.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Louisa M. Alcott wrote the conclusion to "An Old-Fashioned Girl" with
+her left hand in a sling, one foot up, head aching, and no voice.  She
+proudly writes in her diary, "Twenty years ago I resolved to make the
+family independent if I could.  At forty, that is done.  Debts all
+paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable.  It
+has cost me my health, perhaps."  She earned two hundred thousand
+dollars by her pen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Frank Leslie often refers to the time she lived in her carpetless
+attic while striving to pay her husband's obligations.  She has fought
+her way successfully through nine lawsuits, and has paid the entire
+debt.  She manages her ten publications entirely herself, signs all
+checks and money-orders, makes all contracts, looks over all proofs,
+and approves the make-up of everything before it goes to press.  She
+has developed great business ability, which no one dreamed she
+possessed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garfield said, "If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the
+best possible substitute for it."  The triumph of industry and grit
+over low birth and iron fortune in America, this land of opportunity,
+ought to be sufficient to put to shame all grumblers over their hard
+fortune and those who attempt to excuse aimless, shiftless, successless
+men because they have no chance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fear of ridicule and the dread of humiliation often hinder one from
+taking decisive steps when it is plainly a duty, so that courage is a
+very important element of decision.  In a New England academy a pupil
+who was engaged to assist the teacher was unable to solve a problem in
+algebra.  The class was approaching the problem, and he was mortified
+because, after many trials, he was obliged to take it to the teacher
+for solution.  The teacher returned it unsolved.  What could he do?  He
+would not confess to the class that he could not solve it, so, after
+many futile attempts, he went to a distant town to seek the assistance
+of a friend who, he believed, could do the work.  But, alas! his friend
+had gone away, and would not be back for a week.  On his way back he
+said to himself, "What a fool! am I unable to perform a problem in
+algebra, and shall I go back to my class and confess my ignorance?  I
+can solve it and I will."  He shut himself in his room, determined not
+to sleep until he had mastered the problem, and finally he won success.
+Underneath the solution he wrote, "Obtained Monday evening, September
+2, at half past eleven o'clock, after more than a dozen trials that
+have consumed more than twenty hours of time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During a winter in the war of 1812, General Jackson's troops,
+unprovided for and starving, became mutinous and were going home.  But
+the general set the example of living on acorns; then rode before the
+rebellious line and threatened with death the first mutineer that
+should try to leave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The race is not always to the swift, the battle is not always to the
+strong.  Horses are sometimes weighted or hampered in the race, and
+this is taken into account in the result.  So in the race of life the
+distance alone does not determine the prize.  We must take into
+consideration the hindrances, the weights we have carried, the
+disadvantages of education, of breeding, of training, of surroundings,
+of circumstances.  How many young men are weighted down with debt, with
+poverty, with the support of invalid parents or brothers and sisters,
+or friends?  How many are fettered with ignorance, hampered by
+inhospitable surroundings, with the opposition of parents who do not
+understand them?  How many a round boy is hindered in the race by being
+forced into a square hole?  How many are delayed in their course
+because nobody believes in them, because nobody encourages them,
+because they get no sympathy and are forever tortured for not doing
+that against which every fibre of their being protests, and every drop
+of their blood rebels?  How many have to feel their way to the goal,
+through the blindness of ignorance and lack of experience?  How many go
+bungling along from the lack of early discipline and drill in the
+vocation they have chosen?  How many have to hobble along on crutches
+because they were never taught to help themselves, but to lean upon a
+father's wealth or a mother's indulgence?  How many are weakened for
+the journey of life by self-indulgence, by dissipation, by
+"life-sappers;" how many are crippled by disease, by a weak
+constitution, by impaired eyesight or hearing?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the prizes of life shall be awarded by the Supreme Judge, who
+knows our weaknesses and frailties, the distance we have run, the
+weights we have carried, the handicaps, will all be taken into account.
+Not the distance we have run, but the obstacles we have overcome, the
+disadvantages under which we have made the race, will decide the
+prizes.  The poor wretch who has plodded along against unknown
+temptations, the poor woman who has buried her sorrows in her silent
+heart and sewed her weary way through life, those who have suffered
+abuse in silence, and who have been unrecognized or despised by their
+fellow-runners, will often receive the greater prize.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The wise and active conquer difficulties,<BR>
+By daring to attempt them: sloth and folly<BR>
+Shiver and sink at sight of toil and hazard,<BR>
+And make the impossibility they fear."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Tumble me down, and I will sit<BR>
+Upon my ruins, smiling yet:<BR>
+Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be<BR>
+Patient in my necessity:<BR>
+Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun<BR>
+Me as a fear'd infection:<BR>
+Yet scare-crow like I'll walk, as one<BR>
+Neglecting thy derision.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ROBERT HERRICK.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"One ruddy drop of manly blood the surging sea outweighs."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Manhood overtops all titles."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The truest test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of
+cities, nor the crops; no, but the kind of man the country turns
+out.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Hew the block off, and get out the man.&mdash;POPE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the
+peerless and immortal name of Washington.&mdash;JAMES A. GARFIELD.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Better not be at all<BR>
+Than not be noble.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">TENNYSON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Be noble! and the nobleness that lies<BR>
+In other men, sleeping, but never dead,<BR>
+Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LOWELL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Virtue alone out-builds the pyramids:<BR>
+Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">YOUNG.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Were one so tall to touch the pole,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Or grasp creation in his span,</SPAN><BR>
+He must be measured by his soul,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The mind's the measure of the man.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">WATTS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">In feelings, not in figures on a dial.</SPAN><BR>
+We should count time by heart-throbs.  He most lives<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BAILEY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Good name in man or woman<BR>
+Is the immediate jewel of their souls."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+But this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to
+exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in my grave.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A Moor was walking in his garden when a Spanish cavalier suddenly fell at
+his feet, pleading for concealment from pursuers who sought his life in
+revenge for the killing of a Moorish gentleman.  The Moor promised aid,
+and locked his visitor in a summer-house until night should afford
+opportunity for his escape.  Not long after the dead body of his son was
+brought home, and from the description given he knew the Spaniard was the
+murderer.  He concealed his horror, however, and at midnight unlocked the
+summer-house, saying, "Christian, the youth whom you have murdered was my
+only son.  Your crime deserves the severest punishment.  But I have
+solemnly pledged my word not to betray you, and I disdain to violate a
+rash engagement even with a cruel enemy."  Then, saddling one of his
+fleetest mules, he said, "Flee while the darkness of night conceals you.
+Your hands are polluted with blood; but God is just; and I humbly thank
+Him that my faith is unspotted, and that I have resigned judgment to Him."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+[Illustration: John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)]
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Character never dies.  As Longfellow says:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Were a star quenched on high,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For ages would its light,</SPAN><BR>
+Still traveling downward from the sky,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Shine on our mortal sight.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"So when a great man dies,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For years beyond our ken,</SPAN><BR>
+The light he leaves behind him lies<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Upon the paths of men."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The character of Socrates was mightier than the hemlock, and banished the
+fear and sting of death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who can estimate the power of a well-lived life?  <I>Character is power</I>.
+Hang this motto in every school in the land, in every home, in every
+youth's room.  Mothers, engrave it on every child's heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You cannot destroy one single atom of a Garrison, even though he were
+hanged.  The mighty force of martyrs to truth lives; the candle burns
+more brilliantly than before it was snuffed.  "No varnish or veneer of
+scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic or rhetoric, can ever make
+you a positive force in the world;" but your character can.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the statue of George Peabody, erected in one of the thoroughfares of
+London, was unveiled, the sculptor Story was asked to speak.  Twice he
+touched the statue with his hand, and said, "That is my speech.  That is
+my speech."  What could be more eloquent?  Character needs no
+recommendation.  It pleads its own cause.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Show me," said Omar the Caliph to Amru the warrior, "the sword with
+which you have fought so many battles and slain so many infidels."  "Ah!"
+replied Amru, "the sword without the arm of the master is no sharper nor
+heavier than the sword of Farezdak the poet."  So one hundred and fifty
+pounds of flesh and blood without character is of no great value.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Napoleon was so much impressed with the courage and resources of Marshal
+Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I
+would give them all for Ney."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Agra, India, stands the Taj Mahal, the acme of Oriental architecture,
+said to be the most beautiful building in the world.  It was planned as a
+mausoleum for the favorite wife of Shah Jehan.  When the latter was
+deposed by his son Aurungzebe, his daughter Jahanara chose to share his
+captivity and poverty rather than the guilty glory of her brother.  On
+her tomb in Delhi were cut her dying words: "Let no rich coverlet adorn
+my grave; this grass is the best covering for the tomb of the poor in
+spirit, the humble, the transitory Jahanara, the disciple of the holy men
+of Christ, the daughter of the Emperor Shah Jehan."  Travelers who visit
+the magnificent Taj linger long by the grass-green sarcophagus in Delhi,
+but give only passing notice to the beautiful Jamma Masjid, a mausoleum
+afterwards erected in her honor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some writer has well said that David of the throne we cannot always
+recall with pleasure, but David of the Psalms we never forget.  The
+strong, sweet faith of the latter streams like sunlight through even the
+closed windows of the soul, long after the wearied eye has turned with
+disgust from all the gilded pomp and pride of the former.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Robertson says that when you have got to the lowest depths of your heart,
+you will find there not the mere desire of happiness, but a craving as
+natural to us as the desire for food,&mdash;the craving for nobler, higher
+life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Private Benjamin Owen, &mdash;&mdash; Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, was found
+asleep at his post while on picket duty last night.  The court-martial
+has sentenced him to be shot in twenty-four hours, as the offense
+occurred at a critical time."  "I thought when I gave Bennie to his
+country," said farmer Owen as he read the above telegram with dimming
+eyes, "that no other father in all this broad laud made so precious a
+gift.  He only slept a minute,&mdash;just one little minute,&mdash;at his post, I
+know that was all, for Bennie never dozed over a duty.  How prompt and
+trustworthy he was!  He was as tall as I, and only eighteen! and now they
+shoot him because he was found asleep when doing sentinel duty!"  Just
+then Bennie's little sister Blossom answered a tap at the door, and
+returned with a letter.  "It is from him," was all she said.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+DEAR FATHER,&mdash;For sleeping on sentinel duty I am to be shot.  At first,
+it seemed awful to me; but I have thought about it so much now that it
+has no terror.  They say that they will not bind me, nor blind me; but
+that I may meet my death like a man.  I thought, father, that it might
+have been on the battlefield, for my country, and that, when I fell, it
+would be fighting gloriously; but to be shot down like a dog for nearly
+betraying it,&mdash;to die for neglect of duty!  Oh, father, I wonder the very
+thought does not kill me!  But I shall not disgrace you.  I am going to
+write you all about it; and when I am gone, you may tell my comrades; I
+cannot now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You know I promised Jemmie Carr's mother I would look after her boy; and,
+when he fell sick, I did all I could for him.  He was not strong when he
+was ordered back into the ranks, and the day before that night I carried
+all his baggage, besides my own, on our march.  Toward night we went in
+on double-quick, and the baggage began to feel very heavy.  Everybody was
+tired; and as for Jemmie, if I had not lent him an arm now and then, he
+would have dropped by the way.  I was all tired out when we came into
+camp; and then it was Jemmie's turn to be sentry, and I could take his
+place; but I was too tired, father.  I could not have kept awake if a gun
+had been pointed at my head; but I did not know it until,&mdash;well, until it
+was too late.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They tell me to-day that I have a short reprieve,&mdash;given to me by
+circumstances,&mdash;"time to write to you," our good colonel says.  Forgive
+him, father, he only does his duty; he would gladly save me if he could;
+and do not lay my death up against Jemmie.  The poor boy is
+broken-hearted, and does nothing but beg and entreat them to let him die
+in my stead.  I can't bear to think of mother and Blossom.  Comfort them,
+father!  Tell them I die as a brave boy should, and that, when the war is
+over, they will not be ashamed of me, as they must be now.  God help me:
+it is very hard to bear!  Good-by, father.  To-night, in the early
+twilight, I shall see the cows all coming home from pasture, and precious
+little Blossom standing on the back stoop, waiting for me,&mdash;but I shall
+never, never come!  God bless you all!
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"God be thanked!" said Mr. Owen reverently; "I knew Bennie was not the
+boy to sleep carelessly."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Late that night a little figure glided out of the house and down the
+path.  Two hours later the conductor of the southward mail lifted her
+into a car at Mill Depot.  Next morning she was in New York, and the next
+she was admitted to the White House at Washington.  "Well, my child,"
+said the President in pleasant, cheerful tones, "what do you want so
+bright and early this morning?"  "Bennie's life, please, sir," faltered
+Blossom.  "Bennie?  Who is Bennie?" asked Mr. Lincoln.  "My brother, sir.
+They are going to shoot him for sleeping at his post," said the little
+girl.  "I remember," said the President; "it was a fatal sleep.  You see,
+child, it was a time of special danger.  Thousands of lives might have
+been lost through his culpable negligence."  "So my father said; but poor
+Bennie was so tired, sir, and Jemmie so weak.  He did the work of two,
+sir, and it was Jemmie's night, not his; but Jemmie was too tired, and
+Bennie never thought about himself,&mdash;that he was tired, too."  "What is
+that you say, child?  Come here; I do not understand."  He read Bennie's
+letter to his father, which Blossom held out, wrote a few lines, rang his
+bell, and said to the messenger who appeared, "Send this dispatch at
+once."  Then, turning to Blossom, he continued: "Go home, my child, and
+tell that father of yours, who could approve his country's sentence, even
+when it took the life of a child like that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks
+the life far too precious to be lost.  Go back, or&mdash;wait until to-morrow;
+Bennie will need a change after he has so bravely faced death, he shall
+go with you."  "God bless you, sir," said Blossom.  <I>Not all the queens
+are crowned.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two days later, when the young soldier came with his sister to thank the
+President, Mr. Lincoln fastened the strap of a lieutenant upon his
+shoulder, saying, "The soldier that could carry a sick comrade's baggage,
+and die for the act without complaining, deserves well of his country."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When telegrams poured in announcing terrible carnage upon battlefields in
+our late war, and when President Lincoln's heart-strings were nearly
+broken over the cruel treatment of our prisoners at Andersonville, Belle
+Isle, and Libby Prison, he never once departed from his famous motto,
+"With malice toward none, with charity for all."  When it was reported
+that among those returned at Baltimore from Southern prisons, not one in
+ten could stand alone from hunger and neglect, and many were so eaten and
+covered by vermin as to resemble those pitted by smallpox, and so
+emaciated that they were living skeletons, not even these reports could
+move the great President to retaliate in kind upon the Southern prisoners.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Among the slain on the battlefield at Fredericksburg was the body of a
+youth upon which was found next the heart a photograph of Lincoln.  Upon
+the back of it were these words: "God bless President Lincoln."  The
+youth had been sentenced to death for sleeping at his post, but had been
+pardoned by the President.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+David Dudley Field said he considered Lincoln the greatest man of his
+day.  Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others were great, each in one way, but
+Lincoln was great in many ways.  There seemed to be hidden springs of
+greatness in this man that would gush forth in the most unexpected way.
+The men about him were at a loss to name the order of his genius.  Horace
+Greeley was almost as many-sided, but was a wonderful combination of
+goodness and weakness, while Lincoln seemed strong in every way.  After
+Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "The promise
+must now be kept; I shall never recall one word."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, bears the following testimony to the
+influence for good which Gladstone, when a school-fellow at Eton,
+exercised upon him.  "I was a thoroughly idle boy; but I was saved from
+worse things by getting to know Gladstone."  At Oxford we are told the
+effect of his example was so strong that men who followed him there ten
+years later declare "that undergraduates drank less in the forties
+because Gladstone had been so courageously abstemious in the thirties."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Rev. John Newton said, "I see in this world two heaps of human
+happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one
+heap and add it to the other, I carry a point; if as I go home a child
+has dropped a half-penny, and by giving it another I can wipe away its
+tears, I feel I have done something."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A holy hermit, who had lived for six years in a cave of the Thebaid,
+fasting, praying, and performing severe penances, spending his whole life
+in trying to make himself of some account with God, that he might be sure
+of a seat in Paradise, prayed to be shown some saint greater than
+himself, in order that he might pattern after him to reach still greater
+heights of holiness.  The same night an angel came to him and said, "If
+thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanctity, strive to imitate a
+certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."  The
+hermit, much chagrined, sought the minstrel and asked him how he had
+managed to make himself so acceptable to God.  The minstrel hung down his
+head and replied, "Do not mock me, holy father; I have performed no good
+works, and I am not worthy to pray.  I only go from door to door to amuse
+people with my viol and my flute."  The hermit insisted that he must have
+done some good deeds.  The minstrel replied, "Nay, I know of nothing good
+that I have done."  "But how hast thou become a beggar?  Hast thou spent
+thy substance in riotous living?"  "Nay, not so," replied the minstrel.
+"I met a poor woman running hither and thither, distracted, because her
+husband and children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt.  I took
+her home and protected her from certain sons of Belial, for she was very
+beautiful.  I gave her all I possessed to redeem her family and returned
+her to her husband and children.  Is there any man who would not have
+done the same?"   The hermit shed tears, and said in all his life he had
+not done as much as the poor minstrel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor
+than silver or gold."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A gentleman, traveling through West Virginia, went to a house, and
+procured food for himself and companion and their horses.  He wanted to
+make payment, but the woman was ashamed to take pay for a mere act of
+kindness.  He pressed the money upon her.  Finally she said, "If you
+don't think I'm mean, I'll take one quarter of a dollar from you, so as
+to look at it now and then, for there has been no money in this house for
+a year."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Do not take the world's estimate of success.  The real height of the
+Washington Monument is not measured between the capstone and the earth,
+but includes the fifty feet of solid masonry below.  Many of the most
+successful lives are like the rivers of India which run under ground,
+unseen and unheard by the millions who tread above them.  But have these
+rivers therefore no influence?  Ask the rich harvest fields if they feel
+the flowing water beneath.  The greatest worth is never measured.  It is
+only the nearest stars whose distances we compute.  That life whose
+influence can be measured by the world's tape-line of dollars and corn is
+not worth the measuring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All the forces in nature that are the most powerful are the quietest.  We
+speak of the rolling thunder as powerful; but gravitation, which makes no
+noise, yet keeps orbs in their orbits, and the whole system in harmony,
+binding every atom in each planet to the great centre of all attraction,
+is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful.  We say the
+bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into
+splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half
+so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that
+we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable speed, strikes and
+yet is not felt, but exercises an influence so great that the earth is
+clothed with verdure through its influence, and all nature beautified and
+blessed by its ceaseless action.  The things that make no noise, make no
+pretension, may be really the strongest.  The most conclusive logic that
+a preacher uses in the pulpit will never exercise the influence that the
+consistent piety of character will exercise over all the earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The old Sicilian story relates how Pythias, condemned to death through
+the hasty anger of Dionysius of Syracuse, asked that he might go to his
+native Greece, and arrange his affairs, promising to return before the
+time appointed for his execution.  The tyrant laughed his request to
+scorn, saying that when he was once safe out of Sicily no one would
+answer for his reappearance.  At this juncture, Damon, a friend of the
+doomed man, offered to become surety for him, and to die in his stead if
+he did not come back in time.  Dionysius was surprised, but accepted the
+proposition.  When the fatal day came, Pythias had not reached Syracuse,
+but Damon remained firm in his faith that his friend would not fail him.
+At the very last hour Pythias appeared and announced himself ready to
+die.  But such touching loyalty moved even the iron heart of Dionysius;
+accordingly he ordered both to be spared, and asked to be allowed to make
+a third partner in such a noble friendship.  It is a grander thing to be
+nobly remembered than to be nobly born.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Attila, flushed with conquest, appeared with his barbarian horde
+before the gates of Rome in 452, Pope Leo alone of all the people dared
+go forth and try to turn his wrath aside.  A single magistrate followed
+him.  The Huns were awed by the fearless majesty of the unarmed old man,
+and led him before their chief, whose respect was so great that he agreed
+not to enter the city, provided a tribute should be paid to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Blackie thinks there is no kind of a sermon so effective as the example
+of a great man, where we see the thing done before us,&mdash;actually
+done,&mdash;the thing of which we were not even dreaming.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was said that when Washington led the American forces as commanding
+officer, it "doubled the strength of the army."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When General Lee was in conversation with one of his officers in regard
+to a movement of his army, a plain farmer's boy overheard the general's
+remark that he had decided to march upon Gettysburg instead of
+Harrisburg.  The boy telegraphed this fact to Governor Curtin.  A special
+engine was sent for the boy.  "I would give my right hand," said the
+governor, "to know if this boy tells the truth."  A corporal replied,
+"Governor, I know that boy; it is impossible for him to lie; there is not
+a drop of false blood in his veins."  In fifteen minutes the Union troops
+were marching to Gettysburg, where they gained a victory.  Character is
+power.  The great thing is to be a man, to have a high purpose, a noble
+aim, to be dead in earnest, to yearn for the good and the true.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your lordships," said Wellington in Parliament, "must all feel the high
+and honorable character of the late Sir Robert Peel.  I was long
+connected with him in public life.  We were both in the councils of our
+sovereign together, and I had long the honor to enjoy his private
+friendship.  In all the course of my acquaintance with him, I never knew
+a man in whose truth and justice I had greater confidence, or in whom I
+saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service.  In the whole
+course of my communication with him, I never knew an instance in which he
+did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the
+whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated
+anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Secretary stood alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt.  "Modern
+degeneracy had not reached him.  Original and unaccommodating, the
+features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity.  His august
+mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so
+impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be
+relieved from his superiority.  No state chicanery, no narrow system of
+vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but,
+overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his
+ambition, fame.  A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, so
+authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the
+name of Pitt through all the classes of venality.  Corruption imagined,
+indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
+the inconsistency of his policy, and much of the ruin of his victories;
+but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answered
+and refuted her.  Upon the whole, there was in this man something that
+could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+eloquence to summon mankind to united exertion, or to break the bonds of
+slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded
+authority; something that could establish or overwhelm an empire, and
+strike a blow in the world that would resound through the universe."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Pitt was Paymaster-General for George II.  When a subsidy was voted a
+foreign office, it was customary for the office to claim one half per
+cent. for honorarium.  Pitt astonished the King of Sardinia by sending
+him the sum without any deduction, and further astonished him by refusing
+a present as a compliment to his integrity.  He was a poor man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Washington would take no pay as commander-in-chief of the Continental
+armies.  He would keep a strict account of his expenses; and these, he
+doubted not, would be discharged.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Remember, the main business of life is not to do, but to become; an
+action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1837, after George Peabody moved to London, there came a commercial
+crisis in the United States.  Many banks suspended specie payments.  Many
+mercantile houses went to the wall, and thousands more were in great
+distress.  Edward Everett said, "The great sympathetic nerve of the
+commercial world, credit, as far as the United States were concerned, was
+for the time paralyzed."  Probably not a half dozen men in Europe would
+have been listened to for a moment in the Bank of England upon the
+subject of American securities, but George Peabody was one of them.  His
+name was already a tower of strength in the commercial world.  In those
+dark days his integrity stood four-square in every business panic.
+Peabody retrieved the credit of the State of Maryland, and, it might
+almost be said, of the United States.  His character was the magic wand
+which in many a case changed almost worthless paper into gold.  Merchants
+on both sides of the Atlantic procured large advances from him, even
+before the goods consigned to him had been sold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thackeray says, "Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's
+faces which is honored wherever presented.  You cannot help trusting such
+men; their very presence gives confidence.  There is a 'promise to pay'
+in their very faces which gives confidence, and you prefer it to another
+man's indorsement."  <I>Character is credit.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With most people, as with most nations, "things are worth what they will
+sell for," and the dollar is mightier than the sword.  As good as gold
+has become a proverb&mdash;as though it were the highest standard of
+comparison.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Themistocles, having conceived the design of transferring the government
+of Greece from the hands of the Lacedaemonians into those of the
+Athenians, kept his thoughts continually fixed on this great project.
+Being at no time very nice or scrupulous in the choice of his measures,
+he thought anything which could tend to the accomplishment of the end he
+had in view just and lawful.  Accordingly in an assembly of the people
+one day, he intimated that he had a very important design to propose; but
+he could not communicate it to the public at large, because the greatest
+secrecy was necessary to its success, and he therefore desired that they
+would appoint a person to whom he might explain himself on the subject.
+Aristides was unanimously selected by the assembly, which deferred
+entirely to his opinion.  Themistocles, taking him aside, told him that
+the design he had conceived was to burn the fleet belonging to the rest
+of the Grecian states, which then lay in a neighboring port, when Athens
+would assuredly become mistress of all Greece.  Aristides returned to the
+assembly, and declared to them that nothing could be more advantageous to
+the commonwealth than the project of Themistocles, but that, at the same
+time, nothing in the world could be more unfair.  The assembly
+unanimously declared that, since such was the case, Themistocles should
+wholly abandon his project.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A tragedy by Aeschylus was once represented before the Athenians, in
+which it was said of one of the characters, "that he cared not more to be
+just than to appear so."  At these words all eyes were instantly turned
+upon Aristides as the man who, of all the Greeks, most merited that
+distinguished reputation.  Ever after he received, by universal consent,
+the surname of the Just,&mdash;a title, says Plutarch, truly royal, or rather
+truly divine.  This remarkable distinction roused envy, and envy
+prevailed so far as to procure his banishment for years, upon the unjust
+suspicion that his influence with the people was dangerous to their
+freedom.  When the sentence was passed by his countrymen, Aristides
+himself was present in the midst of them, and a stranger who stood near,
+and could not write, applied to him to write for him on his shell-ballot.
+"What name?" asked the philosopher.  "Aristides," replied the stranger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you know him, then?" said Aristides, "or has he in any way injured
+you?"  "Neither," said the other, "but it is for this very thing I would
+he were condemned.  I can go nowhere but I hear of Aristides the Just."
+Aristides inquired no further, but took the shell, and wrote his name on
+it as desired.  The absence of Aristides soon dissipated the
+apprehensions which his countrymen had so idly indulged.  He was in a
+short time recalled, and for many years after took a leading part in the
+affairs of the republic, without showing the least resentment against his
+enemies, or seeking any other gratification than that of serving his
+countrymen with fidelity and honor.  The virtues of Aristides did not
+pass without reward.  He had two daughters, who were educated at the
+expense of the state, and to whom portions were allotted from the public
+treasury.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The strongest proof, however, of the justice and integrity of Aristides
+is, that notwithstanding he had possessed the highest employments in the
+republic, and had the absolute disposal of its treasures, yet he died so
+poor as not to leave money enough to defray the expenses of his funeral.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong;
+they, and not the police, guarantee the execution of the laws.  Their
+influence is the bulwark of good government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was said of the first Emperor Alexander of Russia, that his personal
+character was equivalent to a constitution.  Of Montaigne, it was said
+that his high reputation for integrity was a better protection for him
+than a regiment of horse would have been, he being the only man among the
+French gentry who, during the wars of the Fronde, kept his castle gates
+unbarred.  There are men, fortunately for the world, who would rather be
+right than be President.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fisher Ames, while in Congress, said of Roger Sherman, of Connecticut:
+"If I am absent during a discussion of a subject, and consequently know
+not on which side to vote, when I return I always look at Roger Sherman,
+for I am sure if I vote with him, I shall vote right."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Character gravitates upward, as with a celestial gravitation, while mere
+genius, without character, gravitates downward.  How often we see in
+school or college young men, who are apparently dull and even stupid,
+rise gradually and surely above others who are without character, merely
+because the former have an upward tendency in their lives, a reaching-up
+principle, which gradually but surely unfolds, and elevates them to
+positions of honor and trust.  There is something which everybody admires
+in an aspiring soul, one whose tendency is upward and onward, in spite of
+hindrances and in defiance of obstacles.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We may try to stifle the voice of the mysterious angel within, but it
+always says "yes" to right actions and "no" to wrong ones.  No matter
+whether we heed it or not, no power can change its decision one iota.
+Through health, through disease, through prosperity and adversity, this
+faithful servant stands behind us in the shadow of ourselves, never
+intruding, but weighing every act we perform, every word we utter,
+pronouncing the verdict "right" or "wrong."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Francis Horner, of England, was a man of whom Sydney Smith said, that
+"the ten commandments were stamped upon his forehead."  The valuable and
+peculiar light in which Horner's history is calculated to inspire every
+right-minded youth is this: he died at the age of thirty-eight, possessed
+of greater influence than any other private man, and admired, beloved,
+trusted, and deplored by all except the heartless and the base.  No
+greater homage was ever paid in Parliament to any deceased member.  How
+was this attained?  By rank?  He was the son of an Edinburgh merchant.
+By wealth?  Neither he nor any of his relatives ever had a superfluous
+sixpence.  By office?  He held but one, and that for only a few years, of
+no influence, and with very little pay.  By talents?  His were not
+splendid, and he had no genius.  Cautious and slow, his only ambition was
+to be right.  By eloquence?  He spoke in calm, good taste, without any of
+the oratory that either terrifies or seduces.  By any fascination of
+manner?  His was only correct and agreeable.  By what was it, then?
+Merely by sense, industry, good principles and a good heart, qualities
+which no well constituted mind need ever despair of attaining.  It was
+the force of his character that raised him; and this character was not
+impressed on him by nature, but formed, out of no peculiarly fine
+elements, by himself.  There were many in the House of Commons of far
+greater ability and eloquence.  But no one surpassed him in the
+combination of an adequate portion of these with moral worth.  Horner was
+born to show what moderate powers, unaided by anything whatever except
+culture and goodness, may achieve, even when these powers are displayed
+amidst the competition and jealousies of public life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When it was reported in Paris that the great Napoleon was dead, I passed
+the Palais Royal," says a French writer, "where a public crier called,
+'Here's your account of the death of Bonaparte.'  This cry which once
+would have appalled all Europe fell perfectly flat.  I entered," he adds,
+"several caf�s, and found the same indifference,&mdash;coldness everywhere; no
+one seemed interested or troubled.  This man, who had conquered Europe
+and awed the world, had inspired neither the love nor the admiration of
+even his own countrymen.  He had impressed the world with his
+marvelousness, and had inspired astonishment but not love."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Emerson says that Napoleon did all that in him lay to live and thrive
+without moral principle.  It was the nature of things, the eternal law of
+man and of the world, which balked and ruined him; and the result, in a
+million attempts of this kind, will be the same.  His was an experiment,
+under the most favorable conditions, to test the powers of intellect
+without conscience.  Never elsewhere was such a leader so endowed, and so
+weaponed; never has another leader found such aids and followers.  And
+what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense
+armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men,
+of this demoralized Europe?  He left France smaller, poorer, feebler than
+he found her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A hundred years hence what difference will it make whether you were rich
+or poor, a peer or a peasant?  But what difference may it not make
+whether you did what was right or what was wrong?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said George William Curtis, "was sold,
+through Dr. Johnson's mediation, for sixty pounds; and ten years after,
+the author died.  With what love do we hang over its pages!  What springs
+of feeling it has opened!  Goldsmith's books are influences and friends
+forever, yet the five thousandth copy was never announced, and Oliver
+Goldsmith, M. D., often wanted a dinner!  Horace Walpole, the coxcomb of
+literature, smiled at him contemptuously from his gilded carriage.
+Goldsmith struggled cheerfully with his adverse fate, and died.  But then
+sad mourners, whom he had aided in their affliction, gathered around his
+bed, and a lady of distinction, whom he had only dared to admire at a
+distance, came and cut a lock of his hair for remembrance.  When I see
+Goldsmith, thus carrying his heart in his hand like a palm branch, I look
+on him as a successful man, whom adversity could not bring down from the
+level of his lofty nature."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dr. Maudsley tells us that the aims which chiefly predominate&mdash;riches,
+position, power, applause of men&mdash;are such as inevitably breed and foster
+many bad passions in the eager competition to attain them.  Hence, in
+fact, come disappointed ambition, jealousy, grief from loss of fortune,
+all the torments of wounded self-love, and a thousand other mental
+sufferings,&mdash;the commonly enumerated moral causes of insanity.  They are
+griefs of a kind to which a rightly developed nature should not fall a
+prey.  There need be no envy nor jealousy, if a man were to consider that
+it mattered not whether he did a great thing or some one else did it,
+Nature's only concern being that it should be done; no grief from loss of
+fortune, if he were to estimate at its true value that which fortune can
+bring him, and that which fortune can never bring him; no wounded
+self-love, if he had learned well the eternal lesson of
+life,&mdash;self-renunciation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Soon after his establishment in Philadelphia Franklin was offered a piece
+for publication in his newspaper.  Being very busy, he begged the
+gentleman would leave it for consideration.  The next day the author
+called and asked his opinion of it.  "Well, sir," replied Franklin, "I am
+sorry to say I think it highly scurrilous and defamatory.  But being at a
+loss on account of my poverty whether to reject it or not, I thought I
+would put it to this issue: At night, when my work was done, I bought a
+two-penny loaf, on which I supped heartily, and then, wrapping myself in
+my great coat, slept very soundly on the floor till morning, when another
+loaf and mug of water afforded a pleasant breakfast.  Now, sir, since I
+can live very comfortably in this manner, why should I prostitute my
+press to personal hatred or party passion for a more luxurious living?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One cannot read this anecdote of our American sage without thinking of
+Socrates' reply to King Archelaus, who had pressed him to give up
+preaching in the dirty streets of Athens, and come and live with him in
+his splendid courts: "Meal, please your Majesty, is a half-penny a peck
+at Athens, and water I get for nothing!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During Alexander's march into Africa he found a people dwelling in peace,
+who knew neither war nor conquest.  While he was interviewing the chief
+two of his subjects brought a case before him for judgment.  The dispute
+was this: the one had bought of the other a piece of ground, which, after
+the purchase, was found to contain a treasure, for which he felt bound to
+pay.  The other refused to receive anything, stating that when he sold
+the ground he sold it with all the advantages apparent or concealed which
+it might be found to afford.  The king said, "One of you has a daughter
+and the other a son; let them be married and the treasure given to them
+as a dowry."  Alexander was surprised, and said, "If this case had been
+in our country it would have been dismissed, and the king would have kept
+the treasure."  The chief said, "Does the sun shine on your country, and
+the rain fall, and the grass grow?"  Alexander replied, "Certainly."  The
+chief then asked, "Are there any cattle?"  "Certainly," was the reply.
+The chief replied, "Then it is for these innocent cattle that the Great
+Being permits the rain to fall and the grass to grow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A good character is a precious thing, above rubies, gold, crowns, or
+kingdoms, and the work of making it is the noblest labor on earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Professor Blackie of the University of Edinburgh said to a class of young
+men: "Money is not needful; power is not needful; liberty is not needful;
+even health is not the one thing needful; but character alone is that
+which can truly save us, and if we are not saved in this sense, we
+certainly must be damned."  It has been said that "when poverty is your
+inheritance, virtue must be your capital."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the American Revolution, while General Reed was President of
+Congress, the British Commissioners offered him a bribe of ten thousand
+guineas to desert the cause of his country.  His reply was, "Gentlemen, I
+am poor, very poor; but your king is not rich enough to buy me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When Le P�re Bourdaloue preached at Rouen," said P�re Arrius, "the
+tradesmen forsook their shops, lawyers their clients, physicians their
+sick, and tavern-keepers their bars; but when I preached the following
+year I set all things to rights,&mdash;every man minded his own business."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I fear John Knox's prayers more than an army of ten thousand men," said
+Mary, Queen of Scotland.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Pope Paul IV. heard of the death of Calvin he exclaimed with a sigh,
+"Ah, the strength of that proud heretic lay in&mdash;riches?  No.  Honors?
+No.  But nothing could move him from his course.  Holy Virgin!  With two
+such servants, our church would soon be mistress of both worlds."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garibaldi's power over his men amounted to fascination.  Soldiers and
+officers were ready to die for him.  His will power seemed to enslave
+them.  In Rome he called for forty volunteers to go where half of them
+would be sure to be killed and the others probably wounded.  The whole
+battalion rushed forward; and they had to draw lots, so eager were all to
+obey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What power of magic lies in a great name!  There was not a throne in
+Europe that could stand against Washington's character, and in comparison
+with it the millions of the Croesuses would look ridiculous.  What are
+the works of avarice compared with the names of Lincoln, Grant, or
+Garfield?  A few names have ever been the leaven which has preserved many
+a nation from premature decay.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"But strew his ashes to the wind<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Whose sword or voice has served mankind&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+And is he dead, whose glorious mind<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Lifts thine on high?&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+To live in hearts we leave behind<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Is not to die."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Gladstone gave in Parliament, when announcing the death of Princess
+Alice, a touching story of sick-room ministration.  The Princess' little
+boy was ill with diphtheria, the physician had cautioned her not to
+inhale the poisoned breath; the child was tossing in the delirium of
+fever.  The mother took the little one in her lap and stroked his fevered
+brow; the boy threw his arms around her neck, and whispered, "Kiss me,
+mamma;" the mother's instinct was stronger than the physician's caution;
+she pressed her lips to the child's, but lost her life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At a large dinner-party given by Lord Stratford after the Crimean War, it
+was proposed that every one should write on a slip of paper the name
+which appeared most likely to descend to posterity with renown.  When the
+papers were opened every one of them contained the name of Florence
+Nightingale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Leckey says that the first hospital ever established was opened by that
+noble Christian woman, Fabiola, in the fourth century.  The two foremost
+names in modern philanthropy are those of John Howard and Florence
+Nightingale.  Not a general of the Crimean War on either side can be
+named by one person in ten.  The one name that rises instantly, when that
+carnival of pestilence and blood is suggested, is that of a young woman
+just recovering from a serious illness, Florence Nightingale.  A soldier
+said, "Before she came there was such cussin' and swearin'; and after
+that it was as holy as a church."  She robbed war of half its terrors.
+Since her time the hospital systems of all the nations during war have
+been changed.  No soldier was braver and no patriot truer than Clara
+Barton, and wherever that noble company of Protestant women known as the
+Red Cross Society,&mdash;the cross, I suppose, pointing to Calvary, and the
+red to the blood of the Redeemer,&mdash;wherever those consecrated workers
+seek to alleviate the condition of those who suffer from plagues,
+cholera, fevers, flood, famine, there this tireless angel moves on her
+pathway of blessing.  And of all heroes, what nobler ones than these,
+whose names shine from the pages of our missionary history?  I never read
+of Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Snow, Miss Brittain, Miss West, without feeling that
+the heroic age of our race has just begun, the age which opens to woman
+the privilege of following her benevolent inspirations wheresoever she
+will, without thinking that our Christianity needs no other evidence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Duty is the cement without which all power, goodness, intellect, truth,
+happiness, and love itself can have no permanence, but all the fabric of
+existence crumbles away from under us and leaves us at last sitting in
+the midst of a ruin, astonished at our own desolation."  A constant,
+abiding sense of duty is the last reason of culture.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I slept and dreamed that life is beauty;<BR>
+I woke and found that life is duty."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We have no more right to refuse to perform a duty than to refuse to pay a
+debt.  Moral insolvency is certain to him who neglects and disregards his
+duty to his fellow-men.  Nor can we hire another to perform our duty.
+The mere accident of having money does not release you from your duty to
+the world.  Nay, it increases it, for it enables you to do a larger and
+nobler duty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If your money is not clean, if there is a dirty dollar in your millions,
+you have not succeeded.  If there is the blood of the poor and
+unfortunate, of orphans and widows, on your bank account, you have not
+succeeded.  If your wealth has made others poorer, your life is a
+failure.  If you have gained it in an occupation that kills, that
+shortens the lives of others, that poisons their blood, or engenders
+disease, if you have taken a day from a human life, if you have gained
+your money by that which has debauched other lives, you have failed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Remember that a question will be asked you some time which you cannot
+evade, the right answer to which will fix your destiny forever: "How did
+you get that fortune?"  Are other men's lives in it; are others' hope and
+happiness buried in it; are others' comforts sacrificed to it; are
+others' rights buried in it; are others' opportunities smothered in it;
+others' chances strangled by it; has their growth been stunted by it;
+their characters stained by it; have others a smaller loaf, a meaner
+home?  If so, you have failed; all your millions cannot save you from the
+curse, "thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Walter Scott's publisher and printer failed and $600,000 of debt
+stared them in the face, friends came forward and offered to raise money
+enough to allow him to arrange with his creditors.  "No," said he
+proudly, "this right hand shall work it all off; if we lose everything
+else, we will at least keep our honor unblemished."  What a grand picture
+of manliness, of integrity in this noble man, working like a dray-horse
+to cancel that great debt, throwing off at white heat the "Life of
+Napoleon," "Woodstock," "The Tales of a Grandfather," articles for the
+"Quarterly," and so on, all written in the midst of great sorrow, pain,
+and ruin.  "I could not have slept soundly," he writes, "as I now can
+under the comfortable impression of receiving the thanks of my creditors,
+and the conscious feeling of discharging my duty as a man of honesty.  I
+see before me a long, tedious, and dark path, but it leads to stainless
+reputation.  If I die in the harness, as is very likely, I shall die with
+honor."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the last things he uttered was, "I have been, perhaps, the most
+voluminous author of my day, and it is a comfort to me to think that I
+have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles,
+and that I have written nothing which, on my deathbed, I would wish
+blotted out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Although Agassiz refused to lecture even for a large sum of money, yet he
+left a greater legacy to the world, and left even more money to Harvard
+University ($300,000) than he would have left if he had taken the time to
+lecture for money.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Faraday had to choose between a fortune of nearly a million and a life of
+almost certain poverty if he pursued science.  He chose poverty and
+science, and earned a name never to be erased from the book of fame.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Beecher says that we are all building a soul-house for eternity; yet with
+what differing architecture and what various care!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What if a man should see his neighbor getting workmen and building
+materials together, and should say to him, "What are you building?" and
+he should answer, "I don't exactly know.  I am waiting to see what will
+come of it."  And so walls are reared, and room is added to room, while
+the man looks idly on, and all the bystanders exclaim, "What a fool he
+is!"  Yet this is the way many men are building their characters for
+eternity, adding room to room, without plan or aim, and thoughtlessly
+waiting to see what the effect will be.  Such builders will never dwell
+in "the house of God, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some people build as cathedrals are built, the part nearest the ground
+finished; but that part which soars towards heaven, the turrets and the
+spires, forever incomplete.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise&mdash;the head and heart are
+stuffed with goods.  Like those houses in the lower streets of cities
+which were once family dwellings, but are now used for commercial
+purposes, there are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by
+taste, and love, and joy, and worship; but they are all deserted now, and
+the rooms are filled with material things.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+WEALTH IN ECONOMY.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Economy is half the battle of life.&mdash;SPURGEON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and ease, and the
+beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health.&mdash;DR.
+JOHNSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's
+self?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+As much wisdom can be expended on a private economy as on an
+empire.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and
+little by little will multiply.&mdash;GOETHE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of
+what you have.&mdash;LATIN PROVERB.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Beware of little extravagances: a small leak will sink a big
+ship.&mdash;FRANKLIN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Better go to bed supperless than rise with debts.&mdash;GERMAN PROVERB.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough
+to get out of.&mdash;H. W. SHAW.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen
+pence a day; but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not
+suffice.&mdash;MACAULAY.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Economy, the poor man's mint.&mdash;TUPPER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing
+only lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is
+incurable.&mdash;SHAKESPEARE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate
+away on the chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision
+against the workhouse.&mdash;BULWER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Not for to hide it in a hedge,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Nor for a train attendant,</SPAN><BR>
+But for the glorious privilege<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Of being independent.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BURNS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"We shan't get much here," whispered a lady to her companion, as John
+Murray blew out one of the two candles by whose light he had been
+writing when they asked him to contribute to some benevolent object.
+He listened to their story and gave one hundred dollars.  "Mr. Murray,
+I am very agreeably surprised," said the lady quoted; "I did not expect
+to get a cent from you."  The old Quaker asked the reason for her
+opinion; and, when told, said, "That, ladies, is the reason I am able
+to let you have the hundred dollars.  It is by practicing economy that
+I save up money with which to do charitable actions.  One candle is
+enough to talk by."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-226"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-226.jpg" ALT="ALEXANDER HAMILTON" BORDER="2" WIDTH="375" HEIGHT="531">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 375px">
+ALEXANDER HAMILTON
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"The Moses of Colonial Finance."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Poverty is a condition which no man should accept, unless it is forced
+upon him as an inexorable necessity or as the alternative of dishonor."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"Comfort and independence abide with those who can postpone their
+desires."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Emerson relates the following anecdote: "An opulent merchant in Boston
+was called on by a friend in behalf of a charity.  At that time he was
+admonishing his clerk for using whole wafers instead of halves; his
+friend thought the circumstance unpropitious; but to his surprise, on
+listening to the appeal, the merchant subscribed five hundred dollars.
+The applicant expressed his astonishment that any person who was so
+particular about half a wafer should present five hundred dollars to a
+charity; but the merchant said, "It is by saving half wafers, and
+attending to such little things, that I have now something to give."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the
+shipowner.  "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one,
+by dint of exertion."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Four years from the time Marshall Field left the rocky New England farm
+to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm
+of Coaley, Farwell &amp; Co.  The only reason the modest young man gave, to
+explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor
+influence, was that he saved his money.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents
+every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he
+will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old.
+Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in
+fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars.  Even a
+saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give
+him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years
+of life.  "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the
+world with gifts even if he is poor.  In fact, the poor and the middle
+classes give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the
+poor.  Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own
+ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy.
+The miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it.
+A miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a
+quarter does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic
+of avarice.  Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should
+like some soup, but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying
+Ostervalde; "what is to become of that?  It will be a sad waste."  And
+so the rich Paris banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a
+broken latch on a farmyard gate.  Every one going through would shut
+the gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with
+every breeze.  One day a pig ran out into the woods.  Every one on the
+farm went to help get him back.  A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop
+the pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed
+for two weeks.  When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left
+to dry at the fire, was all badly scorched.  The dairymaid in her
+excitement left the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a
+colt.  The gardener lost several hours of valuable time.  Yet a new
+latch would not have cost five cents.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Guy, the London bookseller, and afterward the founder of the great
+hospital, was a great miser, living in the back part of his shop,
+eating upon an old bench, and using his counter for a table, with a
+newspaper for a cloth.  He did not marry.  One day he was visited by
+"Vulture" Hopkins, another well-known miser.  "What is your business?"
+asked Guy, lighting a candle.  "To discuss your methods of saving
+money," was the reply, alluding to the niggardly economy for which Guy
+was famous.  On learning Hopkins's business he blew out the light,
+saying, "We can do that in the dark."  "Sir, you are my master in the
+art," said the "Vulture;" "I need ask no further.  I see where your
+secret lies."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet that kind of economy which verges on the niggardly is better than
+the extravagance that laughs at it.  Either, when carried to excess, is
+not only apt to cause misery, but to ruin the character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lay by something for a rainy day," said a gentleman to an Irishman in
+his service.  Not long afterwards he asked Patrick how much he had
+added to his store.  "Faith, nothing at all," was the reply; "I did as
+you bid me, but it rained very hard yesterday, and it all went&mdash;in
+drink."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Wealth, a monster gorged<BR>
+'Mid starving populations."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But nowhere and at no period were these contrasts more startling than
+in Imperial Rome.  There a whole population might be trembling lest
+they should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn-ship, while
+the upper classes were squandering fortunes at a single banquet,
+drinking out of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds,
+and feasting on the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales.
+As a consequence, disease was rife, men were short-lived.  At this time
+the dress of Roman ladies displayed an unheard-of splendor.  The elder
+Pliny tells us that he himself saw Lollia Paulina dressed for a
+betrothal feast in a robe entirely covered with pearls and emeralds,
+which had cost 40,000,000 sesterces, and which was known to be less
+costly than some of her other dresses.  Gluttony, caprice,
+extravagance, ostentation, impurity, rioted in the heart of a society
+which knew of no other means by which to break the monotony of its
+weariness or alleviate the anguish of its despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The expense ridiculously bestowed on the Roman feasts passes all
+belief.  Suetonius mentions a supper given to Vitellius by his brother,
+in which, among other articles, there were two thousand of the choicest
+fishes, seven thousand of the most delicate birds, and one dish, from
+its size and capacity, named the aegis or shield of Minerva.  It was
+filled chiefly with the liver of the scari, a delicate species of fish,
+the brains of pheasants and peacocks, and the tongues of parrots,
+considered desirable chiefly because of their great cost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hope that there will not be another sale," exclaimed Horace Walpole,
+"for I have not an inch of room nor a farthing left."  A woman once
+bought an old door-plate with "Thompson" on it because she thought it
+might come in handy some time.  The habit of buying what you don't need
+because it is cheap encourages extravagance.  "Many have been ruined by
+buying good pennyworths."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where there is no prudence," said Dr. Johnson, "there is no virtue."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The eccentric John Randolph once sprang from his seat in the House of
+Representatives, and exclaimed in his piercing voice, "Mr. Speaker, I
+have found it."  And then, in the stillness which followed this strange
+outburst, he added, "I have found the Philosopher's Stone: it is <I>Pay
+as you go</I>."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a young man seems to think that when he sees his name on a sign he
+is on the highway to fortune, and he begins to live on a scale as
+though there was no possible chance of failure; as though he were
+already beyond the danger point.  Unfortunately Congress can pass no
+law that will remedy the vice of living beyond one's means.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The prosperity of fools shall destroy them."  "However easy it may be
+to make money," said Barnum, "it is the most difficult thing in the
+world to keep it."  Money often makes the mare&mdash;run away with you.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Very few men know how to use money properly.  They can earn it, lavish
+it, hoard it, waste it, but to deal with it <I>wisely</I>, as a means to an
+end, is an education difficult of acquirement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After a large stained-glass window had been constructed an artist
+picked up the discarded fragments and made one of the most exquisite
+windows in Europe for another cathedral.  So one boy will pick up a
+splendid education out of the odds and ends of time which others
+carelessly throw away, or gain a fortune by saving what others waste.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has become a part of the new political economy to argue that a debt
+on a church or a house or a firm is a desirable thing to develop
+character.  When the young man starts out in life with the
+old-fashioned idea strong in his mind that debt is bondage and a
+disgrace, that a mortgage is to be shunned like the cholera, and that
+to owe a dollar that you cannot pay, unless overtaken by misfortune, is
+nothing more or less than stealing, then he is bound in so much at
+least to succeed, and save his old age from being a burden upon his
+friends or the state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To do your best you must own every bit of yourself.  If you are in
+debt, part of you belongs to your creditors.  Nothing but actual sin is
+so paralyzing to a young man's energies as debt.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The "loose change" which many young men throw away carelessly, or
+worse, would often form the basis of a fortune and independence.  The
+earnings of the people of the United States, rich and poor, old and
+young, male and female, amount to an average of less than fifty cents a
+day.  But it is by economizing such savings that one must get his start
+in business.  The man without a penny is practically helpless, from a
+business point of view, except so far as he can immediately utilize his
+powers of body and mind.  Besides, when a man or woman is driven to the
+wall, the chance of goodness surviving self-respect and the loss of
+public esteem is frightfully diminished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Money goes as it comes."  "A child and a fool imagine that twenty
+years and twenty shillings can never be spent."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Live between extravagance and meanness.  Don't save money and starve
+your mind.  "The very secret and essence of thrift consists in getting
+things into higher values.  Spend upward, that is, for the higher
+faculties.  Spend for the mind rather than for the body, for culture
+rather than for amusement.  Some young men are too stingy to buy the
+daily papers, and are very ignorant and narrow."  "There is that
+withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty."  "Don't
+squeeze out of your life and comfort and family what you save."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Liberal, not lavish, is Nature's hand.  Even God, it is said, cannot
+afford to be extravagant.  When He increased the loaves and fishes, He
+commanded to gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nature uses a grinding economy," says Emerson, "working up all that is
+wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of
+sand for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.
+She flung us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair or a paring
+of a nail but instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates it
+to her general stock."  Last summer's flowers and foliage decayed in
+autumn only to enrich the earth this year for other forms of beauty.
+Nature will not even wait for our friends to see us, unless we die at
+home.  The moment the breath has left the body she begins to take us to
+pieces, that the parts may be used again for other creations.  Mark the
+following contrast:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<PRE STYLE="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 10pt">
+1772.                              1822.
+Man, to the plow;                  Man, tally-ho;
+Wife, to the cow;                  Wife, piano;
+Girl, to the sow;                  Miss, silk and satin;
+Boy, to the mow;                   Boy, Greek and Latin;
+And your rents will be netted.     And you'll all be gazetted.
+        <I>Hone's Works.</I>                      <I>The Times.</I>
+</PRE>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+More than a lifetime has elapsed since the above was published, but
+instead of returning to the style of 1772, our farmers have out-Heroded
+Herod in the direction of the fashion, of 1822, and many a farmhouse,
+like the home of Artemas [Transcriber's note: Artemus?] Ward, may be
+known by the cupola and the mortgage with which it is decorated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is by the mysterious power of economy, it has been said, that the
+loaf is multiplied, that using does not waste, that little becomes
+much, that scattered fragments grow to unity, and that out of nothing
+or next to nothing comes the miracle of something.  It is not merely
+saving, still less, parsimony.  It is foresight and arrangement,
+insight and combination, causing inert things to labor, useless things
+to serve our necessities, perishing things to renew their vigor, and
+all things to exert themselves for human comfort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+English working men and women work very hard, seldom take a holiday,
+and though they get nearly double the wages of the same classes in
+France, yet save very little.  The millions earned by them slip out of
+their hands almost as soon as obtained to satisfy the pleasures of the
+moment.  In France every housekeeper is taught the art of making much
+out of little.  "I am simply astonished," writes an American lady
+stopping in France, "at the number of good wholesome dishes which my
+friend here makes for her table from things, which at home, I always
+throw away.  Dainty little dishes from scraps of cold meat, from hard
+crusts of bread, delicately prepared and seasoned, from almost
+everything and nothing.  And yet there is no feeling of stinginess or
+want."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wish I could write all across the sky, in letters of gold," says
+Rev. William Marsh, "the one word, savings-bank."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Boston savings-banks have $130,000,000 on deposit, mostly saved in
+driblets.  Josiah Quincy used to say that the servant girls built most
+of the palaces on Beacon Street.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer.
+"With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at
+least have 'my crust of bread and liberty.'  But with five thousand
+pounds a year I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical
+master in servants whose wages I cannot pay; my exile may be at the
+fiat of the first long-suffering man who enters a judgment against me;
+for the flesh that lies nearest my heart some Shylock may be dusting
+his scales and whetting his knife.  Every man is needy who spends more
+than he has; no man is needy who spends less.  I may so ill manage,
+that with five thousand pounds a year I purchase the worst evils of
+poverty,&mdash;terror and shame; I may so well manage my money, that with
+one hundred pounds a year I purchase the best blessings of
+wealth,&mdash;safety and respect."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Edmund Burke, speaking on Economic Reform, quoted from Cicero: "Magnum
+vectigal est parsimonia," accenting the second word on the first
+syllable.  Lord North whispered a correction, when Burke turned the
+mistake to advantage.  "The noble lord hints that I have erred in the
+quantity of a principal word in my quotation; I rejoice at it, sir,
+because it gives me an opportunity of repeating the inestimable
+adage,&mdash;'Magnum vectigal est parsimonia.'"  The sentiment, meaning
+"Thrift is a good income," is well worthy of emphatic repetition by us
+all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Washington examined the minutest expenditures of his family, even when
+President of the United States.  He understood that without economy
+none can be rich, and with it none need be poor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I make a point of paying my own bills," said Wellington.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Jacob Astor said that the first thousand dollars cost him more
+effort than all of his millions.  Boys who are careless with their
+dimes and quarters, just because they have so few, never get this first
+thousand, and without it no fortune is possible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To find out uses for the persons or things which are now wasted in life
+is to be the glorious work of the men of the next generation, and that
+which will contribute most to their enrichment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Economizing "in spots" or by freaks is no economy at all.  It must be
+done by management.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Learn early in life to say "I can't afford it."  It is an indication of
+power and courage and manliness.  Dr. Franklin said, "It is not our own
+eyes, but other people's, that ruin us."  "Fashion wears out more
+apparel than the man," says Shakespeare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of what a hideous progeny of ill is debt the father," said Douglas
+Jerrold.  "What meanness, what invasions of self-respect, what cares,
+what double-dealing!  How in due season it will carve the frank, open
+face into wrinkles; how like a knife it will stab the honest heart.
+And then its transformations,&mdash;how it has been known to change a goodly
+face into a mask of brass; how with the evil custom of debt has the
+true man become a callous trickster!  A freedom from debt, and what
+nourishing sweetness may be found in cold water; what toothsomeness in
+a dry crust; what ambrosial nourishment in a hard egg!  Be sure of it,
+he who dines out of debt, though his meal be a biscuit and an onion,
+dines in 'The Apollo.'  And then, for raiment, what warmth in a
+threadbare coat, if the tailor's receipt be in your pocket!  What
+Tyrian purple in the faded waistcoat, the vest not owed for; how glossy
+the well-worn hat, if it covers not the aching head of a debtor!  Next,
+the home sweets, the outdoor recreation of the free man.  The street
+door falls not a knell in his heart, the foot on the staircase, though
+he lives on the third pair, sends no spasm through his anatomy; at the
+rap of his door he can crow 'come in,' and his pulse still beats
+healthfully.  See him abroad!  How he returns look for look with any
+passenger.  Poverty is a bitter draught, yet may, and sometimes can
+with advantage, be gulped down.  Though the drinker makes wry faces,
+there may, after all, be a wholesome goodness in the cup.  But debt,
+however courteously it may be offered, is the Cup of Siren; and the
+wine, spiced and delicious though it be, is poison.  My son, if poor,
+see Hyson in the running spring; see thy mouth water at a last week's
+roll; think a threadbare coat the only wear; and acknowledge a
+whitewashed garret the fittest housing-place for a gentleman; do this,
+and flee debt.  So shall thy heart be at rest, and the sheriff
+confounded."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men to the extent of that
+sixpence," says Carlyle; "commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to
+teach him, kings to mount guard over him,&mdash;to the extent of that
+sixpence."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If a man owes you a dollar, he is almost sure to owe you a grudge, too.
+If you owe another money, you will be apt to regard him with
+uncharitable eyes.  Why not economize before getting into debt instead
+of pinching afterwards?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Communities which live wholly from hand to mouth never make much
+progress in the useful arts.  Savings mean power.  <I>Comfort and
+independence abide with those who can postpone their desires.</I>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach,
+are disagreeable," says Horace Greeley, "but debt is infinitely worse
+than them all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a ruined man dates his downfall from the day when he began
+borrowing money.  Debt demoralized Daniel Webster, and Theodore Hook,
+and Sheridan, and Fox, and Pitt.  Mirabeau's life was made wretched by
+duns.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Annual income," says Micawber, "twenty pounds; annual expenditure,
+nineteen six, result&mdash;happiness.  Annual income, twenty pounds; annual
+expenditure, twenty pounds ought and six, result&mdash;misery."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are ruined," says Colton, "not by what we really want, but by what
+we think we do.  Therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if
+they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that
+buys what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The honorable course is to give every man his due.  It is better to
+starve than not to do this.  It is better to do a small business on a
+cash basis than a large one on credit.  <I>Owe no man anything</I>, wrote
+St. Paul.  It is a good motto to place in every purse, in every
+counting-room, in every church, in every home.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Economy is of itself a great revenue.&mdash;CICERO.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RICH WITHOUT MONEY.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Let others plead for pensions; I can be rich without money, by
+endeavoring to be superior to everything poor.  I would have my
+services to my country unstained by any interested motive.&mdash;LORD
+COLLINGWOOD.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,<BR>
+Where wealth accumulates and men decay.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">GOLDSMITH.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; to be
+without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; sunlight
+is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who choose.&mdash;HELEN
+HUNT.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that
+he is rich in my presence.  I ought to make him feel that I can do
+without his riches, that I cannot be bought,&mdash;neither by comfort,
+neither by pride,&mdash;and although I be utterly penniless, and receiving
+bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of
+riches.&mdash;CICERO.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+There is no riches above a sound body and no joy above the joy of the
+heart.&mdash;ECCLESIASTES.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Where, thy true treasure?  Gold says, "Not in me;"<BR>
+And "Not in me," the Diamond.  Gold is poor;<BR>
+India's insolvent: seek it in thyself.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">YOUNG.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth
+of nature.&mdash;SOCRATES.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+A great heart in a little house is of all things here below that which
+has ever touched me most.&mdash;LACORDAIRE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+My crown is in my heart, not on my head,<BR>
+Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones,<BR>
+Nor to be seen: my crown is called content;<BR>
+A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEAKE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Many a man is rich without money.  Thousands of men with nothing in
+their pockets, and thousands without even a pocket, are rich.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-238"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-238.jpg" ALT="RALPH WALDO EMERSON" BORDER="2" WIDTH="363" HEIGHT="522">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 363px">
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="caption" ALIGN="center">
+"The Sage of Concord."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"I revere the person who is riches: so I cannot think of him as alone,
+or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A man born with a good, sound constitution, a good stomach, a good
+heart and good limbs, and a pretty good headpiece, is rich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Good bones are better than gold, tough muscles than silver, and nerves
+that carry energy to every function are better than houses and land.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Heart-life, soul-life, hope, joy, and love, are true riches," said
+Beecher.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Why should I scramble and struggle to get possession of a little
+portion of this earth?  This is my world now; why should I envy others
+its mere legal possession?  It belongs to him who can see it, enjoy it.
+I need not envy the so-called owners of estates in Boston and New York.
+They are merely taking care of my property and keeping it in excellent
+condition for me.  For a few pennies for railroad fare whenever I wish
+I can see and possess the best of it all.  It has cost me no effort, it
+gives me no care; yet the green grass, the shrubbery, and the statues
+on the lawns, the finer sculptures and the paintings within, are always
+ready for me whenever I feel a desire to look upon them.  I do not wish
+to carry them home with me, for I could not give them half the care
+they now receive; besides, it would take too much of my valuable time,
+and I should be worrying continually lest they be spoiled or stolen.  I
+have much of the wealth of the world now.  It is all prepared for me
+without any pains on my part.  All around me are working hard to get
+things that will please me, and competing to see who can give them the
+cheapest.  The little I pay for the use of libraries, railroads,
+galleries, parks, is less than it would cost to care for the least of
+all I use.  Life and landscape are mine, the stars and flowers, the sea
+and air, the birds and trees.  What more do I want?  All the ages have
+been working for me; all mankind are my servants.  I am only required
+to feed and clothe myself, an easy task in this land of opportunity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A millionaire pays thousands of pounds for a gallery of paintings, and
+some poor boy or girl comes in, with open mind and poetic fancy, and
+carries away a treasure of beauty which the owner never saw.  A
+collector bought at public auction in London, for one hundred and
+fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a
+schoolboy can read and absorb the riches of "Hamlet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Why should I waste my abilities pursuing this will-o'-the-wisp
+"Enough," which is ever a little more than one has, and which none of
+the panting millions ever yet overtook in his mad chase?  Is there no
+desirable thing left in this world but gold, luxury, and ease?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough
+to cover."  "A man may as soon fill a chest with grace, or a vessel
+with virtue," says Phillips Brooks, "as a heart with wealth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shall we seek happiness through the sense of taste or of touch?  Shall
+we idolize our stomachs and our backs?  Have we no higher missions, no
+nobler destinies?  Shall we "disgrace the fair day by a pusillanimous
+preference of our bread to our freedom"?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the three great "Banquets" of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch the food
+is not even mentioned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What does your money say to you: what message does it bring to you?
+Does it say to you, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die"?
+Does it bring a message of comfort, of education, of culture, of
+travel, of books, of an opportunity to help your fellow-man, or is the
+message "More land, more thousands and millions"?  What message does it
+bring you?  Clothes for the naked, bread for the starving, schools for
+the ignorant, hospitals for the sick, asylums for the orphans, or of
+more for yourself and none for others?  Is it a message of generosity
+or of meanness, breadth or narrowness?  Does it speak to you of
+character?  Does it mean a broader manhood, a larger aim, a nobler
+ambition, or does it cry "More, more, more"?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Are you an animal loaded with ingots, or a man filled with a purpose?
+He is rich whose mind is rich, whose thought enriches the intellect of
+the world.  It is a sad sight to see a soul which thirsts not for truth
+or beauty or the good.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A sailor on a sinking vessel in the Caribbean Sea eagerly filled his
+pockets with Spanish dollars from a barrel on board while his
+companions, about to leave in the only boat, begged him to seek safety
+with them.  But he could not leave the bright metal which he had so
+longed for and idolized, and was prevented from reaching shore by his
+very riches, when the vessel went down.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is the richest of men," asked Socrates?  "He who is content with
+the least, for contentment is nature's riches."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In More's "Utopia" gold was despised.  Criminals were forced to wear
+heavy chains of it, and to have rings of it in their ears; it was put
+to the vilest uses to keep up the scorn of it.  Bad characters were
+compelled to wear gold head-bands.  Diamonds and pearls were used to
+decorate infants, so that the youth would discard and despise them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ah, if the rich were as rich as the poor fancy riches!" exclaims
+Emerson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a rich man has died in the poorhouse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In excavating Pompeii a skeleton was found with the fingers clenched
+round a quantity of gold.  A man of business in the town of Hull,
+England, when dying, pulled a bag of money from under his pillow, which
+he held between his clenched fingers with a grasp so firm as scarcely
+to relax under the agonies of death.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Oh! blind and wanting wit to choose,<BR>
+Who house the chaff and burn the grain;<BR>
+Who hug the wealth ye cannot use,<BR>
+And lack the riches all may gain.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">WILLIAM WATSON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Poverty is the want of much, avarice the want of everything.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A poor man was met by a stranger while scoffing at the wealthy for not
+enjoying themselves.  The stranger gave him a purse, in which he was
+always to find a ducat.  As fast as he took one out another was to drop
+in, but he was not to begin to spend his fortune until he had thrown
+away the purse.  He takes ducat after ducat out, but continually
+procrastinates and puts off the hour of enjoyment until he has got "a
+little more," and dies at last counting his millions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A beggar was once met by Fortune, who promised to fill his wallet with
+gold, as much as he might please, on condition that whatever touched
+the ground should turn at once to dust.  The beggar opens his wallet,
+asks for more and yet more, until the bag bursts.  The gold falls to
+the ground, and all is lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the steamer Central America was about to sink, the stewardess,
+having collected all the gold she could from the staterooms, and tied
+it in her apron, jumped for the last boat leaving the steamer.  She
+missed her aim and fell into the water, the gold carrying her down head
+first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the year 1843 a rich miser lived in Padua, who was so mean and
+sordid that he would never give a cent to any person or object, and he
+was so afraid of the banks that he would not deposit with them, but
+would sit up nights with sword and pistol by him to guard his idol
+hoard.  When his health gave way from anxiety and watching he built an
+underground treasure-chamber, so arranged that if any burglar ever
+entered, he would step upon a spring which would precipitate him into a
+subterranean river, where he could neither escape nor be heard.  One
+night the miser went to his chest to see that all was right, when his
+foot touched the spring of the trap, and he was hurled into the deep,
+hidden stream.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One would think," said Boswell, "that the proprietor of all this
+(Keddlestone, the seat of Lord Scarsfield) must be happy."  "Nay, sir,"
+said Johnson, "all this excludes but one evil, poverty."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+John Duncan, the illegitimate child of a Scottish weaver, was ignorant,
+near-sighted, bent, a miserable apology for a human being, and at last
+a pauper.  If he went upon the street he would sometimes be stoned by
+other boys.  The farmer, for whom he watched cattle, was cruel to him,
+and after a rainy day would send him cold and wet to sleep on a
+miserable bed in a dark outhouse.  Here he would empty the water from
+his shoes, and wring out his wet clothes and sleep as best he might.
+But the boy had a desire to learn to read, and when, a little later, he
+was put to weaving, he persuaded a schoolgirl, twelve years old, to
+teach him.  He was sixteen when he learned the alphabet, after which
+his progress was quite rapid.  He was very fond of plants, and worked
+overtime for several months to earn five shillings to buy a book on
+botany.  He became a good botanist, and such was his interest in the
+study that at the age of eighty he walked twelve miles to obtain a new
+specimen.  A man whom he met became interested at finding such a
+well-stored mind in such a miserable body, poorly clad, and published
+an account of his career.  Many readers sent him money, but he saved
+it, and left it in his will to found eight scholarships and offer
+prizes for the encouragement of the study of natural science by the
+poor.  His small but valuable library was left for a similar use.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Franklin said money never made a man happy yet; there is nothing in its
+nature to produce happiness.  The more a man has, the more he wants.
+Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.  A great bank account can
+never make a man rich.  It is the mind that makes the body rich.  No
+man is rich, however much money or land he may possess, who has a poor
+heart.  If that is poor, he is poor indeed, though he own and rule
+kingdoms.  He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to
+what he has.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who would not choose to be a millionaire of deeds with a Lincoln, a
+Grant, a Florence Nightingale, a Childs; a millionaire of ideas with
+Emerson, with Lowell, with Shakespeare, with Wordsworth; a millionaire
+of statesmanship with a Gladstone, a Bright, a Sumner, a Washington?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some men are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial
+temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a
+shipload of ordinary men.  Others are rich in disposition, family, and
+friends.  There are some men so amiable that everybody loves them; some
+so cheerful that they carry an atmosphere of jollity about them.  Some
+are rich in integrity and character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the first great lessons of life is to learn the true estimate of
+values.  As the youth starts out in his career, all sorts of wares will
+be imposed upon him, and all kinds of temptations will be used to
+induce him to buy.  His success will depend very largely upon his
+ability to estimate properly, not the apparent but the real value of
+everything presented to him.  Vulgar Wealth will flaunt her banner
+before his eyes, and claim supremacy over everything else.  A thousand
+different schemes will be thrust into his face with their claims for
+superiority.  Every occupation and vocation will present its charms in
+turn, and offer its inducements.  The youth who would succeed must not
+allow himself to be deceived by appearances, but must place the
+emphasis of life where it belongs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No man, it is said, can read the works of John Ruskin without learning
+that his sources of pleasure are well-nigh infinite.  There is not a
+flower, nor a cloud, nor a tree, nor a mountain, nor a star; not a bird
+that fans the air, nor a creature that walks the earth; not a glimpse
+of sea or sky or meadow-greenery; not a work of worthy art in the
+domains of painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture; not a thought
+of God as the Great Spirit presiding over and informing all things,
+that is not to him a source of the sweetest pleasure.  The whole world
+of matter and of spirit and the long record of human art are open to
+him as the never-failing fountains of his delight.  In these pure
+realms he seeks his daily food and has his daily life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is now and then a man who sees beauty and true riches everywhere,
+and "worships the splendor of God which he sees bursting through each
+chink and cranny."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Phillips Brooks, Thoreau, Garrison, Emerson, Beecher, Agassiz, were
+rich without money.  They saw the splendor in the flower, the glory in
+the grass, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything.  They knew that the man who owns the landscape is seldom
+the one who pays the taxes on it.  They sucked in power and wealth at
+first hands from the meadows, fields, and flowers, birds, brooks,
+mountains, and forest, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers.  Every
+natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great
+Author of the beautiful.  To these rare souls every natural object was
+touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drank it in as a
+traveler on a desert drinks in the god-sent water of the oasis.  To
+extract power and real wealth from men and things seemed to be their
+mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsty
+humanity.  They believed that man's most important food does not enter
+by the mouth.  They knew that man could not live by estates, dollars,
+and bread alone, and that if he could he would only be an animal.  They
+believed that the higher life demands a higher food.  They believed in
+man's unlimited power of expansion, and that this growth demands a more
+highly organized food product than that which merely sustains animal
+life.  They saw a finer nutriment in the landscape, in the meadows,
+than could be ground into flour, and which escaped the loaf.  They felt
+a sentiment in natural objects which pointed upward, ever upward to the
+Author, and which was capable of feeding and expanding the higher life
+until it should grow into a finer sympathy and fellowship with the
+Author of the beautiful.  They believed that the Creation thunders the
+ten commandments, and that all Nature is tugging at the terms of every
+contract to make it just.  They could feel this finer sentiment, this
+soul lifter, this man inspirer, in the growing grain, in the waving
+corn, in the golden harvest.  They saw it reflected in every brook, in
+every star, in every flower, in every dewdrop.  They believed that
+Nature together with human nature were man's great schoolmasters, that
+if rightly used they would carve his rough life into beauty and touch
+his rude manner with grace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"More servants wait on man than he'll take notice of."  But if he would
+enjoy Nature he must come to it from a higher level than the yardstick.
+He must bring a spirit as grand and sublime as that by which the thing
+itself exists.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We all live on far lower levels than we need to do.  We linger in the
+misty and oppressive valleys, when we might be climbing the sunlit
+hills.  God puts into our hands the Book of Life, bright on every page
+with open secrets, and we suffer it to drop out of our hands unread.
+Emerson says, "We have come into a world which is a living poem.
+Everything is as I am."  Nature provides for us a perpetual festival;
+she is bright to the bright, comforting to those who will accept
+comfort.  We cannot conceive how a universe could possibly be created
+which could devise more efficient methods or greater opportunities for
+the delight, the happiness, and the real wealth of human beings than
+the one we live in.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The human body is packed full of marvelous devices, of wonderful
+contrivances, of infinite possibilities for the happiness and riches of
+the individual.  No physiologist nor scientist has ever yet been able
+to point out a single improvement, even in the minutest detail, in the
+structure of the human body.  No inventor has ever yet been able to
+suggest an improvement in this human mechanism.  No chemist has ever
+been able to suggest a superior combination in any one of the elements
+which make up the human structure.  One of the first things to do in
+life is to learn the natural wealth of our surroundings, instead of
+bemoaning our lot, for, no matter where we are placed, there is
+infinitely more about us than we can ever understand, than we can ever
+exhaust the meaning of.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank Heaven there are still some Matthew Arnolds who prefer the
+heavenly sweetness of light to the Eden of riches."  Arnold left only a
+few thousand dollars, but yet was he not one of the richest of men?
+What the world wants is young men who will amass golden thoughts,
+golden wisdom, golden deeds, not mere golden dollars; young men who
+prefer to have thought-capital, character-capital, to cash-capital.  He
+who estimates his money the highest values himself the least.  "I
+revere the person," says Emerson, "who is riches; so that I cannot
+think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Raphael was rich without money.  All doors opened to him, and he was
+more than welcome everywhere.  His sweet spirit radiated sunshine
+wherever he went.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Henry Wilson was rich without money.  So scrupulous had he been not to
+make his exalted position a means of worldly gain, that when this
+Natick cobbler, the sworn friend of the oppressed, whose one question
+as to measures or acts was ever "Is it right; will it do good?" came to
+be inaugurated as Vice-President of the country, he was obliged to
+borrow of his fellow-senator, Charles Sumner, one hundred dollars to
+meet the necessary expenses of the occasion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mozart, the great composer of the "Requiem," left barely enough money
+to bury him, but he has made the world richer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A rich mind and noble spirit will cast a radiance of beauty over the
+humblest home, which the upholsterer and decorator can never approach.
+Who would not prefer to be a millionaire of character, of contentment,
+rather than possess nothing but the vulgar coins of a Croesus?  Whoever
+uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future
+generations will erect his monument.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Are we tender, loving, self-denying, and honest, trying to fashion our
+frail life after that of the model man of Nazareth?  Then, though our
+pockets are often empty, we have an inheritance which is as
+overwhelmingly precious as it is eternally incorruptible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An Asiatic traveler tells us that one day he found the bodies of two
+men laid upon the desert sand beside the carcass of a camel.  They had
+evidently died from thirst, and yet around the waist of each was a
+large store of jewels of different kinds, which they had doubtless been
+crossing the desert to sell in the markets of Persia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is
+poorer than he.  He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he who
+is covetous is poor though he have millions.  There are riches of
+intellect, and no man with an intellectual taste can be called poor.
+He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by
+changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in
+fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
+He is rich as well as brave who can face poverty and misfortune with
+cheerfulness and courage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We can so educate the will power that it will focus the thoughts upon
+the bright side of things, and upon objects which elevate the soul,
+thus forming a habit of happiness and goodness which will make us rich.
+The habit of making the best of everything and of always looking on the
+bright side of everything is a fortune in itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He is rich who values a good name above gold.  Among the ancient Greeks
+and Romans honor was more sought after than wealth.  Rome was imperial
+Rome no more when the imperial purple became an article of traffic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the evil of trade, as well as of partisan politics.  As Emerson
+remarks, it would put everything into market,&mdash;talent, beauty, virtue,
+and man himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave.  His purchaser
+released him, and gave him charge of his household and of the education
+of his children.  He despised wealth and affectation, and lived in a
+tub.  "Do you want anything?" asked Alexander the Great, forcibly
+impressed by the abounding cheerfulness of the philosopher under such
+circumstances.  "Yes," replied Diogenes, "I want you to stand out of my
+sunshine and not to take from me what you cannot give me."  "Were I not
+Alexander," exclaimed the great conqueror, "I would be Diogenes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Brave and honest men do not work for gold.  They work for love, for
+honor, for character.  When Socrates suffered death rather than abandon
+his views of right morality, when Las Casas endeavored to mitigate the
+tortures of the poor Indians, they had no thought of money or country.
+They worked for the elevation of all that thought, and for the relief
+of all that suffered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't want such things," said Epictetus to the rich Roman orator who
+was making light of his contempt for money-wealth; "and besides," said
+the stoic, "you are poorer than I am, after all.  You have silver
+vessels, but earthenware reasons, principles, appetites.  My mind to me
+a kingdom is, and it furnishes me with abundant and happy occupation in
+lieu of your restless idleness.  All your possessions seem small to
+you; mine seem great to me.  Your desire is insatiate, mine is
+satisfied."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you know, sir," said a devotee of Mammon to John Bright, "that I am
+worth a million sterling?"  "Yes," said the irritated but calm-spirited
+respondent, "I do; and I know that it is all you are worth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A bankrupt merchant, returning home one night, said to his noble wife,
+"My dear, I am ruined; everything we have is in the hands of the
+sheriff."  After a few moments of silence the wife looked into his face
+and asked, "Will the sheriff sell you?"  "Oh, no."  "Will the sheriff
+sell me?"  "Oh, no."  "Then do not say we have lost everything.  All
+that is most valuable remains to us,&mdash;manhood, womanhood, childhood.
+We have lost but the results of our skill and industry.  We can make
+another fortune if our hearts and hands are left us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating
+with a consciousness of untold riches of head and heart?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Paul was never so great as when he occupied a prison cell; and Jesus
+Christ reached the height of his success when, smitten, spat upon,
+tormented, and crucified, He cried in agony, and yet with triumphant
+satisfaction, "It is finished."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Character before wealth," was the motto of Amos Lawrence, who had
+inscribed on his pocket-book, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall
+gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If you make a fortune let every dollar of it be clean.  You do not want
+to see in it drunkards reel, orphans weep, widows moan.  Your riches
+must not make others poorer and more wretched.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Alexander the Great wandered to the gates of Paradise, and knocked for
+entrance.  "Who knocks?" demanded the guardian angel.  "Alexander."
+"Who is Alexander?"  "Alexander,&mdash;the Alexander,&mdash;Alexander the
+Great,&mdash;the conqueror of the world."  "We know him not," replied the
+angel; "this is the Lord's gate; only the righteous enter here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Don't start out in life with a false standard; a truly great man makes
+official position and money and houses and estates look so tawdry, so
+mean and poor, that we feel like sinking out of sight with our cheap
+laurels and gold.  <I>Millions look trifling beside character</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A friend of Professor Agassiz, an eminent practical man, once expressed
+his wonder that a man of such abilities should remain contented with
+such a moderate income as he received.  "I have enough," was Agassiz's
+reply.  "I have no time to waste in making money.  Life is not
+sufficiently long to enable a man to get rich and do his duty to his
+fellow-men at the same time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How were the thousands of business men who lost every dollar they had
+in the Chicago fire enabled to go into business at once, some into
+wholesale business, without money?  Their record was their bank
+account.  The commercial agencies said they were square men; that they
+had always paid one hundred cents on a dollar; that they had paid
+promptly, and that they were industrious and dealt honorably with all
+men.  This record was as good as a bank account.  <I>They drew on their
+character</I>.  Character was the coin which enabled penniless men to buy
+thousands of dollars' worth of goods.  Their integrity did not burn up
+with their stores.  The best part of them was beyond the reach of fire
+and could not be burned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What are the toil-sweated productions of wealth piled up in vast
+profusion around a Girard, or a Rothschild, when weighed against the
+stores of wisdom, the treasures of knowledge, and the strength, beauty,
+and glory with which victorious virtue has enriched and adorned a great
+multitude of minds during the march of a hundred generations?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lord, how many things are in the world of which Diogenes hath no
+need!" exclaimed the stoic, as he wandered among the miscellaneous
+articles at a country fair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There are treasures laid up in the heart&mdash;treasures of charity, piety,
+temperance, and soberness.  These treasures a man takes with him beyond
+death when he leaves this world."  (Buddhist Scriptures.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Is it any wonder that our children start out with wrong ideals of life,
+with wrong ideas of what constitutes success?  The child is "urged to
+get on," to "rise in the world," to "make money."  The youth is
+constantly told that nothing succeeds like success.  False standards
+are everywhere set up for him, and then the boy is blamed if he makes a
+failure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is all very well to urge youth on to success, but the great mass of
+mankind can never reach or even approximate the goal constantly
+preached to them, nor can we all be rich.  One of the great lessons to
+teach in this century of sharp competition and the survival of the
+fittest is how to be rich without money, and to learn how to do without
+success, according to the popular standard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gold cannot make the miser rich, nor can the want of it make the beggar
+poor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the poem, "The Changed Cross," a weary woman is represented as
+dreaming that she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of
+divers shapes and sizes.  The most beautiful one was set in jewels of
+gold.  It was so tiny and exquisite that she changed her own plain
+cross for it, thinking she was fortunate in finding one so much lighter
+and lovelier.  But soon her back began to ache under the glittering
+burden, and she changed it for another cross very beautiful and
+entwined with flowers.  But she soon found that underneath the flowers
+were piercing thorns which tore her flesh.  At last she came to a very
+plain cross without jewels, without carving, and with only the word,
+"Love," inscribed upon it.  She took this one up and it proved the
+easiest and best of all.  She was amazed, however, to find that it was
+her old cross which she had discarded.  It is easy to see the jewels
+and the flowers in other people's crosses, but the thorns and heavy
+weight are known only to the bearers.  How easy other people's burdens
+seem to us compared with our own.  We do not appreciate the secret
+burdens which almost crush the heart, nor the years of weary waiting
+for delayed success&mdash;the aching hearts longing for sympathy, the hidden
+poverty, the suppressed emotion in other lives.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+William Pitt, the great Commoner, considered money as dirt beneath his
+feet compared with the public interest and public esteem.  His hands
+were clean.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The object for which we strive tells the story of our lives.  Men and
+women should be judged by the happiness they create in those around
+them.  Noble deeds always enrich, but millions of mere money may
+impoverish.  <I>Character is perpetual wealth</I>, and by the side of him
+who possesses it the millionaire who has it not seems a pauper.
+Compared with it, what are houses and lands, stocks and bonds?  "It is
+better that great souls should live in small habitations than that
+abject slaves should burrow in great houses."  Plain living, rich
+thought, and grand effort are real riches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Invest in yourself, and you will never be poor.  Floods cannot carry
+your wealth away, fire cannot burn it, rust cannot consume it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If a man empties his purse into his head," says Franklin, "no man can
+take it from him.  An investment in knowledge always pays the best
+interest."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is a cunning juggle in riches.  I observe," says Emerson, "that
+they take somewhat for everything they give.  I look bigger, but I am
+less, I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but less
+courage; more books, but less wit."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Howe'er it be, it seems to me,<BR>
+'T is only noble to be good.<BR>
+Kind hearts are more than coronets,<BR>
+And simple faith than Norman blood.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">TENNYSON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+To each man's life there comes a time supreme;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">One day, one night, one morning, or one noon,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">One freighted hour, one moment opportune,</SPAN><BR>
+One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam,<BR>
+One space when fate goes tiding with the stream,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And ready for the passing instant's boon</SPAN><BR>
+To tip in favor the uncertain beam.<BR>
+Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Knows also how to watch and work and stand</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">On Life's broad deck alert, and at the prow</SPAN><BR>
+To seize the passing moment, big with fate,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">From opportunity's extended hand,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">When the great clock of destiny strikes Now!</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">MARY A. TOWNSEND.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,<BR>
+In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">LOWELL.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+What is opportunity to a man who can't use it?  An unfecundated egg,
+which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.&mdash;GEORGE ELIOT.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+A thousand years a poor man watched<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Before the gate of Paradise:</SPAN><BR>
+But while one little nap he snatched,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">It oped and shut.  Ah! was he wise?</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">W. B. ALGER.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
+do what lies clearly at hand.&mdash;CARLYLE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+A man's best things are nearest him,<BR>
+Lie close about his feet.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">R. M. MILNES.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The secret of success in life is for a man <I>to be ready for his
+opportunity</I> when it comes.&mdash;DISRAELI.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"There are no longer any good chances for young men," complained a law
+student to Daniel Webster.  "There is always room at the top," replied
+the great lawyer.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-256"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-256.jpg" ALT="THOMAS JEFFERSON" BORDER="2" WIDTH="361" HEIGHT="515">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 361px">
+THOMAS JEFFERSON
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"The world is all gates, all opportunities to him who can use them.'
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'T is never offered twice, seize then the hour<BR>
+When fortune smiles and duty points the way."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+No chance, no opportunities, in a land where many poor boys become rich
+men, where newsboys go to Congress, and where those born in the lowest
+stations attain the highest positions?  The world is all gates, all
+opportunities to him who will use them.  But, like Bunyan's Pilgrim in
+the dungeon of Giant Despair's castle, who had the key of deliverance
+all the time with him but had forgotten it, we fail to rely wholly upon
+the ability to advance all that is good for us which has been given to
+the weakest as well as the strongest.  We depend too much upon outside
+assistance.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"We look too high<BR>
+For things close by."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
+supposed that it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak.  Years
+afterward she washed the steps of the Peabody Institute, pondering how
+to get money to buy food.  She cut up an old, worn-out, ragged cloak to
+make a hood, when lo! in the lining of the cloak she discovered the
+diamond bracelet.  During all her poverty she was worth $3500, but did
+not know it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities, if we could
+only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
+than diamond bracelets.  In our large Eastern cities it has been found
+that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
+fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
+wants.  It is a sorry day for a young man who cannot see any
+opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
+Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
+gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
+with on the voyage.  After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
+had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
+diamonds.  They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
+from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by others
+and sold to the government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for $42 by the
+owner to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
+he could get rich.  Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a
+farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and
+rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
+business.  He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
+measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time.  He
+sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
+miles away.  Only a short time after the man who bought his farm
+discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
+previously ignorantly tried to drain off.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
+Persian by the name of Ali Hafed.  He lived in a cottage on the river
+bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
+stretching away to the sea.  He had a wife and children, an extensive
+farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
+of forest.  He had a plenty of money and everything that heart could
+wish.  He was contented and happy.  One evening a priest of Buddha
+visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
+world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
+earth's surface into diamonds.  The old priest told that a drop of
+sunlight the size of his thumb was worth more than large mines of
+copper, silver, or gold; that with one of them he could buy many farms
+like his; that with a handful he could buy a province, and with a mine
+of diamonds he could purchase a kingdom.  Ali Hafed listened, and was
+no longer a rich man.  He had been touched with discontent, and with
+that all wealth vanishes.  Early the next morning he woke the priest
+who had been the cause of his unhappiness, and anxiously asked him
+where he could find a mine of diamonds.  "What do you want of
+diamonds?" asked the astonished priest.  "I want to be rich and place
+my children on thrones."  "All you have to do is to go and search until
+you find them," said the priest.  "But where shall I go?" asked the
+poor farmer.  "Go anywhere, north, south, east, or west."  "How shall I
+know when I have found the place?"  "When you find a river running over
+white sands between high mountain ranges, in those white sands you will
+find diamonds," answered the priest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The discontented man sold the farm for what he could get, left his
+family with a neighbor, took the money he had at interest, and went to
+search for the coveted treasure.  Over the mountains of Arabia, through
+Palestine and Egypt, he wandered for years, but found no diamonds.
+When his money was all gone and starvation stared him in the face,
+ashamed of his folly and of his rags, poor Ali Hafed threw himself into
+the tide and was drowned.  The man who bought his farm was a contented
+man, who made the most of his surroundings, and did not believe in
+going away from home to hunt for diamonds or success.  While his camel
+was drinking in the garden one day, he noticed a flash of light from
+the white sands of the brook.  He picked up a pebble, and pleased with
+its brilliant hues took it into the house, put it on the shelf near the
+fireplace, and forgot all about it.  The old priest of Buddha who had
+filled Ali Hafed with the fatal discontent called one day upon the new
+owner of the farm.  He had no sooner entered the room than his eye
+caught that flash of light from the stone.  "Here's a diamond! here's a
+diamond!" the old priest shouted in great excitement.  "Has Ali Hafed
+returned?" said the priest.  "No," said the farmer, "nor is that a
+diamond.  That is but a stone."  They went into the garden and stirred
+up the white sand with their fingers, and behold, other diamonds more
+beautiful than the first gleamed out of it.  So the famous diamond beds
+of Golconda were discovered.  Had Ali Hafed been content to remain at
+home, had he dug in his own garden, instead of going abroad in search
+for wealth, and reaping poverty, hardships, starvation, and death, he
+would have been one of the richest men in the world, for the entire
+farm abounded in the richest of gems.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You have your own special place and work.  Find it, fill it.  Scarcely
+a boy or girl will read these lines but has much better opportunity to
+win success than Garfield, Wilson, Franklin, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher
+Stowe, Frances Willard, and thousands of others.  But to succeed you
+must be prepared to seize and improve the opportunity when it comes.
+Remember that four things come not back: the spoken word, the sped
+arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that the more opportunities
+are utilized, the more new ones are thereby created.  New openings are
+as easy to fill as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
+so easy as formerly to obtain distinction in the old lines, because the
+standard has advanced so much and competition has so greatly increased.
+"The world is no longer clay," said Emerson, "but rather iron in the
+hands of its workers, and men have got to hammer out a place for
+themselves by steady and rugged blows."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thousands of men have made fortunes out of trifles which others pass
+by.  As the bee gets honey from the same flower from which the spider
+gets poison, so some men will get a fortune out of the commonest and
+meanest things, as scraps of leather, cotton waste, slag, iron filings,
+from which others get only poverty and failure.  There is scarcely a
+thing which contributes to the welfare and comfort of humanity, not an
+article of household furniture, a kitchen utensil, an article of
+clothing or of food, that is not capable of an improvement in which
+there may be a fortune.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Opportunities?  They are all around us.  Edison found them in a baggage
+car.  Forces of nature plead to be used in the service of man, as
+lightning for ages tried to attract his attention to the great force of
+electricity, which would do his drudgery and leave him to develop the
+God-given powers within him.  There is power lying latent everywhere
+waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+First find out what the world needs and then supply that want.  An
+invention to make smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very
+ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity.  The patent
+office at Washington is full of wonderful devices of ingenious
+mechanism, but not one in hundreds is of use to the inventor or to the
+world.  And yet how many families have been impoverished, and have
+struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
+working on useless inventions.  A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
+eighty-seven cents when his capital was one dollar and a half in buying
+buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for.  After that he made
+it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want, and so
+prospered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
+manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles which
+made their fortunes.  One of the greatest hindrances to advancement in
+life is the lack of observation and of the inclination to take pains.
+An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
+not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
+metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather;" he was so
+poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut the grass in front of his
+hired tenement.  Now he is a very rich man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
+improvement in shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
+rich.  A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
+his invalid wife.  He had never realized what it was to wash before.
+Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing-machine,
+and made a fortune.  A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
+said to himself, there must be some way of filling teeth which will
+prevent their aching.  So he invented the principle of gold filling for
+teeth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
+Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
+The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin.  John Harrison,
+the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
+loft of an old barn.  Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
+were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
+McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a gristmill.  The first
+model dry dock was made in an attic.  Clark, the founder of Clark
+University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
+wagons in a horse shed.  Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
+with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft.  Edison
+began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
+a newsboy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As soon as the weather would permit, the Jamestown colonists began to
+stroll about the country digging for gold.  In a bank of sand some
+glittering particles were found, and the whole settlement was in a
+state of excitement.  Fourteen weeks of the precious springtime, which
+ought to have been given to plowing and planting, were consumed in this
+stupid nonsense.  Even the Indians ridiculed the madness of the men
+who, for imaginary grains of gold, were wasting their chances for a
+crop of corn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
+rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskillful workman had
+cut, hacked, spoiled, and thrown away.  No doubt many artists had
+noticed the fine quality of the marble, and regretted that it should
+have been spoiled.  But Michael Angelo still saw an angel in the ruin,
+and with his chisel and mallet he called out from it one of the finest
+pieces of statuary in Italy, the young David.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The lonely island of Nantucket would not be considered a very favorable
+place to win success and fame.  But Maria Mitchell, on seventy-five
+dollars a year, as librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum, found time and
+opportunity to become a celebrated astronomer.  Lucretia Mott, one of
+America's foremost philanthropists and reformers, who made herself felt
+over a whole continent, gained much of her reputation as a preacher on
+Nantucket Island.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why does not America have fine sculptors?" asked a romping girl, of
+Watertown, Mass., in 1842.  Her father, a physician, answered that he
+supposed "an American could be a stone-cutter, but that is a very
+different thing from being a sculptor."  "I think," said the plucky
+maiden, "that if no other American tries it I will."  She began her
+studies in Boston, and walked seven miles to and fro daily between her
+home and the city.  The medical schools in Boston would not admit her
+to study anatomy, so she had to go to St. Louis.  Subsequently she went
+to Rome, and there, during a long residence, and afterward, modeled and
+carved very beautiful statuary which made the name of Harriet G. Hosmer
+famous.  Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you
+are now wasting, dreaming of some far-off success, may be crowded with
+grand possibilities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patrick Henry was called a lazy boy, a good-for-nothing farmer, and he
+failed as a merchant.  He was always dreaming of some far-off
+greatness, and never thought he could be a hero among the corn and
+tobacco and saddlebags of Virginia.  He studied law six weeks, when he
+put out his shingle.  People thought he would fail, but in his first
+case he showed that he had a wonderful power of oratory.  It then first
+dawned upon him that he could be a hero in Virginia.  From the time the
+Stamp Act was passed and Henry was elected to the Virginia House of
+Burgesses, and he had introduced his famous resolution against the
+unjust taxation of the American colonies, he rose steadily until he
+became one of the brilliant orators of America.  In one of his first
+speeches upon this resolution he uttered these words, which were
+prophetic of his power and courage: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the
+First his Cromwell, and George the Third&mdash;may profit by their example.
+If this be treason, make the most of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The great natural philosopher, Faraday, who was the son of a
+blacksmith, wrote, when a young man, to Humphry Davy, asking for
+employment at the Royal Institution.  Davy consulted a friend on the
+matter.  "Here is a letter from a young man named Faraday, he has been
+attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal
+Institution&mdash;what can I do?"  "Do? put him to washing bottles; if he is
+good for anything he will do it directly; if he refuses he is good for
+nothing."  But the boy who could experiment in the attic of an
+apothecary shop with an old pan and glass vials during every moment he
+could snatch from his work saw an opportunity in washing bottles, which
+led to a professorship at the Royal Academy at Woolwich.  Tyndall said
+of this boy with no chance, "He is the greatest experimental
+philosopher the world has ever seen."  He became the wonder of his age
+in science.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a legend of an artist who long sought for a piece of
+sandal-wood, out of which to carve a Madonna.  He was about to give up
+in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream
+he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was
+destined for the fire.  He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece from a
+log of common firewood.  Many of us lose great opportunities in life by
+waiting to find sandal-wood for our carvings, when they really lie
+hidden in the common logs that we burn.  One man goes through life
+without seeing chances for doing anything great, while another close
+beside him snatches from the same circumstances and privileges
+opportunities for achieving grand results.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Anna Dickinson began life as a school-teacher.  Adelaide Neilson was a
+child's nurse.  Charlotte Cushman's parents were poor.  The renowned
+Jeanne d'Arc fed swine.  Christine Nilsson was a poor Swedish peasant,
+and ran barefoot in childhood.  Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor,
+overcame the prejudice against her sex and color, and pursued her
+profession in Italy.  Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, was the daughter
+of a poor man who taught school at two dollars per week.  These are but
+a few of the many who have struggled with fate and risen to distinction
+through their own personal efforts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Opportunities?  They are everywhere.  "America is another name for
+opportunities.  Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine
+Providence in behalf of the human race."  Never before were there such
+grand openings, such chances, such opportunities.  Especially is this
+true for girls and young women.  A new era is dawning for them.
+Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only
+a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I hear of a young woman entering the medical profession, or
+beginning the study of law, or entering school with a view to teaching,
+I feel like congratulating her for thus asserting her individuality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We cannot all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
+Faraday, Edison, and Thompson.  We cannot all of us paint immortal
+pictures like an Angelo or a Raphael.  But we can all of us make our
+lives sublime, by <I>seizing common occasions and making them great</I>.
+What chance had the young girl, Grace Darling, to distinguish herself,
+living on those barren lighthouse rocks alone with her aged parents?
+But while her brothers and sisters, who moved to the cities to win
+wealth and fame, are not known to the world, she became more famous
+than a princess.  This poor girl did not need to go to London to see
+the nobility; they came to the lighthouse to see her.  Right at home
+this young girl had won fame which the regal heirs might envy, and a
+name which will never perish from the earth.  She did not wander away
+into dreamy distance for fame and fortune, but did her best where duty
+had placed her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants.  You will
+find that millions have the same wants.  The safest business is always
+connected with man's prime necessities.  He must have clothing and a
+dwelling; he must eat.  He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
+pleasure, luxuries, education, and culture.  Any man who can supply a
+great want of humanity, improve any methods which men use, supply any
+demand of comfort, or contribute in any way to their well-being, can
+make a fortune.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We cannot doubt," said Edward Everett, "that truths now unknown are in
+reserve to reward the patience and the labors of future lovers of
+truth, which will go as far beyond the brilliant discoveries of the
+last generation as these do beyond all that was known to the ancient
+world."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">The golden opportunity</SPAN><BR>
+Is never offered twice; seize then the hour<BR>
+When fortune smiles and duty points the way;<BR>
+Nor shrink aside to 'scape the spectre fear,<BR>
+Nor pause, though pleasure beckon from her bower;<BR>
+But bravely bear thee onward to the goal.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ANON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+For the distant still thou yearnest,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And behold the good so near;</SPAN><BR>
+If to use the good thou learnest,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Thou wilt surely find it here.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">GOETHE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Do not, then, stand idly waiting<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For some greater work to do;</SPAN><BR>
+Fortune is a lazy goddess&mdash;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">She will never come to you.</SPAN><BR>
+Go and toil in any vineyard,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Do not fear to do or dare;</SPAN><BR>
+If you want a field of labor,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">You can find it anywhere.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">ELLEN H. GATES.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For the far-off, unattained and dim,</SPAN><BR>
+While the beautiful, all around thee lying<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">HARRIET WINSLOW.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Work for the good that is nighest;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Dream not of greatness afar:</SPAN><BR>
+That glory is ever the highest<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Which shines upon men as they are.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">W. MORLEY PUNSHON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Little strokes fell great oaks.&mdash;FRANKLIN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;<BR>
+Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,<BR>
+And trifles, life.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">YOUNG.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Scorn not the slightest word or deed,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Nor deem it void of power;</SPAN><BR>
+There's fruit in each wind-wafted seed,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">That waits its natal hour."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in
+trifles.&mdash;WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and
+little.&mdash;ECCLESIASTICUS.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Often from our weakness our strongest principles of conduct are born;
+and from the acorn, which a breeze has wafted, springs the oak which
+defies the storm.&mdash;BULWER.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Men are led by trifles.&mdash;NAPOLEON I.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"A pebble on the streamlet scant<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Has turned the course of many a river;</SPAN><BR>
+A dewdrop on the baby plant<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Has warped the giant oak forever."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing.&mdash;SCOTCH
+PROVERB.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+"The bad thing about a little sin is that it won't stay little."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,<BR>
+And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;<BR>
+A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,<BR>
+And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Arletta's pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of
+William the Conqueror," says Palgrave's "History of Normandy and
+England."  "Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of
+Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman
+dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-268"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-268.jpg" ALT="AGASSIZ" BORDER="2" WIDTH="366" HEIGHT="510">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 366px">
+AGASSIZ
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Small things become great when a great soul sees them.  Trifles light
+as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize
+the world.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the
+ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved
+forever.  We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man
+never saw, walked to the river's edge to find their food.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when
+nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic
+luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of
+the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless
+mental growth.  A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress
+of the human race more than ten centuries.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute
+silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an
+educated man to shame.  Returning home, an Indian discovered that his
+venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen.  After
+careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods.
+Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old,
+white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog.  The man
+told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the
+Indian had not even seen the one he described.  He asked the Indian how
+he could give such a minute description of the man whom he had never
+seen.  "I knew the thief was a little man," said the Indian, "because
+he rolled up a stone to stand on in order to reach the venison; I knew
+he was an old man by his short steps; I knew he was a white man by his
+turning out his toes in walking, which an Indian never does; I knew he
+had a short gun by the mark it left on the tree where he had stood it
+up; I knew the dog was small by his tracks and short steps, and that he
+had a bob-tail by the mark it left in the dust where he sat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two drops of rain, falling side by side, were separated a few inches by
+a gentle breeze.  Striking on opposite sides of the roof of a
+court-house in Wisconsin, one rolled southward through the Rock River
+and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico; while the other entered
+successively the Fox River, Green Bay, Lake Michigan, the Straits of
+Mackinaw, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River,
+Lake Erie, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and
+finally reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  How slight the influence of
+the breeze, yet such was the formation of the continent that a trifling
+cause was multiplied almost beyond the power of figures to express its
+momentous effect upon the destinies of these companion raindrops.  Who
+can calculate the future of the smallest trifle when a mud crack swells
+to an Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold?  Who
+does not know that the act of a moment may cause a life's regret?  A
+trigger may be pulled in an instant, but the soul returns never.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A spark falling upon some combustibles led to the invention of
+gunpowder.  Irritable tempers have marred the reputation of many a
+great man, as in the case of Edmund Burke and of Thomas Carlyle.  A few
+bits of seaweed and driftwood, floating on the waves, enabled Columbus
+to stay a mutiny of his sailors which threatened to prevent the
+discovery of a new world.  There are moments in history which balance
+years of ordinary life.  Dana could interest a class for hours on a
+grain of sand; and from a single bone, such as no one had ever seen
+before, Agassiz could deduce the entire structure and habits of an
+animal so accurately that subsequent discoveries of complete skeletons
+have not changed one of his conclusions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A cricket once saved a military expedition from destruction.  The
+commanding officer and hundreds of his men were going to South America
+on a great ship, and, through the carelessness of the watch, they would
+have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket
+which a soldier had brought on board.  When the little insect scented
+the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned
+them of their danger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Strange that a little thing like that should cause a man so much
+pain!" exclaimed a giant, as he rolled in his hand and examined with
+eager curiosity the acorn which his friend the dwarf had obligingly
+taken from the huge eye into which it had fallen just as the colossus
+was on the point of shooting a bird perched in the branches of an oak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sometimes a conversation, or a sentence in a letter, or a paragraph in
+an article, will help us to reproduce the whole character of the
+author; as a single bone, a fish scale, a fin, or a tooth, will enable
+the scientist and anatomist to reproduce the fish or the animal,
+although extinct for ages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.  A little boy
+in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a
+dike.  He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the
+water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a
+dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of
+passers-by.  His name is still held in grateful remembrance in Holland.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The beetling chalk cliffs of England were built by rhizopods, too small
+to be clearly seen without the aid of a magnifying-glass.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What was so unlikely as that throwing an empty wine-flask in the fire
+should furnish the first notion of a locomotive, or that the sickness
+of an Italian chemist's wife and her absurd craving for reptiles for
+food should begin the electric telegraph?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Madame Galvani noticed the contraction of the muscles of a skinned frog
+which was accidentally touched at the moment her husband took a spark
+from an electrical machine.  She gave the hint which led to the
+discovery of galvanic electricity, now so useful in the arts and in
+transmitting vocal or written language.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+M. Louis Pasteur was usher in the Lyceum.  Thursdays he took the boys
+to walk.  A student took his microscope to examine insects, and allowed
+Pasteur to look through it.  This was the starting of the boy on the
+microscopic career which has made men wonder.  He was almost wild with
+enthusiasm at the new world which the microscope revealed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A stamp act to raise 60,000 pounds produced the American Revolution, a
+war that cost 100,000,000 pounds.  What mighty contests rise from
+trivial things!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Congress met near a livery stable to discuss the Declaration of
+Independence.  The members, in knee breeches and silk stockings, were
+so annoyed by flies, which they could not keep away with their
+handkerchiefs, that it has been said they cut short the debate, and
+hastened to affix their signatures to the greatest document in history.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The fate of a nation," says Gladstone, "has often depended upon the
+good or bad digestion of a fine dinner."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A young man once went to India to seek his fortune, but, finding no
+opening, he went to his room, loaded his pistol, put the muzzle to his
+head, and pulled the trigger.  But it did not go off.  He went to the
+window to point it in another direction and try it again, resolved that
+if the weapon went off he would regard it as a Providence that he was
+spared.  He pulled the trigger and it went off the first time.
+Trembling with excitement he resolved to hold his life sacred, to make
+the most of it, and never again to cheapen it.  This young man became
+General Robert Clive, who, with but a handful of European soldiers,
+secured to the East India Company and afterwards to Great Britain a
+great and rich country with two hundred millions of people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The cackling of a goose aroused the sentinels and saved Rome from the
+Gauls, and the pain from a thistle warned a Scottish army of the
+approach of the Danes.  "Had Acre fallen," said Napoleon, "I should
+have changed the face of the world."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Henry Ward Beecher came within one vote of being elected superintendent
+of a railway.  If he had had that vote America would probably have lost
+its greatest preacher.  What a little thing fixes destiny!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the earliest days of cotton spinning, the small fibres would stick
+to the bobbins, and make it necessary to stop and clear the machinery.
+Although this loss of time reduced the earnings of the operatives, the
+father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full
+pay, as his machine never stopped.  "How is this, Dick?" asked Mr. Peel
+one day; "the on-looker tells me your bobbins are always clean."  "Ay,
+that they be," replied Dick Ferguson.  "How do you manage it, Dick?"
+"Why, you see, Meester Peel," said the workman, "it is sort o' secret!
+If I tow'd ye, yo'd be as wise as I am."  "That's so," said Mr. Peel,
+smiling; "but I'd give you something to know.  Could you make all the
+looms work as smoothly as yours?"  "Ivery one of 'em, meester," replied
+Dick.  "Well, what shall I give you for your secret?" asked Mr. Peel,
+and Dick replied, "Gi' me a quart of ale every day as I'm in the mills,
+and I'll tell thee all about it."  "Agreed," said Mr. Peel, and Dick
+whispered very cautiously in his ear, "Chalk your bobbins!"  That was
+the whole secret, and Mr. Peel soon shot ahead of all his competitors,
+for he made machines that would chalk their own bobbins.  Dick was
+handsomely rewarded with money instead of beer.  His little idea has
+saved the world millions of dollars.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Trifles light as air often suggest to the thinking mind ideas which
+have revolutionized the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A poor English boy was compelled by his employer to deposit something
+on board a ship about to start for Algiers, in accordance with the
+merchant's custom of interesting employees by making them put something
+at risk in his business and so share in the gain or loss of each common
+venture.  The boy had only a cat, which he had bought for a penny to
+catch mice in the garret where he slept.  In tears, he carried her on
+board the vessel.  On arriving at Algiers, the captain learned that the
+Dey was greatly annoyed by rats, and loaned him the cat.  The rats
+disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the
+captain would not sell until a very high price was offered.  With the
+purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of
+Tabby.  When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to
+find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the
+bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods.  The
+London merchant took the boy into partnership; the latter became very
+wealthy, and in the course of business loaned money to the Dey who had
+bought the cat.  As Lord Mayor of London, our cat merchant was
+knighted, and became the second man in the city,&mdash;Sir Richard
+Whittington.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When John Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, went to the
+South Sea Islands, he took with him a single banana-tree from an
+English nobleman's conservatory; and now, from that single banana-tree,
+bananas are to be found throughout whole groups of islands.  Before the
+negro slaves in the West Indies were emancipated a regiment of British
+soldiers was stationed near one of the plantations.  A soldier offered
+to teach a slave to read on condition that he would teach a second, and
+that second a third, and so on.  This the slave faithfully carried out,
+though severely flogged by the master of the plantation.  Being sent to
+another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at
+length liberty was proclaimed throughout the island, and the Bible
+Society offered a New Testament to every negro who could read, the
+number taught through this slave's instrumentality was found to be no
+less than six hundred.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A famous ruby was offered to the English government.  The report of the
+crown jeweler was that it was the finest he had ever seen or heard of,
+but that one of the "facets" was slightly fractured.  That invisible
+fracture reduced its value thousands of dollars, and it was rejected
+from the regalia of England.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a little thing for the janitor to leave a lamp swinging in the
+cathedral at Pisa, but in that steady swaying motion the boy Galileo
+saw the pendulum, and conceived the idea of thus measuring time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," said Edison, "when
+the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of
+my fingers held just behind it.  That set me to thinking.  If I could
+record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface
+afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.  I determined
+to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants
+the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered.  That's
+the whole story.  The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a
+finger."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a little thing for a cow to kick over a lantern left in a
+shanty, but it laid Chicago in ashes, and rendered homeless a hundred
+thousand people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You turned a cold shoulder but once, you made but one stinging remark,
+yet it lost you a friend forever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some little weakness, some self-indulgence, a quick temper, want of
+decision, are little things, you say, when placed beside great
+abilities, but they have wrecked many a career.  The Parliament of
+Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative
+governments all over the world have come from King John signing the
+Magna Charta.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bentham says, "The turn of a sentence has decided many a friendship,
+and, for aught we know, the fate of many a kingdom."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sight of a stranded cuttlefish led Cuvier to an investigation which
+made him one of the greatest natural historians in the world.  The web
+of a spider suggested to Captain Brown the idea of a suspension bridge.
+A man, looking for a lost horse, picked up a stone in the Idaho
+mountains which led to the discovery of a rich gold mine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An officer apologized to General O. M. Mitchel, the astronomer, for a
+brief delay, saying he was only a few moments late.  "I have been in
+the habit of calculating the value of the thousandth part of a second,"
+was Mitchel's reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A missing marriage certificate kept the hod-carrier of Hugh Miller from
+establishing his claim to the Earldom of Crawford.  The masons would
+call out, "John, Yearl of Crawford, bring us anither hod o' lime."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not long ago the great steamship Umbria was stopped in mid-Atlantic by
+a flaw in her engine shaft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The absence of a comma in a bill which passed through Congress several
+years ago cost our government a million dollars.  A single misspelled
+word prevented a deserving young man from obtaining a situation as
+instructor in a New England college.  A cinder on the eyeball will
+conquer a Napoleon.  Some little weakness, as lack of courtesy, want of
+decision, a bad temper, may nullify the labor of years.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I cannot see that you have made any progress since my last visit,"
+said a gentleman to Michael Angelo.  "But," said the sculptor, "I have
+retouched this part, polished that, softened that feature, brought out
+that muscle, given some expression to this lip, more energy to that
+limb, etc."  "But they are trifles!" exclaimed the visitor.  "It may be
+so," replied the great artist, "but trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That infinite patience which made Michael Angelo spend a week in
+bringing out a muscle in a statue with more vital fidelity to truth, or
+Gerhard Dow a day in giving the right effect to a dewdrop on a cabbage
+leaf, makes all the difference between success and failure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By scattering it upon a sloping field of grain so as to form, in
+letters of great size, "Effects of Gypsum," Franklin brought this
+fertilizer into general use in America.  By means of a kite he
+established principles in the science of electricity of such broad
+significance that they underlie nearly all the modern applications of
+that science, with probably boundless possibilities of development in
+the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+More than four hundred and fifty years have passed since Laurens Coster
+amused his children by cutting their names in the bark of trees, in the
+land of windmills, and the monks have laid aside forever their old
+trade of copying books.  From that day monarchies have crumbled, and
+Liberty, lifting up her head for the first time among the nations of
+the earth, has ever since kept pace with the march of her sister,
+Knowledge, up through the centuries.  Yet how simple was the thought
+which has borne such a rich harvest of benefit to mankind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As he carved the names of his prattling children it occurred to him
+that if the letters were made in separate blocks, and wet with ink,
+they would make clear printed impressions better and more rapidly than
+would the pen.  So he made blocks, tied them together with strings, and
+printed a pamphlet with the aid of a hired man, John Gutenberg.  People
+bought the pamphlets at a slight reduction from the price charged by
+the monks, supposing that the work was done in the old way.  Coster
+died soon afterward, but young Gutenberg kept the secret, and
+experimented with metals until he had invented the metal type.  In an
+obscure chamber in Strasburg he printed his first book.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At about this time a traveler called upon Charles VII. of France, who
+was so afraid somebody would poison him that he dared eat but little,
+and made his servants taste of every dish of food before he ate any.
+He looked with suspicion upon the stranger; but when the latter offered
+a beautiful copy of the Bible for only seven hundred and fifty crowns,
+the monarch bought it at once.  Charles showed his Bible to the
+archbishop, telling him that it was the finest copy in the world,
+without a blot or mistake, and that it must have taken the copyist a
+lifetime to write it.  "Why!" exclaimed the archbishop in surprise, "I
+bought one exactly like it a few days ago."  It was soon learned that
+other rich people in Paris had bought similar copies.  The king traced
+the book to John Faust, of Strasburg, who had furnished Gutenberg money
+to experiment with.  The people said that Faust must have sold himself
+to the devil, and he only escaped burning at the stake by divulging the
+secret.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+William Caxton, a London merchant who went to Holland to purchase
+cloth, bought a few books and some type, and established a
+printing-office in Westminster Chapel, where he issued, in 1474, "The
+Game of Chess," the first book printed in England.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The cry of the infant Moses attracted the attention of Pharaoh's
+daughter, and gave the Jews a lawgiver.  A bird alighting on the bough
+of a tree at the mouth of the cave where Mahomet lay hid turned aside
+his pursuers, and gave a prophet to many nations.  A flight of birds
+probably prevented Columbus from discovering this continent, for when
+he was growing anxious, Martin Alonzo Pinzon persuaded him to follow a
+flight of parrots toward the southwest; for to the Spanish seamen of
+that day it was good luck to follow in the wake of a flock of birds
+when on a voyage of discovery.  But for his change of course Columbus
+would have reached the coast of Florida.  "Never," wrote Humboldt, "had
+the flight of birds more important consequences."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The children of a spectacle-maker placed two or more pairs of the
+spectacles before each other in play, and told their father that
+distant objects looked larger.  From this hint came the telescope.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of what use is it?" people asked with a sneer, when Franklin told of
+his discovery that lightning and electricity are identical.  "What is
+the use of a child?" replied Franklin; "it may become a man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once," said Dr. Johnson,
+"will never do any."  Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee
+no good.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every day is a little life; and our whole life but a day repeated.
+Those that dare lose a day are dangerously prodigal, those that dare
+misspend it, desperate.  What is the happiness of your life made up of?
+Little courtesies, little kindnesses, pleasant words, genial smiles, a
+friendly letter, good wishes, and good deeds.  One in a million&mdash;once
+in a lifetime&mdash;may do a heroic action.  The atomic theory is the true
+one.  Many think common fractions vulgar, but they are the components
+of millions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He is a great man who sees great things where others see little things,
+who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Ruskin sees a poem in the
+rose or the lily, while the hod-carrier would perhaps not go a rod out
+of his way to see a sunset which Ruskin would feed upon for a year.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Napoleon was a master of trifles.  To details which his inferior
+officers thought too microscopic for their notice he gave the most
+exhaustive attention.  Nothing was too small for his attention.  He
+must know all about the provisions, the horse fodder, the biscuits, the
+camp kettles, the shoes.  When the bugle sounded for the march to
+battle, every officer had his orders as to the exact route which he
+should follow, the exact day he was to arrive at a certain station, and
+the exact hour he was to leave, and they were all to reach the point of
+destination at a precise moment.  It is said that nothing could be more
+perfectly planned than his memorable march which led to the victory of
+Austerlitz, and which sealed the fate of Europe for many years.  He
+would often charge his absent officers to send him perfectly accurate
+returns, even to the smallest detail.  "When they are sent to me, I
+give up every occupation in order to read them in detail, and to
+observe the difference between one monthly return and another.  No
+young girl enjoys her novel as much as I do these returns."  The
+captain who conveyed Napoleon to Elba was astonished with his
+familiarity with all the minute details connected with the ship.
+Napoleon left nothing to chance, nothing to contingency, so far as he
+could possibly avoid it.  Everything was planned to a nicety before he
+attempted to execute it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wellington too was "great in little things."  He knew no such things as
+trifles.  While other generals trusted to subordinates, he gave his
+personal attention to the minutest detail.  The history of many a
+failure could be written in three words, "Lack of detail."  How many a
+lawyer has failed from the lack of details in deeds and important
+papers, the lack of little words which seemed like surplusage, and
+which involved his clients in litigation, and often great losses!  How
+many wills are contested from the carelessness of lawyers in the
+omission or shading of words, or ambiguous use of language!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Physicians often fail to make a reputation through their habitual
+blundering, carelessness in writing prescriptions, failure to give
+minute instruction.  The world is full of blunderers; business men fail
+from a disregard of trifles; they go to the bank to pay a note the day
+after it has gone to protest; they do not pay their bills promptly; do
+not answer their letters promptly or file them away accurately; their
+books do not quite balance; they do not know exactly how they stand,
+they have a contempt for details.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My rule of conduct has been that whatever is worth doing at all is
+worth doing well," said Nicolas Poussin, the great French painter.
+When asked the reason why he had become so eminent in a land of famous
+artists he replied, "Because I have neglected nothing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not even Helen of Troy, it is said, was beautiful enough to spare the
+tip of her nose; and if Cleopatra's had been an inch shorter Mark
+Antony would never have become infatuated with her wonderful charms,
+and the blemish would have changed the history of the world.  Anne
+Boleyn's fascinating smile split the great Church of Rome in twain, and
+gave a nation an altered destiny.  Napoleon, who feared not to attack
+the proudest monarchs in their capitols, shrank from the political
+influence of one independent woman in private life, Madame de Sta�l.
+Had not Scott sprained his foot his life would probably have taken a
+different direction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Cromwell was about to sail for America when a law was passed
+prohibiting emigration.  At that time he was a profligate, having
+squandered all his property.  But when he found that he could not leave
+England he reformed his life.  Had he not been detained who can tell
+what the history of Great Britain would have been?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that
+could be of little use to him, he answered, "It is in these useless and
+superfluous things that I am rich and happy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon's day.  Mites
+play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and
+furs, and mice in our pantries.  More than half our diseases are
+produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice.
+There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the
+peace, the happiness, of a home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We call the large majority of human lives obscure," says Bulwer,
+"presumptuous that we are!  How know we what lives a single thought
+retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe.
+From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each
+trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a
+Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the
+science of botany.  A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools
+by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat, and a prism, a lens, and a
+sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light
+and the origin of colors.  An eminent foreign savant called on Dr.
+Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in
+which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the
+doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray
+on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small
+balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory."  A burnt
+stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper.  A
+single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the
+sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving
+famine from Ireland again and again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and
+the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as
+Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people.  A cloud may hide
+the sun which it cannot extinguish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth."  "A look of
+vexation or a word coldly spoken, or a little help thoughtlessly
+withheld, may produce long issues of regret."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was but a little dispute, a little flash of temper, the trigger was
+pulled in an instant, but the soul returned never.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from
+Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its
+action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished
+forever.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"For want of a nail the shoe was lost,<BR>
+For want of a shoe the horse was lost;<BR>
+For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+says Poor Richard, "for want of a horse-shoe nail."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A single remark dropped by an unknown person in the street led to the
+successful story of "The Bread-winners."  A hymn chanted by the
+barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter at Rome led to the famous
+"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do little things now," says a Persian proverb; "so shall big things
+come to thee by and by asking to be done."  God will take care of the
+great things if we do not neglect the little ones.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Words are things," says Byron, "and a small drop of ink, falling like
+dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps
+millions think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony;" such
+were the words of ten ministers who in the year 1700 assembled at the
+village of Branford a few miles east of New Haven.  Each of the worthy
+fathers deposited a few books upon the table around which they were
+sitting; such was the founding of Yale College.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He that has a spirit of detail," says Webster, "will do better in life
+than many who figured beyond him in the university."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The pyramid of knowledge is made up of little grains of information,
+little observations picked up from everywhere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a thousand years Asia monopolized the secret of silk culture, and
+at Rome the product was sold for its weight in gold.  During the sixth
+century, at the request of Justinian, two Persian monks brought a few
+eggs from China to Europe in a hollow cane.  The eggs were hatched by
+means of heat, and Asia no longer held the monopoly of the silk
+business.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In comparison with Ferdinand, preparing to lead forth his magnificent
+army in Europe's supreme contest with the Moors, how insignificant
+seemed the visionary expedition of Columbus, about to start in three
+small shallops across the unknown ocean.  But grand as was the triumph
+of Ferdinand, it now seems hardly worthy of mention in comparison with
+the wonderful achievement of the poor Genoese navigator.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Only one hundred and ninety-two Athenians perished in the battle of
+Marathon, but Europe was saved from a host which is said to have drunk
+rivers dry, and to have shaken the solid earth as they marched.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great men are noted for their attention to trifles.  Goethe once asked
+a monarch to excuse him, during an interview, while he went to an
+adjoining room to jot down a stray thought.  Hogarth would make
+sketches of rare faces and characteristics upon his finger-nails upon
+the streets.  Indeed, to a truly great mind there are no little things.
+"The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you
+may see objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great
+axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances," said Bacon.
+Trifles light as air suggest to the keen observer the solution of
+mighty problems.  Bits of glass arranged to amuse children led to the
+discovery of the kaleidoscope.  Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize
+rubber by forgetting, until it became red hot, a skillet containing a
+compound which he had before considered worthless.  Confined in the
+house by typhoid fever, Helmholtz, with a little money which he had
+saved by great economy, bought a microscope which led him into the
+field of science where he became so famous.  A ship-worm boring a piece
+of wood suggested to Sir Isambard Brunei the idea of a tunnel under the
+Thames at London.  Tracks of extinct animals in the old red sandstone
+led Hugh Miller on and on until he became the greatest geologist of his
+time.  Sir Walter Scott once saw a shepherd boy plodding sturdily
+along, and asked him to ride.  This boy was George Kemp, who became so
+enthusiastic in his study of sculpture that he walked fifty miles and
+back to see a beautiful statue.  He did not forget the kindness of Sir
+Walter, and, when the latter died, threw his soul into the design of
+the magnificent monument erected in Edinburgh to the memory of the
+author of "Waverley."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A poor boy applied for a situation at a bank in Paris, but was refused.
+As he left the door, he picked up a pin.  The bank president saw this,
+called the boy back, and gave him a situation from which he rose until
+he became the greatest banker of Paris,&mdash;Laffitte.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the turning point in Theodore Parker's life when he picked up a
+stone to throw at a turtle.  Something within him said, "Don't do it,"
+and he didn't.  He went home and asked his mother what it was in him
+that said "Don't;" and she taught him the purpose of that inward
+monitor which he ever after chose as his guide.  It is said that David
+Hume became a deist by being appointed in a debating society to take
+the side of infidelity.  Voltaire could not erase from his mind the
+impression of a poem on infidelity committed at the age of five.  The
+"Arabian Nights" aroused the genius of Coleridge.  A Massachusetts
+soldier in the Civil War observed a bird hulling rice, and shot it;
+taking its bill for a model, he invented a hulling machine which has
+revolutionized the rice business.  A war between France and England,
+costing more than a hundred thousand lives, grew out of a quarrel as to
+which of two vessels should first be served with water.  The quarrel of
+two Indian boys over a grasshopper led to the "Grasshopper War."
+George IV. of England fell in a fit, and a village apothecary bled him,
+restoring him to consciousness.  The king made him his physician, a
+position of great honor and profit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many a noble ship has stranded because of one defective timber, when
+all other parts were strong.  Guard the weak point.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No object the eye ever beheld, no sound however slight caught by the
+ear, or anything once passing the turnstile of any of the senses, is
+ever let go.  The eye is a perpetual camera imprinting upon the
+sensitive mental plates, and packing away in the brain for future use
+every face, every tree, every plant, flower, hill, stream, mountain,
+every scene upon the street, in fact, everything which comes within its
+range.  There is a phonograph in our natures which catches, however
+thoughtless and transient, every syllable we utter, and registers
+forever the slightest enunciation, and renders it immortal.  These
+notes may appear a thousand years hence, reproduced in our descendants,
+in all their beautiful or terrible detail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All the ages that have been are rounded up into the small space we call
+"To-day."  Every life spans all that precedes it.  To-day is a book
+which contains everything that has transpired in the world up to the
+present moment.  The millions of the past whose ashes have mingled with
+the dust for centuries still live in their destinies through the laws
+of heredity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nothing has ever been lost.  All the infinitesimals of the past are
+amassed into the present.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first acorn had wrapped up in it all the oak forests on the globe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Least of all seeds, greatest of all harvests," seems to be one of the
+great laws of nature.  All life comes from microscopic beginnings.  In
+nature there is nothing small.  The microscope reveals as great a world
+below as the telescope above.  All of nature's laws govern the smallest
+atoms, and a single drop of water is a miniature ocean.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, however large and
+strong all the others may be.  We are all inclined to be proud of our
+strong points, while we are sensitive and neglectful of our weaknesses.
+Yet it is our greatest weakness which measures our real strength.  A
+soldier who escapes the bullets of a thousand battles may die from the
+scratch of a pin, and many a ship has survived the shocks of icebergs
+and the storms of ocean only to founder in a smooth sea from holes made
+by tiny insects.  Drop by drop is instilled into the mind the poison
+which blasts many a precious life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How often do we hear people say, "Oh, it's only ten minutes, or twenty
+minutes, till dinner time; there's no use doing anything," or use other
+expressions of a like effect?  Why, it is just in these little spare
+bits of time, these odd moments, which most people throw away, that men
+who have risen have gained their education, written their books, and
+made themselves immortal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Small things become great when a great soul sees them</I>.  The noble or
+heroic act of one man has sometimes elevated a nation.  Many an
+honorable career has resulted from a kind word spoken in season or the
+warm grasp of a friendly hand.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+It is the little rift within the lute,<BR>
+That by and by will make the music mute,<BR>
+And, ever widening, slowly silence all.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">TENNYSON.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"It was only a glad 'good-morning,'<BR>
+As she passed along the way,<BR>
+But it spread the morning's glory<BR>
+Over the livelong day."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Only a thought in passing&mdash;a smile, or encouraging word,<BR>
+Has lifted many a burden no other gift could have stirred.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Only!&mdash;But then the onlys</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Make up the mighty all."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap16"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVI.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SELF-MASTERY.
+</H3>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Give me that man</SPAN><BR>
+That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him<BR>
+In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">SHAKESPEARE.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Strength of character consists of two things,&mdash;power of will and power
+of self-restraint.  It requires two things, therefore, for its
+existence,&mdash;strong feelings and strong command over them.&mdash;F. W.
+ROBERTSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,<BR>
+These three alone lead life to sovereign power."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The bravest trophy ever man obtained<BR>
+Is that which o'er himself himself hath gained.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">EARL OF STIRLING.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Real glory springs from the conquest of ourselves; and without that the
+conqueror is naught but the veriest slave.&mdash;THOMSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Whatever day makes man a slave takes half his worth away.&mdash;ODYSSEY.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast.  Lead thine own captivity
+captive, and be Caesar within thyself.&mdash;THOMAS BROWNE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears,
+is more than a king.&mdash;MILTON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty: and he that ruleth
+his spirit than he that taketh a city.&mdash;BIBLE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Self-trust is of the essence of heroism.&mdash;EMERSON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Man who man would be<BR>
+Must rule the empire of himself.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">P. B. SHELLEY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Ah!  Diamond, you little know the mischief you have wrought," said Sir
+Isaac Newton, returning from supper to find that his dog had upset a
+lighted taper upon the laborious calculations of years, which lay in
+ashes before him.  Then he went calmly to work to reproduce them.  The
+man who thus excelled in self-mastery surpassed all his predecessors
+and contemporaries in mastering the laws of nature.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-288"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-288.jpg" ALT="JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL" BORDER="2" WIDTH="365" HEIGHT="529">
+<H3 CLASS="h3center" STYLE="width: 365px">
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"We rise by the things that are under our feet;<BR>
+By what we have mastered of good or gain:<BR>
+By the pride deposed and the passion slain,<BR>
+And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="100%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The sun was high in the heavens when a man called at the house of
+Pericles to abuse him.  The man's anger knew no bounds.  He vented his
+spite in violent language until he paused from sheer exhaustion, and
+saw that it was quite dark without.  He turned to go home, when
+Pericles calmly called a servant, and said, "Bring a lamp and attend
+this man home."  Is any argument needed to show the superiority of
+Pericles?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The gladiators who were trained to tight in the Coliseum were compelled
+to practice the most graceful postures of falling and the finest
+attitudes to assume in dying, in case they were vanquished.  They were
+obliged to eat food which would make the blood thick in order that they
+should not die quickly when wounded, thus giving the spectators
+prolonged gratification by the spectacle of their agonies.  Each had to
+take this oath: "We swear that we will suffer ourselves to be bound,
+scourged, burned, or killed by the sword, or whatever Eumolpus ordains,
+and thus, like freeborn gladiators, we religiously devote both our
+souls and our bodies to our master."  They were trained to exercise
+sublime self-control even when dying a cruel death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The American Minister at St. Petersburg was summoned one morning to
+save a young, dissolute, reckless American youth, Poe, from the
+penalties incurred in a drunken debauch.  By the Minister's aid young
+Poe returned to the United States.  Not long after this the author of
+the best story and poem competed for in the "Baltimore Visitor" was
+sent for, and behold, the youth who had taken both prizes was that same
+dissolute, reckless, penniless, orphan youth, who had been arrested in
+St. Petersburg,&mdash;pale, ragged, with no stockings, and with his
+threadbare but well brushed coat buttoned to the chin to conceal the
+lack of a shirt.  Young Poe took fresh courage and resolution, and for
+a while showed that he was superior to the appetite which was striving
+to drag him down.  But, alas, that fatal bottle! his mind was stored
+with riches, yet he died in moral poverty.  This was a soldier's
+epitaph:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Here lies a soldier whom all must applaud,<BR>
+Who fought many battles at home and abroad!<BR>
+But the hottest engagement he ever was in,<BR>
+Was the conquest of self, in the battle of sin."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In 1860, when a committee visited Abraham Lincoln at his home in
+Springfield, Ill., to notify him of his nomination as President, he
+ordered a pitcher of water and glasses, "that they might drink each
+other's health in the best beverage God ever gave to man."  "Let us,"
+he continued, "make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the
+temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets in
+church, and instances will be as rare in one case as the other."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Burns exercised no control over his appetites, but gave them the rein:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Thus thoughtless follies laid him low<BR>
+And stained his name."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"The first and best of victories," says Plato, "is for a man to conquer
+himself; to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most
+shameful and vile."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Self-control is at the root of all the virtues.  Let a man yield to his
+impulses and passions, and from that moment he gives up his moral
+freedom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasurable," says Walter
+Scott, "and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever
+issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stonewall Jackson, early in life, determined to conquer every weakness
+he had, physical, mental, and moral.  He held all of his powers with a
+firm hand.  To his great self-discipline and self-mastery he owed his
+success.  So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he
+could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter.  "I will not give
+in to the cold," he said.  For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he
+lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body
+because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the
+idea.  This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military
+Institute.  His doctor advised him to retire at nine o'clock; and, no
+matter where he was, or who was present, he always sought his bed on
+the minute.  He adhered rigidly through life to this stern system of
+discipline.  Such self-training, such self-conquest, gives one great
+power over others.  It is equal to genius itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a good plan to form the habit of ranking our various qualities,
+marking our strongest point one hundred and all the others in
+proportion, in order to make the lowest mark more apparent, and
+enabling us to try to raise or strengthen it.  A man's industry, for
+example, may be his strongest point, one hundred, his physical courage
+may be fifty; his moral courage, seventy-five; his temper, twenty-five;
+with but ten for self-control,&mdash;which, if he has strong appetites and
+passions, will be likely to be the rock on which he will split.  He
+should strive in every way to raise it from one of the weakest
+qualities to one of the strongest.  It would take but two or three
+minutes a day to rank ourselves in such a table by noting the exercise
+of each faculty for the day.  If you have worked hard and faithfully,
+mark industry one hundred.  If you have lost your temper, and, in
+consequence, lost your self-control, and made a fool of yourself,
+indicate it by a low mark.  This will be an incentive to try to raise
+it the next day.  If you have been irritable, indicate it by a
+corresponding mark, and redeem yourself on the morrow.  If you have
+been cowardly where you should have been brave, hesitating where you
+should have shown decision, false where you should have been true,
+foolish where you should have been wise, tardy where you should have
+been prompt; if you have prevaricated where you should have told the
+exact truth; if you have taken the advantage where you should have been
+fair, have been unjust where you should have been just, impatient where
+you should have been patient, cross where you should have been
+cheerful, so indicate by your marks.  You will find this a great aid to
+character building.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a subtle and profound remark of Hegel's that the riddle which the
+Sphinx, the Egyptian symbol of the mysteriousness of Nature, propounds
+to Oedipus is only another way of expressing the command of the Delphic
+oracle, "Know thyself."  And when the answer is given the Sphinx casts
+herself down from her rock.  When man knows himself, the mysteriousness
+of Nature and her terrors vanish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The command by the ancient oracle at Delphos is of eternal
+significance.  Add to it its natural complement&mdash;Help thyself&mdash;and the
+path to success is open to those who obey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Guard your weak point</I>.  Moral contagion borrows fully half its
+strength from the weakness of its victims.  Have you a hot, passionate
+temper?  If so, a moment's outbreak, like a rat-hole in a dam, may
+flood all the work of years.  One angry word sometimes raises a storm
+that time itself cannot allay.  A single angry word has lost many a
+friend.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A Quaker was asked by a merchant whom he had conquered by his patience
+how he had been able to bear the other's abuse, and replied: "Friend, I
+will tell thee.  I was naturally as hot and violent as thou art.  I
+observed that men in a passion always speak loud, and I thought if I
+could control my voice I should repress my passion.  I have therefore
+made it a rule never to let my voice rise above a certain key, and by a
+careful observance of this rule, I have, by the blessing of God,
+entirely mastered my natural tongue."  Mr. Christmas of the Bank of
+England explains that the secret of his self-control under very trying
+circumstances was due to a rule learned from the great Pitt, never to
+lose his temper during banking hours from nine to three.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Socrates found in himself any disposition to anger, he would check
+it by speaking low, in opposition to the motions of his displeasure.
+If you are conscious of being in a passion, keep your mouth shut, lest
+you increase it.  Many a person has dropped dead in a rage.  Fits of
+anger bring fits of disease.  "Whom the gods would destroy they first
+make mad."  "Keep cool," says Webster, "anger is not argument."  "Be
+calm in arguing," says George Herbert, "for fierceness makes error a
+fault, and truth discourtesy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To be angry with a weak man is to prove that you are not strong
+yourself.  "Anger," says Pythagoras, "begins with folly and ends with
+repentance."  You must measure the strength of a man by the power of
+the feelings he subdues, not by the power of those which subdue him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+De Leon, a distinguished Spanish poet, after lying years in dungeons of
+the Inquisition, dreary, and alone, without light, for translating part
+of the Scriptures into his native tongue, was released and restored to
+his professorship.  A great crowd thronged to hear his first lecture,
+out of curiosity to learn what he might say about his imprisonment.
+But the great man merely resumed the lecture which had been so cruelly
+broken off five years before, just where he left it, with the words
+"Heri discebamus" (Yesterday we were teaching).  What a lesson in this
+remarkable example of self-control for those who allow their tongues to
+jabber whatever happens to be uppermost in their minds!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Did you ever see a man receive a flagrant insult, and only grow a
+little pale, bite his quivering lip, and then reply quietly?  Did you
+ever see a man in anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock,
+mastering himself?  Have you not seen one bearing a hopeless daily
+trial remain silent and never tell the world what cankered his home
+peace?  That is strength.  "He who, with strong passions, remains
+chaste; he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in
+him, can be provoked, and yet restrain himself and forgive,&mdash;these are
+strong men, the spiritual heroes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You will be remembered only as the man who broke my nose," said young
+Michael Angelo to the man Torrigiano, who struck him in anger.  What
+sublime self-control for a quick-tempered man!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ask whether it would not be manly to resent a great injury," said
+Eardley Wilmot: "I answer that it would be manly to resent it, but it
+would be Godlike to forgive it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That man has conquered his tongue who can allow the ribald jest or
+scurrilous word to die unspoken on his lips, and maintain an indignant
+silence amid reproaches and accusations and sneers and scoffs.  "He is
+a fool who cannot be angry," says English, "but he is a wise man who
+will not."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Peter the Great made a law in 1722 that a nobleman who should beat his
+slave should be regarded as insane, and a guardian appointed to look
+after his property and person.  This great monarch once struck his
+gardener, who took to his bed and died.  Peter, hearing of this,
+exclaimed with tears in his eyes, "Alas!  I have civilized my own
+subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet have I not been able to
+civilize or conquer myself."  The same monarch, when drunk, rushed upon
+Admiral Le Fort with a sword.  Le Fort, with great self-possession,
+bared his breast to receive the stroke.  This sobered Peter, and
+afterwards he asked the pardon of Le Fort.  Peter said, "I am trying to
+reform my country, and I am not yet able to reform myself."
+Self-conquest is man's last and greatest victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A medical authority of highest repute affirms that excessive labor,
+exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of
+necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth and
+intemperance, are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none
+of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passion,&mdash;that men and women
+have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these, but that
+instances are very rare where people of irascible tempers live to
+extreme old age.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the self-discipline of a man who had never looked upon war until
+he was forty that enabled Oliver Cromwell to create an army which never
+fought without annihilating, yet which retired into the ranks of
+industry as soon as the government was established, each soldier being
+distinguished from his neighbors only by his superior diligence,
+sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How sweet the serenity of habitual self-command!  When does a man feel
+more a master of himself than when he has passed through a sudden and
+severe provocation in silence or in undisturbed good humor?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether teaching the rules of an exact morality, answering his corrupt
+judges, receiving sentence of death, or swallowing the poison, Socrates
+was still calm, quiet, undisturbed, intrepid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a great thing to have brains, but it is vastly greater to be able
+to command them.  The Duke of Wellington had great power over himself,
+although his natural temper was extremely irritable.  He remained at
+the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning
+of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful," although he
+knew that a desperate battle was awaiting him.  On the field of
+Waterloo he gave his orders at the most critical moments without the
+slightest excitement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Napoleon, having made his arrangements for the terrible conflict of the
+next day (Jena and Auerstadt), retired to his tent about midnight, and
+calmly sat down to draw up a plan of study and discipline for Madame
+Campan's female school.  "Keep cool, and you command everybody," says
+St. Just.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"He that would govern others first should be<BR>
+The master of himself,"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+says Massinger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He who has mastered himself, who is his own Caesar, will be stronger
+than his passion, superior to circumstances, higher than his calling,
+greater than his speech.  Self-control is the generalship which turns a
+mob of raw recruits into a disciplined army.  The rough man has become
+the polished and dignified soldier, in other words, the man has got
+control of himself, and knows how to use himself.  The human race is
+under constant drill.  Our occupations, difficulties, obstacles,
+disappointments, if used aright, are the great schoolmasters which help
+us to possess ourselves.  The man who is master of himself will not be
+a slave to drudgery, but will keep in advance of his work.  He will not
+rob his family of that which is worth more than money or position; he
+will not be the slave of his occupation, not at the mercy of
+circumstances.  His methods and system will enable him to accomplish
+wonders, and yet give him leisure for self-culture.  The man who
+controls himself works to live rather than lives for work.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man of great self-control, the man who thinks a great deal and says
+little, who is self-centred, well balanced, carries a thousand times
+more weight than the man of weak will, always wavering and undecided.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If a man lacks self-control he seems to lack everything.  Without it he
+can have no patience, no power to govern himself, he can have no
+self-reliance, for he will always be at the mercy of his strongest
+passion.  If he lacks self-control, the very backbone, pith, and nerve
+of character are lacking also.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The discipline which is the main end in education is simply control
+acquired over one's mental faculties; without this discipline no man is
+a strong and accurate thinker.  "Prove to me," says Mrs. Oliphant,
+"that you can control yourself, and I'll say you're an educated man;
+and, without this, all other education is good for next to nothing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, was a woman of a most fantastical and
+furious spirit.  At one time, having vented all the reproaches upon
+Socrates her fury could suggest, he went out and sat before the door.
+His calm and unconcerned behavior but irritated her so much the more;
+and, in the excess of her rage, she ran upstairs and emptied a vessel
+upon his head, at which he only laughed and said that "so much thunder
+must needs produce a shower."  Alcibiades his friend, talking with him
+about his wife, told him he wondered how he could bear such an
+everlasting scold in the same house with him.  He replied, "I have so
+accustomed myself to expect it, that it now offends me no more than the
+noise of carriages in the street."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How many men have in their chain of character one weak link.  They may
+be weak in the link of truthfulness, politeness, trustworthiness,
+temper, chastity, temperance, courage, industry, or may have some other
+weakness which wrecks their success and thwarts a life's endeavor.  He
+who would succeed must hold all his faculties under perfect control;
+they must be disciplined, drilled, until they obey the will.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Think of a young man just starting out in life to conquer the world
+being at the mercy of his own appetites and passions!  He cannot stand
+up and look the world in the face when he is the slave of what should
+be his own servants.  He cannot lead who is led.  There is nothing
+which gives certainty and direction to the life of a man who is not his
+own master.  If he has mastered all but one appetite, passion, or
+weakness, he is still a slave; it is the weakest point that measures
+the strength of character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Seneca, one of the greatest of the ancient philosophers, said that "we
+should every night call ourselves to account.  What infirmity have I
+mastered to-day? what passion opposed? what temptation resisted? what
+virtue acquired?" and then he follows with the profound truth that "our
+vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the
+shrift."  If you cannot at first control your anger, learn to control
+your tongue, which, like fire, is a good servant, but a hard master.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks' silence.  There is many a man
+whose tongue might govern multitudes if he could only govern his
+tongue.  Anger, like too much wine, hides us from ourselves, but
+exposes us to others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+General von Moltke, perhaps the greatest strategist of this century,
+had, as a foundation for his other talents, the power to "hold his
+tongue in seven languages."  A young man went to Socrates to learn
+oratory.  On being introduced, he talked so incessantly that Socrates
+asked for double fees.  "Why charge me double?" asked the young fellow.
+"Because," said the orator, "I must teach you two sciences: the one how
+to hold your tongue, the other how to speak."  The first is the more
+difficult.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Half the actual trouble of life would be saved if people would remember
+that silence is golden, when they are irritated, vexed, or annoyed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To feel provoked or exasperated at a trifle, when the nerves are
+exhausted, is, perhaps, natural to us in our imperfect state.  But why
+put into the shape of speech the annoyance which, once uttered, is
+remembered; which may burn like a blistering wound, or rankle like a
+poisoned arrow?  If a child be crying or a friend capricious, or a
+servant unreasonable, be careful what you say.  Do not speak while you
+feel the impulse of anger, for you will be almost certain to say too
+much, to say more than your cooler judgment will approve, and to speak
+in a way that you will regret.  Be silent until the "sweet by and by,"
+when you will be calm, rested, and self-controlled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words?  There is more hope of a
+fool than of him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Silence," says Zimmerman, "is the safest response for all the
+contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In rhetoric, as Emerson truly says, this art of omission is the chief
+secret of power.  "Everything tells in favor of the man who talks but
+little.  The presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in point
+of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is that he
+is very superior indeed."  Grant was master of the science of silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The self-controlled are self-possessed.  "Sir, the house is on fire!"
+shrieked a frightened servant, running into Dr. Lawson's study.  "Go
+and tell your mistress," said the preoccupied professor, without
+looking up from the book he was reading; "you know I have no charge of
+household matters."  A woman whose house was on fire threw a
+looking-glass out of the window, and carried a pair of andirons several
+rods to a safe place beside a stone wall.  "Presence of mind and
+courage in distress are more than armies to procure success."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Xenophon tells us that at one time the Persian princes had for their
+teachers the four best men in the kingdom.  (1) The wisest man to teach
+wisdom.  (2) The bravest to teach courage.  (3) The most just to train
+the moral nature.  (4) The most temperate to teach self-control.  We
+have them all in the Bible, and in Christ our teacher, an example.  "If
+it is a small sacrifice to discontinue the use of wine," said Samuel J.
+May, "do it for the sake of others; if it is a great sacrifice, do it
+for your own sake."  How many of nature's noblemen, who might be kings
+if they could control themselves, drink away their honor, reputation,
+and money in glasses of "wet damnation," more costly than the vinegar
+in which Cleopatra dissolved her pearls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Experience shows that, quicker than almost any other physical agency,
+alcohol breaks down a man's power of self-control.  But the physical
+evils of intemperance, great as they are, are slight, compared with the
+moral injury it produces.  It is not simply that vices and crimes
+almost inevitably follow the loss of rational self-direction, which is
+the invariable accompaniment of intoxication; manhood is lowered and
+finally lost by the sensual tyranny of appetite.  The drunken man has
+given up the reins of his nature to a fool or a fiend, and he is driven
+fast to base or unutterably foolish ends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With almost palsied hand, at a temperance meeting, John B. Gough signed
+the pledge.  For six days and nights in a wretched garret, without a
+mouthful of food, with scarcely a moment's sleep, he fought the fearful
+battle with appetite.  Weak, famished, almost dying, he crawled into
+the sunlight; but he had conquered the demon, which had almost killed
+him.  Gough used to describe the struggles of a man who tried to leave
+off using tobacco.  He threw away what he had, and said that was the
+end of it; but no, it was only the beginning of it.  He would chew
+camomile, gentian, toothpicks, but it was of no use.  He bought another
+plug of tobacco and put it in his pocket.  He wanted a chew awfully,
+but he looked at it and said, "You are a weed, and I am a <I>man</I>.  I'll
+master you if I die for it;" and he did, while carrying it in his
+pocket daily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Natural appetites, if given rein, will not only grow monstrous and
+despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a
+ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and
+then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock
+his efforts to free himself from this slavery.  The victim of strong
+drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he becomes half
+beast, or half demon.  Oh, the silent, suffering tongues that whisper
+"Don't," but the will lies prostrate, and the debauch goes on.  What a
+mute confession of degradation there is in the very appearance of a
+confirmed sot.  Behold a man no longer in possession of himself; the
+flesh is master; the spiritual nature is sunk in the mire of
+sensuality, and the mental faculties are a mere mob of enfeebled powers
+under bondage to a bestial or mad tyrant.  As Challis says:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Once the demon enters,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Stands within the door;</SPAN><BR>
+Peace and hope and gladness<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Dwell there nevermore."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Many persons are intemperate in their feelings; they are emotionally
+prodigal.  Passion is intemperance; so is caprice.  There is an
+intemperance even in melancholy and mirth.  The temperate man is not
+mastered by his moods; he will not be driven or enticed into excess;
+his steadfast will conquers despondency, and is not unbalanced by
+transient exhilarations, for ecstasy is as fatal as despair.  Temper is
+subjected to reason and conscience.  How many people excuse themselves
+for doing wrong or foolish acts by the plea that they have a quick
+temper.  But he who is king of himself rules his temper, turning its
+very heat and passion into energy that works good instead of evil.
+Stephen Girard, when he heard of a clerk with a strong temper, was glad
+to employ him.  He believed that such persons, taught self-control,
+were the best workers.  Controlled temper is an element of strength;
+wisely regulated, it expends itself as energy in work, just as heat in
+an engine is transmuted into force that drives the wheels of industry.
+Cromwell, William the Silent, Wordsworth, Faraday, Washington, and
+Wellington were men of prodigious tempers, but they were also men whose
+self-control was nearly perfect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+George Washington's faculties were so well balanced and combined that
+his constitution was tempered evenly with all the elements of activity,
+and his mind resembled a well organized commonwealth.  His passions,
+which had the intensest vigor, owed allegiance to reason; and with all
+the fiery quickness of his spirit, his impetuous and massive will was
+held in check by consummate judgment.  He had in his composition a calm
+which was a balance-wheel, and which gave him in moments of highest
+excitement the power of self-control, and enabled him to excel in
+patience, even when he had most cause for disgust.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was said by an enemy of William the Silent that an arrogant or
+indiscreet word never fell from his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How brilliantly could Carlyle write of heroism, courage, self-control,
+and yet fly into a rage at a rooster crowing in a neighbor's yard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A self-controlled mind is a free mind, and freedom is power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I call that mind free," says Channing, "which jealously guards its
+intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does
+not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens
+itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as
+an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still
+more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad,
+not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt its own energies.  I call
+that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances,
+which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the
+creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own
+improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles
+which it has deliberately espoused.  I call that mind free which
+protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not
+cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher
+tribunal than man's, which respects a higher law than fashion, which
+respects itself too much to be the slave or tool of the many or the
+few.  I call that mind free which through confidence in God and in the
+power of virtue has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no
+menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults,
+and possesses itself though all else be lost.  I call that mind free
+which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat
+itself and copy the past, which does not live on its old virtues, which
+does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is
+behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and
+rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.  I call
+that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself
+from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as
+nobler than the empire of the world."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Be free&mdash;not chiefly from the iron chain<BR>
+But from the one which passion forges&mdash;be<BR>
+The master of thyself.  If lost, regain<BR>
+The rule o'er chance, sense, circumstance.  Be free.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">EPHRAIM PEABODY.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"It is not enough to have great qualities," says La Rochefoucauld; "we
+should also have the management of them."  No man can call himself
+educated until every voluntary muscle obeys his will.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every human being is conscious of two natures.  One is ever reaching up
+after the good, the true, and the noble,&mdash;is aspiring after all that
+uplifts, elevates, and purifies.  It is the God-side of man, the image
+of the Creator, the immortal side, the spiritual side.  It is the
+gravitation of the soul faculties toward their Maker.  The other is the
+bestial side which gravitates downward.  It does not aspire, it
+grovels; it wallows in the mire of sensualism.  Like the beast, it
+knows but one law, and is led by only one motive, self-indulgence,
+self-gratification.  When neither hungry nor thirsty, or when gorged
+and sated by over-indulgence, it lies quiet and peaceful as a lamb, and
+we sometimes think it subdued.  But when its imperious passion
+accumulates, it clamors for satisfaction.  You cannot reason with it,
+for it has no reason, only an imperious instinct for gratification.
+You cannot appeal to its self-respect, for it has none.  It cares
+nothing for character, for manliness, for the spiritual.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These two natures are ever at war, one pulling heavenward, the other,
+earthward.  Nor do they ever become reconciled.  Either may conquer,
+but the vanquished never submits.  The higher nature may be compelled
+to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always
+rebels and enters its protest.  It can never forget that it bears the
+image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism.
+The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed.  If
+the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to
+look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he could
+only hush the voice which haunts him and condemns him when he is bound
+in slavery, if he could only enjoy his indulgences without the mockery
+of remorse, he thinks he would be content to remain a brute.  But the
+ghost of his better self rises as he is about to partake of his
+delight, and robs him of the expected pleasure.  He has sold his better
+self for pleasure which is poison, and he cannot lose the consciousness
+of the fearful sacrifice he has made.  The banquet may be ready, but
+the hand on the wall is writing his doom.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Give me that soul, superior power,<BR>
+That conquest over fate,<BR>
+Which sways the weakness of the hour,<BR>
+Rules little things as great:<BR>
+That lulls the human waves of strife<BR>
+With words and feelings kind,<BR>
+And makes the trials of our life<BR>
+The triumphs of our mind.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">CHARLES SWAIN.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Reader, attend&mdash;whether thy soul<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Soars fancy's flights above the pole,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Or darkly grubs this earthly hole,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">In low pursuits:</SPAN><BR>
+Know prudent, cautious self-control<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Is wisdom's root.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">BURNS.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The king is the man who can.&mdash;CARLYLE.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+I have only one counsel for you&mdash;Be master.&mdash;NAPOLEON.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Ah, silly man, who dream'st thy honor stands<BR>
+In ruling others, not thyself.  Thy slaves<BR>
+Serve thee, and thou thy slave: in iron bands<BR>
+Thy servile spirit, pressed with wild passions, raves.<BR>
+Wouldst thou live honored?&mdash;clip ambition's wing:<BR>
+To reason's yoke thy furious passions bring:<BR>
+Thrice noble is the man who of himself is king.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">PHINEAS FLETCHER.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Not in the clamor of the crowded street,<BR>
+Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,<BR>
+But in ourselves are triumph and defeat."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
+
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+</pre>
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+</BODY>
+
+</HTML>
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,11134 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Architects of Fate
+       or, Steps to Success and Power
+
+Author: Orison Swett Marden
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2007 [EBook #21622]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCHITECTS OF FATE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Phillips Brooks]
+
+"The best-loved man in New England."
+
+"The ideal life, the life full of completion, haunts us all.  We feel
+the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are."
+
+"_First, be a man._"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE
+
+OR, STEPS TO SUCCESS AND POWER
+
+
+  A BOOK DESIGNED TO INSPIRE YOUTH TO
+  CHARACTER BUILDING, SELF-CULTURE
+  AND NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT
+
+
+BY
+
+ORISON SWETT MARDEN
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "PUSHING TO THE FRONT
+  OR, SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES"
+
+
+
+_ILLUSTRATED WITH SIXTEEN FINE
+  PORTRAITS OF EMINENT PERSONS_
+
+
+
+  "All are architects of fate
+  Working in these walls of time."
+
+  "Our to-days and yesterdays
+  Are the blocks with which we build."
+
+  "Let thy great deed be thy prayer to thy God."
+
+
+
+
+TORONTO
+
+WILLIAM BRIGGS
+
+WESLEY BUILDINGS
+
+MONTREAL: C. W. COATES
+
+HALIFAX: S. F. HUESTIS
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1895,
+
+BY ORISON SWETT MARDEN.
+
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+The demand for more than a dozen editions of "Pushing to the Front"
+during its first year and its universally favorable reception, both at
+home and abroad, have encouraged the author to publish this companion
+volume of somewhat similar scope and purpose.  The two books were
+prepared simultaneously, and the story of the first, given in its
+preface, applies equally well to this.
+
+Inspiration to character-building and worthy achievement is the keynote
+of the present volume, its object, to arouse to honorable exertion
+youth who are drifting without aim, to awaken dormant ambitions in
+those who have grown discouraged in the struggle for success, to
+encourage and stimulate to higher resolve those who are setting out to
+make their own way, with perhaps neither friendship nor capital other
+than a determination to get on in the world.
+
+Nothing is so fascinating to a youth with high purpose, life, and
+energy throbbing in his young blood as stories of men and women who
+have brought great things to pass.  Though these themes are as old as
+the human race, yet they are ever new, and more interesting to the
+young than any fiction.  The cry of youth is for life! more life!  No
+didactic or dogmatic teaching, however brilliant, will capture a
+twentieth-century boy, keyed up to the highest pitch by the pressure of
+an intense civilization.  The romance of achievement under
+difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant ends; the story of
+how great men started, their struggles, their long waitings, amid want
+and woe, the obstacles overcome, the final triumphs; examples, which
+explode excuses, of men who have seized common situations and made them
+great, of those of average capacity who have succeeded by the use of
+ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose:
+these will most inspire the ambitious youth.  The author teaches that
+there are bread and success for every youth under the American flag who
+has the grit to seize his chance and work his way to his own loaf; that
+the barriers are not yet erected which declare to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther"; that the most forbidding circumstances
+cannot repress a longing for knowledge, a yearning for growth; that
+poverty, humble birth, loss of limbs or even eyesight, have not been
+able to bar the progress of men with grit; that poverty has rocked the
+cradle of the giants who have wrung civilization from barbarism, and
+have led the world up from savagery to the Gladstones, the Lincolns,
+and the Grants.
+
+The book shows that it is the man with one unwavering aim who cuts his
+way through opposition and forges to the front; that in this electric
+age, where everything is pusher or pushed, he who would succeed must
+hold his ground and push hard; that what are stumbling-blocks and
+defeats to the weak and vacillating, are but stepping-stones and
+victories to the strong and determined.  The author teaches that every
+germ of goodness will at last struggle into bloom and fruitage, and
+that true success follows every right step.  He has tried to touch the
+higher springs of the youth's aspiration; to lead him to high ideals;
+to teach him that there is something nobler in an occupation than
+merely living-getting or money-getting; that a man may make millions
+and be a failure still; to caution youth not to allow the maxims of a
+low prudence, dinned daily into his ears in this money-getting age, to
+repress the longings for a higher life; that the hand can never safely
+reach higher than does the heart.
+
+The author's aim has been largely through concrete illustrations which
+have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in
+a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more
+pertinent than novel.
+
+The author wishes to acknowledge valuable assistance from Mr. Arthur W.
+Brown, of W. Kingston, R. I.
+
+O. S. M.
+
+43 BOWDOIN ST., BOSTON, MASS.
+
+December 2, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.  WANTED--A MAN
+
+God after a _man_.  Wealth is nothing, fame is nothing.  _Manhood is
+everything_.
+
+II.  DARE
+
+Dare to live thy creed.  Conquer your place in the world.  All things
+serve a brave soul.
+
+III.  THE WILL AND THE WAY
+
+Find a way or make one.  Everything is either pusher or pushed.  The
+world always listens to a man with a will in him.
+
+IV.  SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES
+
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to recognition through detraction, calumny, and persecution.
+
+V.  USES OR OBSTACLES
+
+The Great Sculptor cares little for the human block as such; it is the
+statue He is after; and He will blast, hammer, and chisel with poverty,
+hardships, anything to get out the man.
+
+VI.  ONE UNWAVERING AIM
+
+Find your purpose and fling your life out to it.  Try to be somebody
+with all your might.
+
+VII.  SOWING AND REAPING
+
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.
+_Start right_.
+
+VIII.  SELF-HELP
+
+Self-made or never made.  The greatest men have risen from the ranks.
+
+IX.  WORK AND WAIT
+
+Don't risk a life's superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+
+X.  CLEAR GRIT
+
+The goddess of fame or of fortune has been won by many a poor boy who
+had no friends, no backing, or anything but pure grit and invincible
+purpose to commend him.
+
+XI.  THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD
+
+Manhood is above all riches and overtops all titles; character is
+greater than any career.
+
+XII.  WEALTH IN ECONOMY
+
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach,
+are disagreeable; but debt is infinitely worse than all."
+
+XIII.  RICH WITHOUT MONEY
+
+To have nothing is not poverty.  Whoever uplifts civilization is rich
+though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.
+
+XIV.  OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE
+
+"How speaks the present hour?  _Act_."  Don't wait for great
+opportunities.  _Seize common occasions and make them great_.
+
+XV.  THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS
+
+There is nothing small in a world where a mud-crack swells to an
+Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold.
+
+XVI.  SELF-MASTERY
+
+Guard your weak point.  Be lord over yourself.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF PORTRAITS.
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+    I. Phillips Brooks . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+   II. Oliver Hazard Perry
+  III. Walter Scott
+   IV. William Hickling Prescott
+    V. John Bunyan
+   VI. Richard Arkwright
+  VII. Victor Hugo
+ VIII. James A. Garfield (missing from book)
+   IX. Thomas Alva Edison
+    X. Andrew Jackson
+   XI. John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)
+  XII. Alexander Hamilton
+ XIII. Ralph Waldo Emerson
+  XIV. Thomas Jefferson
+   XV. Louis Agassiz
+  XVI. James Russell Lowell
+
+
+
+
+ARCHITECTS OF FATE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+WANTED--A MAN.
+
+  "Wanted; men:
+  Not systems fit and wise,
+  Not faiths with rigid eyes,
+  Not wealth in mountain piles,
+  Not power with gracious smiles,
+  Not even the potent pen:
+  Wanted; men."
+
+Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and
+know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a
+man.--JEREMIAH.
+
+All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us?  We want a man!
+Don't look so far for this man.  You have him at hand.  This man,--it
+is you, it is I, it is each one of us! . . .  How to constitute one's
+self a man?  Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
+easier, if one wills it.--ALEXANDRE DUMAS.
+
+  "'Tis life, not death for which we pant!
+  'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant:
+  More life and fuller, that we want."
+
+I do not wish in attempting to paint a man to describe an air-fed,
+unimpassioned, impossible ghost.  My eyes and ears are revolted by any
+neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man.--EMERSON.
+
+  But nature, with a matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born,
+  And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn;
+  She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine,
+  And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?"
+        ELIZA COOK.
+
+
+"In a thousand cups of life," says Emerson, "only one is the right
+mixture.  The fine adjustment of the existing elements, where the
+well-mixed man is born with eyes not too dull, nor too good, with fire
+enough and earth enough, capable of receiving impressions from all
+things, and not too susceptible, then no gift need be bestowed on him.
+He brings his fortune with him."
+
+Diogenes sought with a lantern at noontide in ancient Athens for a
+perfectly honest man, and sought in vain.  In the market place he once
+cried aloud, "Hear me, O men;" and, when a crowd collected around him,
+he said scornfully: "I called for men, not pygmies."
+
+The world has a standing advertisement over the door of every
+profession, every occupation, every calling; "Wanted--A Man."
+
+Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
+has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
+though all the world say "Yes."
+
+Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
+permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
+manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one facility to
+stunt or paralyze his other faculties.
+
+Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
+estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
+living.  Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and
+culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.
+
+A thousand pulpits vacant in a single religious denomination, a
+thousand preachers standing idle in the market place, while a thousand
+church committees scour the land for men to fill those same vacant
+pulpits, and scour in vain, is a sufficient indication, in one
+direction at least, of the largeness of the opportunities of the age,
+and also of the crying need of good men.
+
+Wanted, a man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little
+defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his
+powers.  Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any part of
+his nature.
+
+Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development,
+who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow
+specialty, and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and
+die.  Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of
+things.  Wanted, a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who
+does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day
+life; a man who prefers substance to show, who regards his good name as
+a priceless treasure.
+
+Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
+whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a
+tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of
+nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as
+himself."
+
+God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, but he also calls
+him to be intelligent and skillful and strong and brave.
+
+The world wants a man who is educated all over; whose nerves are
+brought to their acutest sensibility, whose brain is cultured, keen,
+incisive, penetrating, broad, liberal, deep; whose hands are deft;
+whose eyes are alert, sensitive, microscopic, whose heart is tender,
+broad, magnanimous, true.
+
+The whole world is looking for such a man.  Although there are millions
+out of employment, yet it is almost impossible to find just the right
+man in almost any department of life.  Every profession and every
+occupation has a standing advertisement all over the world: "Wanted--A
+Man."
+
+Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on education, says: "According to the
+order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the
+profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the
+duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices
+that have a relation to him.  It matters little to me whether my pupil
+be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.  Nature has destined
+us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination
+concerning society.  To live is the profession I would teach him.  When
+I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a
+lawyer, nor a divine.  _Let him first be a man_; Fortune may remove him
+from one rank to another as she pleases, he will be always found in his
+place."
+
+A little, short doctor of divinity in a large Baptist convention stood
+on a step and said he thanked God he was a Baptist.  The audience could
+not hear and called "Louder."  "Get up higher," some one said.  "I
+can't," he replied.  "To be a Baptist is as high as one can get."  But
+there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
+_man_.
+
+As Emerson says, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he
+rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty?
+is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but is he anybody?
+does he stand for something?  He must be good of his kind.  That is all
+that Talleyrand, all that State Street, all that the common sense of
+mankind asks.
+
+When Garfield was asked as a young boy, "what he meant to be," he
+answered: "First of all, I must make myself a man, if I do not succeed
+in that, I can succeed in nothing."
+
+Montaigne says our work is not to train a soul by itself alone, nor a
+body by itself alone, but to train a man.
+
+One great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good
+animals.  To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
+coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits.  They must
+have a robustness of health.  Mere absence of disease is not health.
+It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life
+and beauty to the valley below.  Only he is healthy who exults in mere
+animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding
+pulse throughout his body, who feels life in every limb, as dogs do
+when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of
+ice.
+
+Pope, the poet, was with Sir Godfrey Kneller, the artist, one day, when
+the latter's nephew, a Guinea slave-trader, came into the room.
+"Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two
+greatest men in the world."  "I don't know how great men you may be,"
+said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks.  I have often bought
+a much better man than either of you, all muscles and bones, for ten
+guineas."
+
+Sydney Smith said, "I am convinced that digestion is the great secret
+of life, and that character, virtue and talents, and qualities are
+powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie crust, and rich soups.  I have
+often thought I could feed or starve men into virtues or vices, and
+affect them more powerfully with my instruments of torture than
+Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."
+
+What more glorious than a magnificent manhood, animated with the
+bounding spirits of overflowing health?
+
+It is a sad sight to see thousands of students graduated every year
+from our grand institutions, whose object is to make stalwart,
+independent, self-supporting men, turned out into the world saplings
+instead of stalwart oaks, "memory-glands" instead of brainy men,
+helpless instead of self-supporting, sickly instead of robust, weak
+instead of strong, leaning instead of erect.  "So many promising
+youths, and never a finished man!"
+
+The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of
+the body.  A peevish, snarling, ailing man cannot develop the vigor and
+strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust, jolly
+man.  There is an inherent love in the human mind for wholeness, a
+demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an
+inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency.  Nature too
+demands that man be ever at the top of his condition.  The giant's
+strength with the imbecile's brain will not be characteristic of the
+coming man.
+
+Man has been a dwarf of himself, but a higher type of manhood stands at
+the door of this age knocking for admission.
+
+As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave
+reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes,
+and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a
+while the whole sea is there and beyond it, so now and then there comes
+a man head and shoulders above his fellow-men, showing that Nature has
+not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man will overtop
+the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.
+
+Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points
+of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a
+nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait
+of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.  So the coming man will
+be a composite, many in one.  He will absorb into himself not the
+weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other
+types of men.  He will be a man raised to the highest power.  He will
+be self-centred, equipoised, and ever master of himself.  His
+sensibility will not be deadened or blunted by violation of nature's
+laws.  His whole character will be impressible, and will respond to the
+most delicate touches of nature.
+
+What a piece of work--this coming man!  "How noble in reason.  How
+infinite in faculties.  In form and motion how express and admirable,
+in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.  The
+beauty of the world.  The paragon of animals."
+
+The first requisite of all education and discipline should be
+man-timber.  Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
+Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or
+an exquisite carving.  But it must become timber first.  Time and
+patience develop the sapling into the tree.  So through discipline,
+education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy
+mental, moral, physical timber.
+
+What an aid to character building would be the determination of the
+young man in starting out in life to consider himself his own bank;
+that his notes will be accepted as good or bad, and will pass current
+everywhere or be worthless, according to his individual reputation for
+honor and veracity; that if he lets a note go to protest, his bank of
+character will be suspected; if he lets two or three go to protest,
+public confidence will be seriously shaken; that if they continue to go
+to protest, his reputation will be lost and confidence in him ruined.
+
+If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every
+statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he
+makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be
+kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other
+men's time, if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure,
+feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate
+a hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a
+stand at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost
+unlimited credit and the confidence of all, and would have developed
+into noble man-timber.
+
+What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a
+continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce, compared
+with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the
+accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with the fear of
+exposure, with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no
+stain of dishonor?  To have done no man a wrong; to have put your
+signature to no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not
+have been an attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within
+arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire
+and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;--_this is to
+be a man_.
+
+  "He that of such a height hath built his mind,
+  And reared the dwelling of his thought so strong
+  As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
+  Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
+  Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
+  His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
+  What a fair seat hath he; from whence he may
+  The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey."
+    [_Lines found in one of the books of Beecher's Library._]
+
+A man is never so happy as when he is _totus in se_; as when he
+suffices to himself, and can walk without crutches or a guide.  Said
+Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as much out of myself as could be made
+of the stuff, and no man should require more."
+
+Man is the only great thing in the universe.  All the ages have been
+trying to produce a perfect model.  Only one complete man has yet been
+evolved.  The best of us are but prophecies of what is to come.
+
+    What constitutes a state?
+  Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
+    Thick wall or moated gate;
+  Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned;
+    Not bays and broad-armed ports,
+  Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
+    Not starred and spangled courts,
+  Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
+    No: men, high-minded men,
+  With powers as far above dull brutes endued
+    In forest, brake, or den,
+  As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude,--
+    Men who their duties know,
+  But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
+    Prevent the long-aimed blow,
+  And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.
+        WILLIAM JONES.
+
+  God give us men.  A time like this demands
+  Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands:
+  Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
+  Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
+  Men who possess opinions and a will;
+  Men who have honor--men who will not lie;
+  Men who can stand before a demagogue
+  And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
+  Tall men sun-crowned, who live above the fog
+  In public duty, and in private thinking.
+        ANON.
+
+  Open thy bosom, set thy wishes wide,
+  And let in manhood--let in happiness;
+  Admit the boundless theatre of thought
+  From nothing up to God . . . which makes a man!
+        YOUNG.
+
+  "The wisest man could ask no more of fate
+  Than to be simple, modest, manly, true."
+
+  In speech right gentle, yet so wise; princely of mien,
+  Yet softly mannered; modest, deferent,
+  And tender-hearted, though of fearless blood.
+        EDWIN ARNOLD.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DARE.
+
+The Spartans did not inquire how many the enemy are, but where they
+are.--AGIS II.
+
+What's brave, what's noble, let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+and make death proud to take us.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  Better, like Hector, in the field to die,
+  Than, like a perfumed Paris, turn and fly.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+Let me die facing the enemy.--BAYARD.
+
+Who conquers me, shall find a stubborn foe.--BYRON.
+
+Courage in danger is half the battle.--PLAUTUS.
+
+  No great deed is done
+  By falterers who ask for certainty.
+        GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+Fortune befriends the bold.--DRYDEN.
+
+  Tender handed stroke a nettle,
+    And it stings you for your pains;
+  Grasp it like a man of mettle,
+    And it soft as silk remains.
+        AARON HILL.
+
+We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.--BOVEE.
+
+  Man should dare all things that he knows is right,
+  And fear to do nothing save what is wrong.
+        PHEBE CARY.
+
+  Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
+  Shows softness in the upper story.
+        LOWELL.
+
+O friend, never strike sail to fear.  Come into port grandly, or sail
+with God the seas.--EMERSON.
+
+To stand with a smile upon your face against a stake from which you
+cannot get away--that, no doubt, is heroic.  But the true glory is
+resignation to the inevitable.  To stand unchained, with perfect
+liberty to go away, held only by the higher claims of duty, and let the
+fire creep up to the heart,--this is heroism.--F. W. ROBERTSON.
+
+
+"Steady, men!  Every man must die where he stands!" said Colin Campbell
+to the Ninety-third Highlanders at Balaklava, as an overwhelming force
+of Russian cavalry came sweeping down.  "Ay, ay, Sir Colin! we'll do
+that!" was the cordial response from men many of whom had to keep their
+word by thus obeying.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: COMMODORE PERRY]
+
+"We have met the enemy and they are ours."
+
+  "He either fears his fate too much
+    Or his deserts too small,
+  That dares not put it to the touch,
+    To gain or lose it all."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Bring back the colors," shouted a captain at the battle of the Alma,
+when an ensign maintained his ground in front, although the men were
+retreating.  "No," cried the ensign, "bring up the men to the colors."
+"To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare," was Danton's
+noble defiance to the enemies of France.
+
+"The Commons of France have resolved to deliberate," said Mirabeau to
+De Breze, who brought an order from the king for them to disperse, June
+23, 1789.  "We have heard the intentions that have been attributed to
+the king; and you, sir, who cannot be recognized as his organ in the
+National Assembly,--you, who have neither place, voice, nor right to
+speak,--you are not the person to bring to us a message of his.  Go,
+say to those who sent you that we are here by the power of the people,
+and that we will not be driven hence, save by the power of the bayonet."
+
+When the assembled senate of Rome begged Regulus not to return to
+Carthage to fulfill an illegal promise, he calmly replied: "Have you
+resolved to dishonor me?  Torture and death are awaiting me, but what
+are these to the shame of an infamous act, or the wounds of a guilty
+mind?  Slave as I am to Carthage, I still have the spirit of a Roman.
+I have sworn to return.  It is my duty.  Let the gods take care of the
+rest."
+
+The courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave
+way the moment his final doom was announced.  The moral cowardice which
+had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and
+despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive
+recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon.  But pardon was
+impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its
+very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford
+on the 21st of March, to repeat his recantation on the way to the
+stake.  "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before
+him,--"now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more
+than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is
+the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now
+renounce and refuse as things written by a hand contrary to the truth
+which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my
+life, if it might be.  And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing
+contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished;
+for if I come to the fire it shall be the first burned."  "This was the
+hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it
+shall suffer first punishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame,
+"he never stirred nor cried till life was gone."
+
+"Oh, if I were only a man!" exclaimed Rebecca Bates, a girl of
+fourteen, as she looked from the window of a lighthouse at Scituate,
+Mass., during the War of 1812, and saw a British warship anchor in the
+harbor.  "What could you do?" asked Sarah Winsor, a young visitor.
+"See what a lot of them the boats contain, and look at their guns!" and
+she pointed to five large boats, filled with soldiers in scarlet
+uniforms, who were coming to burn the vessels in the harbor and destroy
+the town.  "I don't care, I'd fight," said Rebecca.  "I'd use father's
+old shotgun--anything.  Think of uncle's new boat and the sloop!  And
+how hard it is to sit here and see it all, and not lift a finger to
+help.  Father and uncle are in the village and will do all they can.
+How still it is in the town!  There is not a man to be seen."  "Oh,
+they are hiding till the soldiers get nearer," said Sarah, "then we'll
+hear the shots and the drum."  "The drum!" exclaimed Rebecca, "how can
+they use it?  It is here.  Father brought it home last night to mend.
+See! the first boat has reached the sloop.  Oh! they are going to burn
+her.  Where is that drum?  I've a great mind to go down and beat it.
+We could hide behind the sandhills and bushes."  As flames began to
+rise from the sloop the ardor of the girls increased.  They found the
+drum and an old fife, and, slipping out of doors unnoticed by Mrs.
+Bates, soon stood behind a row of sandhills.  "Rub-a-dub-dub,
+rub-a-dub-dub," went the drum, and "squeak, squeak, squeak," went the
+fife.  The Americans in the town thought that help had come from
+Boston, and rushed into boats to attack the redcoats.  The British
+paused in their work of destruction; and, when the fife began to play
+"Yankee Doodle," they scrambled into their boats and rowed in haste to
+the warship, which weighed anchor and sailed away as fast as the wind
+would carry her.
+
+A woman's piercing shriek suddenly startled a party of surveyors at
+dinner in a forest of northern Virginia on a calm, sunny day in 1750.
+The cries were repeated in quick succession, and the men sprang through
+the undergrowth to learn their cause.  "Oh, sir," exclaimed the woman
+as she caught sight of a youth of eighteen, but a man in stature and
+bearing; "you will surely do something for me!  Make these friends
+release me.  My boy,--my poor boy is drowning, and they will not let me
+go!"  "It would be madness; she will jump into the river," said one of
+the men who was holding her; "and the rapids would dash her to pieces
+in a moment!"  Throwing on his coat, the youth sprang to the edge of
+the bank, scanned for a moment the rocks and whirling currents, and
+then, at sight of part of the boy's dress, plunged into the roaring
+rapids.  "Thank God, he will save my child!" cried the mother, and all
+rushed to the brink of the precipice; "there he is!  Oh, my boy, my
+darling boy!  How could I leave you?"
+
+But all eyes were bent upon the youth struggling with strong heart and
+hope amid the dizzy sweep of the whirling currents far below.  Now it
+seemed as if he would be dashed against a projecting rock, over which
+the water flew in foam, and anon a whirlpool would drag him in, from
+whose grasp escape would seem impossible.  Twice the boy went out of
+sight, but he had reappeared the second time, although frightfully near
+the most dangerous part of the river.  The rush of waters here was
+tremendous, and no one had ever dared to approach it, even in a canoe,
+lest he should be dashed to pieces.  The youth redoubled his exertions.
+Three times he was about to grasp the child, when some stronger eddy
+would toss it from him.  One final effort he makes; the child is held
+aloft by his strong right arm, but a cry of horror bursts from the lips
+of every spectator as boy and man shoot over the falls and vanish in
+the seething waters below.
+
+"There they are!" shouted the mother a moment later, in a delirium of
+joy.  "See! they are safe!  Great God, I thank Thee!"  And sure enough
+they emerged unharmed from the boiling vortex, and in a few minutes
+reached a low place in the bank and were drawn up by their friends, the
+boy senseless, but still alive, and the youth almost exhausted.  "God
+will give you a reward," solemnly spoke the grateful woman.  "He will
+do great things for you in return for this day's work, and the
+blessings of thousands besides mine will attend you."
+
+The youth was George Washington.
+
+"Your Grace has not the organ of animal courage largely developed,"
+said a phrenologist, who was examining Wellington's head.  "You are
+right," replied the Iron Duke, "and but for my sense of duty I should
+have retreated in my first fight."  That first fight, on an Indian
+field, was one of the most terrible on record.
+
+In the reverses which followed Napoleon, he met the allies at Arcis.  A
+live shell having fallen in front of one of his young battalions, which
+recoiled and wavered in expectation of an explosion, Napoleon, to
+reassure them, spurred his charger toward the instrument of
+destruction, made him smell the burning match, waited unshaken for the
+explosion, and was blown up.  Rolling in the dust with his mutilated
+steed, and rising without a wound amid the plaudits of his soldiers, he
+calmly called for another horse, and continued to brave the grape-shot,
+and to fly into the thickest of the battle.
+
+When General Jackson was a judge and was holding court in a small
+settlement, a border ruffian, a murderer and desperado, came into the
+court-room with brutal violence and interrupted the court.  The judge
+ordered him to be arrested.  The officer did not dare to approach him.
+"Call a posse," said the judge, "and arrest him."  But they also shrank
+in fear from the ruffian.  "Call me, then," said Jackson; "this court
+is adjourned for five minutes."  He left the bench, walked straight up
+to the man, and with his eagle eye actually cowed the ruffian, who
+dropped his weapons, afterwards saying, "There was something in his eye
+I could not resist."
+
+One of the last official acts of the late President Carnot, of France,
+was the sending of a medal of the French Legion of Honor to a little
+American girl, who lives in Indiana.  While a train on the Pan Handle
+Railroad, having on board several distinguished Frenchmen, was bound to
+Chicago and the World's Fair, Jennie Carey, who was then ten years old,
+discovered that a trestle was on fire, and that if the train, which was
+nearly due, entered it a dreadful wreck would take place.  Thereupon
+she ran out upon the track to a place where she could be seen from some
+little distance.  Then she took off her red flannel skirt and, when the
+train came in view, waved it back and forth across the track.  It was
+seen, and the train stopped.  On board of it were seven hundred people,
+many of whom must have suffered death but for Jennie's courage and
+presence of mind.  When they returned to France, the Frenchmen brought
+the occurrence to the notice of President Carnot, and the result was
+the sending of the medal of this famous French society, the purpose of
+which is the honoring of bravery and merit, wherever they may be found.
+
+After the battle of Fort Donelson, the wounded were hauled down the
+hill in rough board wagons, and most of them died before they reached
+St. Louis.  One blue-eyed boy of nineteen, with both arms and both legs
+shattered, had lain a long time and was neglected.  He said, "Why, you
+see they couldn't stop to bother with us because they had to take the
+fort.  When they took it we all forgot our sufferings and shouted for
+joy, even to the dying."
+
+Louis IX. of France was captured by the Turks at the battle of
+Mansoora, during the Seventh Crusade, and his wife Marguerite, with a
+babe at the breast, was in Damietta, many miles away.  The Infidels
+surrounded the city, and pressed the garrison so hard that it was
+decided to capitulate.  The queen summoned the knights, and told them
+that she at least would die in armor upon the ramparts before the enemy
+should become masters of Damietta.
+
+  "Before her words they thrilled like leaves
+    When winds are in the wood;
+  And a deepening murmur told of men
+    Roused to a loftier mood."
+
+
+Grasping lance and shield, they vowed to defend their queen and the
+cross to the last.  Damietta was saved.
+
+Pyrrhus marched to Sparta to reinstate the deposed Cleonymus, and
+quietly pitched his tents before Laconia, not anticipating resistance.
+In consternation, the Spartans in council decided to send their women
+to Crete for safety.  But the women met and asked Queen Archidamia to
+remonstrate.  She went to the council, sword in hand, and told the men
+that their wives did not care to live after Sparta was destroyed.
+
+  "We are brave men's mothers, and brave men's wives;
+    We are ready to do and dare;
+  We are ready to man your walls with our lives,
+    And string your bows with our hair."
+
+
+They hurried to the walls and worked all night, aiding the men in
+digging trenches.  When Pyrrhus attacked the city next day, his repulse
+was so emphatic that he withdrew from Laconia.
+
+Charles V. of Spain passed through Thuringia in 1547, on his return to
+Swabia after the battle of Muehlburg.  He wrote to Catherine, Countess
+Dowager of Schwartzburg, promising that her subjects should not be
+molested in their persons or property if they would supply the Spanish
+soldiers with provisions at a reasonable price.  On approaching
+Eudolstadt, General Alva and Prince Henry of Brunswick, with his sons,
+invited themselves, by a messenger sent forward, to breakfast with the
+Countess, who had no choice but to ratify so delicate a request from
+the commander of an army.  Just as the guests were seated at a generous
+repast, the Countess was called from the hall and told that the
+Spaniards were using violence and driving away the cattle of the
+peasants.
+
+Quietly arming all her retinue, she bolted and barred all the gates and
+doors of the castle, and returned to the banquet to complain of the
+breach of faith.  General Alva told her that such was the custom of
+war, adding that such trifling disorders were not to be heeded.  "That
+we shall presently see," said Catharine; "my poor subjects must have
+their own again, or, as God lives, prince's blood for oxen's blood!"
+The doors were opened, and armed men took the places of the waiters
+behind the chairs of the guests.  Henry changed color; then, as the
+best way out of a bad scrape, laughed loudly, and ended by praising the
+splendid acting of his hostess, and promising that Alva should order
+the cattle restored at once.  Not until a courier returned, saying that
+the order had been obeyed, and all damages settled satisfactorily, did
+the armed waiters leave.  The Countess then thanked her guests for the
+honor they had done her castle, and they retired with protestations of
+their distinguished consideration.
+
+It was the heroic devotion of an Indian girl that saved the life of
+Captain John Smith, when the powerful King Powhatan had decreed his
+death.  Ill could the struggling colony spare him at that time.
+
+When the consul shouted that the bridge was tottering, Lartius and
+Herminius sought safety in flight.  But Horatius strode still nearer
+the foe, the single champion of his country and liberty, and dared the
+ninety thousand to come on.  Dead stillness fell upon the Tuscans, so
+astonished were they at the audacity of the Roman.  He first broke the
+awful silence, so deep that his clear, strong voice could be heard by
+thousands in both armies, between which rolled the Tiber, as he
+denounced the baseness and perfidy of the invaders.  Not until his
+words were drowned by the loud crash of fiercely disrupturing timbers,
+and the sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their
+showers of arrows and javelins.  Then, dexterously warding off the
+missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber.  Although stabbed
+in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he swam in
+safety to Rome.
+
+"It is a bad omen," said Eric the Red, when his horse slipped and fell
+on the way to his ship, moored on the coast of Greenland, in readiness
+for a voyage of discovery.  "Ill-fortune would be mine should I dare
+venture now upon the sea."  So he returned to his house, but his young
+son Leif decided to go, and, with a crew of thirty-five men, sailed
+southward in search of the unknown shore upon which Captain Biarni had
+been driven by a storm, while sailing in another Viking ship two or
+three years before.  The first land that they saw was probably
+Labrador, a barren, rugged plain.  Leif called this country Heluland,
+or the land of flat stones.  Sailing onward many days, he came to a
+low, level coast thickly covered with woods, on account of which he
+called the country Markland, probably the modern Nova Scotia.  Sailing
+onward, they came to an island which they named Vinland on account of
+the abundance of delicious wild grapes in the woods.  This was in the
+year 1000.  Here where the city of Newport, R. I., stands, they spent
+many months, and then returned to Greenland with their vessel loaded
+with grapes and strange kinds of wood.  The voyage was successful, and
+no doubt Eric was sorry he had been frightened by the bad omen.
+
+May 10, 1796, Napoleon carried the bridge at Lodi, in the face of the
+Austrian batteries.  Fourteen cannon--some accounts say thirty--were
+trained upon the French end of the structure.  Behind them were six
+thousand troops.  Napoleon massed four thousand grenadiers at the head
+of the bridge, with a battalion of three hundred carbineers in front.
+At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover
+of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and
+attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge.  The front ranks went down
+like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled
+backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before
+them.  Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at
+their head, and his aids and generals rushed to his side.  Forward
+again, this time over heaps of dead that choked the passage, and a
+quick run, counted by seconds only, carried the column across two
+hundred yards of clear space, scarcely a shot from the Austrians taking
+effect beyond the point where the platoons wheeled for the first leap.
+So sudden and so miraculous was it all that the Austrian artillerists
+abandoned their guns instantly, and their supports fled in a panic
+instead of rushing to the front and meeting the French onslaught.  This
+Napoleon had counted on in making the bold attack.  The contrast
+between Napoleon's slight figure and the massive grenadiers suggested
+the nickname "Little Corporal."
+
+The great secret of the success of Joan of Arc was the boldness of her
+attacks.
+
+When Stephen of Colonna fell into the hands of base assailants, and
+they asked him in derision, "Where is now your fortress?"  "Here," was
+his bold reply, placing his hand upon his heart.
+
+It was after the Mexican War when General McClellan was employed as a
+topographical engineer in surveying the Pacific coast.  From his
+headquarters at Vancouver he had gone south to the Columbia River with
+two companions, a soldier and a servant.  One evening he received word
+that the chiefs of the Columbia River tribes desired to confer with
+him.  From the messenger's manner he suspected that the Indians meant
+mischief.  He warned his companions that they must be ready to leave
+camp at a moment's notice.  Mounting his horse, he rode boldly into the
+Indian village.  About thirty chiefs were holding council.  McClellan
+was led into the circle, and placed at the right hand of Saltese.  He
+was familiar with the Chinook jargon, and could understand every word
+spoken in the council.  Saltese made known the grievance of the tribes.
+Two Indians had been captured by a party of white pioneers and hanged
+for theft.  Retaliation for this outrage seemed indispensable.  The
+chiefs pondered long, but had little to say.  McClellan had been on
+friendly terms with them, and was not responsible for the forest
+executions.  Still, he was a white man, and the chiefs had vowed
+vengeance against the race.  The council was prolonged for hours before
+sentence was passed, and then Saltese, in the name of the head men of
+the tribes, decreed that McClellan should immediately be put to death
+in retaliation for the hanging of the two Indian thieves.
+
+McClellan had said nothing.  He had known that argument and pleas for
+justice or mercy would be of no avail.  He had sat motionless,
+apparently indifferent to his fate.  By his listlessness he had thrown
+his captors off their guard.  When the sentence was passed he acted
+like a flash.  Flinging his left arm around the neck of Saltese, he
+whipped out his revolver and held it close to the chief's temple.
+"Revoke that sentence, or I shall kill you this instant!" he cried,
+with his fingers clicking the trigger.  "I revoke it!" exclaimed
+Saltese, fairly livid from fear.  "I must have your word that I can
+leave this council in safety."  "You have the word of Saltese," was the
+quick response.  McClellan knew how sacred was the pledge which he had
+received.  The revolver was lowered.  Saltese was released from the
+embrace of the strong arm.  McClellan strode out of the tent with his
+revolver in his hand.  Not a hand was raised against him.  He mounted
+his horse and rode to his camp, where his two followers were ready to
+spring into the saddle and to escape from the villages.  He owed his
+life to his quickness of perception, and to his accurate knowledge of
+Indian character.
+
+In 1866, Rufus Choate spoke to an audience of nearly five thousand in
+Lowell in favor of the candidacy of James Buchanan for the presidency.
+The floor of the great hall began to sink, settling more and more as he
+proceeded with his address, until a sound of cracking timber below
+would have precipitated a stampede with fatal results but for the
+coolness of B. F. Butler, who presided.  Telling the people to remain
+quiet, he said that he would see if there were any cause for alarm.  He
+found the supports of the floor in so bad a condition that the
+slightest applause would be likely to bury the audience in the ruins of
+the building.  Returning rather leisurely to the platform, he whispered
+to Choate as he passed, "We shall all be in ---- in five minutes," then
+he told the crowd that there was no immediate danger if they would
+slowly disperse, although he thought it prudent to adjourn to a place
+where there would be no risk whatever.  The post of danger, he added,
+was on the platform, which was most weakly supported, therefore he and
+those with him would be the last to leave.  No doubt many lives were
+saved by his coolness.
+
+Many distinguished foreign and American statesmen were present at a
+fashionable dinner party where wine was freely poured, but Schuyler
+Colfax, then vice-president of the United States, declined to drink
+from a proffered cup.  "Colfax dares not drink," sneered a Senator who
+had already taken too much.  "You are right," said the Vice-President,
+"I dare not."
+
+When Grant was in Houston several years ago, he was given a rousing
+reception.  Naturally hospitable, and naturally inclined to like a man
+of Grant's make-up, the Houstonites determined to go beyond any other
+Southern city in the way of a banquet and other manifestations of their
+good-will and hospitality.  They made great preparations for the
+dinner, the committee taking great pains to have the finest wines that
+could be procured for the table that night.  When the time came to
+serve the wine, the head-waiter went first to Grant.  Without a word
+the general quietly turned down all the glasses at his plate.  This
+movement was a great surprise to the Texans, but they were equal to the
+occasion.  Without a single word being spoken, every man along the line
+of the long tables turned his glasses down, and there was not a drop of
+wine taken that night.
+
+A deep sewer at Noyon, France, had been opened for repairs, and
+carelessly left at night without covering or lights to warn people of
+danger.  Late at night four men stumbled in, and lay some time before
+their situation was known in the town.  No one dared go to the aid of
+the men, then unconscious from breathing noxious gases, except
+Catherine Vassen, a servant girl of eighteen.  She insisted on being
+lowered at once.  Fastening a rope around two of the men, she aided in
+raising them and restoring them to consciousness.  Descending again,
+she had just tied a rope around a third man, when she felt her breath
+failing.  Tying another rope to her long, curly hair, she swooned, but
+was drawn up with the man, to be quickly revived by fresh air and
+stimulants.  The fourth man was dead when his body was pulled up, on
+account of the delay from the fainting of Catherine.
+
+Two French officers at Waterloo were advancing to charge a greatly
+superior force.  One, observing that the other showed signs of fear,
+said, "Sir, I believe you are frightened."  "Yes, I am," was the reply,
+"and if you were half as much frightened, you would run away."
+
+"That's a brave man," said Wellington, when he saw a soldier turn pale
+as he marched against a battery; "he knows his danger, and faces it."
+
+"There are many cardinals and bishops at Worms," said a friend to
+Luther, "and they will burn your body to ashes as they did that of John
+Huss."  Luther replied: "Although they should make a fire that should
+reach from Worms to Wittenberg, and that should flame up to heaven, in
+the Lord's name I would pass through it and appear before them."  He
+said to another: "I would enter Worms though there were as many devils
+there as there are tiles upon the roofs of the houses."  Another said:
+"Duke George will surely arrest you."  He replied: "It is my duty to
+go, and I will go, though it rain Duke Georges for nine days together."
+
+"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me," exclaimed Luther at
+the Diet of Worms, facing his foes.
+
+A Western paper recently invited the surviving Union and Confederate
+officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during
+the Civil War.  Colonel Thomas W. Higginson said that at a dinner at
+Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were
+bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told
+that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung
+a song.  He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although
+I must drink it in water.  It is 'Our Mothers.'"  The men were so
+affected and ashamed that some took him by the hand and thanked him for
+displaying courage greater than that required to walk up to the mouth
+of a cannon.
+
+It took great courage for the commercial Quaker, John Bright, to
+espouse a cause which called down upon his head the derision and scorn
+and hatred of the Parliament.  For years he rested under a cloud of
+obloquy, but Bright was made of stern stuff.  It was only his strength
+of character and masterly eloquence, which saved him from political
+annihilation.  To a man who boasted that his ancestors came over with
+the Conquerors, he replied, "I never heard that they did anything
+else."  A Tory lordling said, when Bright was ill, that Providence had
+inflicted upon Bright, for the measure of his talents, disease of the
+brain.  When Bright went back into the Commons he replied: "This may be
+so, but it will be some consolation to the friends and family of the
+noble lord to know that that disease is one which even Providence
+cannot inflict upon him."
+
+"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World,
+and takes him boldly by the beard," says Holmes, "he is often surprised
+to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare
+away timid adventurers."
+
+It takes courage for a young man to stand firmly erect while others are
+bowing and fawning for praise and power.  It takes courage to wear
+threadbare clothes while your comrades dress in broadcloth.  It takes
+courage to remain in honest poverty when others grow rich by fraud.  It
+takes courage to say "No" squarely when those around you say "Yes."  It
+takes courage to do your duty in silence and obscurity while others
+prosper and grow famous although neglecting sacred obligations.  It
+takes courage to unmask your true self, to show your blemishes to a
+condemning world, and to pass for what you really are.
+
+It takes courage and pluck to be outvoted, beaten, laughed at, scoffed,
+ridiculed, derided, misunderstood, misjudged, to stand alone with all
+the world against you, but
+
+  "They are slaves who dare not be
+  In the right with two or three."
+
+
+"There is never wanting a dog to bark at you."
+
+"An honest man is not the worse because a dog barks at him."
+
+  "Let any man show the world that he feels
+  Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels.
+  Let him fearlessly face it, 't will leave him alone,
+  And 't will fawn at his feet if he fling it a bone."
+
+
+We live ridiculously for fear of being thought ridiculous.
+
+  "'Tis he is the coward who proves false to his vows,
+  To his manhood, his honor, for a laugh or a sneer:
+  'Tis he is the hero who stands firm, though alone,
+  For the truth and the right without flinching or fear."
+
+
+The youth who starts out by being afraid to speak what he thinks will
+usually end by being afraid to think what he wishes.
+
+How we shrink from an act of our own.  We live as others live.  Custom
+or fashion dictates, or your doctor or minister, and they in turn dare
+not depart from their schools.  Dress, living, servants, carriages,
+everything must conform, or be ostracized.  Who dares conduct his
+household or business affairs in his own way, and snap his fingers at
+Dame Grundy?
+
+Many a man has marched up to the cannon's mouth in battle who dared not
+face public opinion or oppose Mrs. Grundy.
+
+It takes courage for a public man not to bend the knee to popular
+prejudice.  It takes courage to refuse to follow custom when it is
+injurious to his health and morals.  To espouse an unpopular cause in
+Congress requires more courage than to lead a charge in battle.  How
+much easier for a politician to prevaricate and dodge an issue than to
+stand squarely on his feet like a man.
+
+As a rule, eccentricity is a badge of power, but how many women would
+not rather strangle their individuality than be tabooed by Mrs. Grundy?
+Yet fear is really the only thing to fear.
+
+"Whoever you may be," said Sainte-Beuve, "great genius, distinguished
+talent, artist honorable or amiable, the qualities for which you
+deserve to be praised will all be turned against you.  Were you a
+Virgil, the pious and sensible singer _par excellence_, there are
+people who will call you an effeminate poet.  Were you a Horace, there
+are people who will reproach you with the very purity and delicacy of
+your taste.  If you were a Shakespeare, some one will call you a
+drunken savage.  If you were a Goethe, more than one Pharisee will
+proclaim you the most selfish of egotists."
+
+As the strongest man has a weakness somewhere, so the greatest hero is
+a coward somewhere.  Peter was courageous enough to draw his sword to
+defend his master, but he could not stand the ridicule and the finger
+of scorn of the maidens in the high priest's hall, and he actually
+denied even the acquaintance of the master he had declared he would die
+for.
+
+"I will take the responsibility," said Andrew Jackson, on a memorable
+occasion, and his words have become proverbial.  Not even Congress
+dared to oppose the edicts of John Quincy Adams.
+
+If a man would accomplish anything in this world, he must not be afraid
+of assuming responsibilities.  Of course it takes courage to run the
+risk of failure, to be subjected to criticism for an unpopular cause,
+to expose one's self to the shafts of everybody's ridicule, but the man
+who is not true to himself, who cannot carry out the sealed orders
+placed in his hands at his birth, regardless of the world's yes or no,
+of its approval or disapproval, the man who has not the courage to
+trace the pattern of his own destiny, which no other soul knows but his
+own, can never rise to the true dignity of manhood.  All the world
+loves courage; youth craves it; they want to hear about it, they want
+to read about it.  The fascination of the "blood and thunder" novels
+and of the cheap story papers for youth are based upon this idea of
+courage.  If the boys cannot get the real article, they will take a
+counterfeit.
+
+Don't be like Uriah Heep, begging everybody's pardon for taking the
+liberty of being in the world.  There is nothing attractive in
+timidity, nothing lovable in fear.  Both are deformities and are
+repulsive.  Manly courage is dignified and graceful.  The worst manners
+in the world are those of persons conscious "of being beneath their
+position, and trying to conceal it or make up for it by style."
+
+Bruno, condemned to be burned alive in Rome, said to his judge: "You
+are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to receive it."
+Anne Askew, racked until her bones were dislocated, never flinched, but
+looked her tormentor calmly in the face and refused to abjure her faith.
+
+"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid
+of each other."  "Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage," said
+Emerson.  Physicians used to teach that courage depends on the
+circulation of the blood in the arteries, and that during passion,
+anger, trials of strength, wrestling or fighting, a large amount of
+blood is collected in the arteries, and does not pass to the veins.  A
+strong pulse is a fortune in itself.
+
+"Rage," said Shaftesbury, "can make a coward forget himself and fight."
+
+"I should have thought fear would have kept you from going so far,"
+said a relative who found the little boy Nelson wandering a long
+distance from home.  "Fear?" said the future admiral, "I don't know
+him."
+
+"Doubt indulged becomes doubt realized."  To determine to do anything
+is half the battle.  "To think a thing is impossible is to make it so."
+_Courage is victory, timidity is defeat_.
+
+That simple shepherd-lad, David, fresh from his flocks, marching
+unattended and unarmed, save with his shepherd's staff and sling, to
+confront the colossal Goliath with his massive armor, is the sublimest
+audacity the world has ever seen.
+
+"Dent, I wish you would get down, and see what is the matter with that
+leg there," said Grant, when he and Colonel Dent were riding through
+the thickest of a fire that had become so concentrated and murderous
+that his troops had all been driven back.  "I guess looking after your
+horse's legs can wait," said Dent; "it is simply murder for us to sit
+here."  "All right," said Grant, "if you don't want to see to it, I
+will."  He dismounted, untwisted a piece of telegraph wire which had
+begun to cut the horse's leg, examined it deliberately, and climbed
+into his saddle.  "Dent," said he, "when you've got a horse that you
+think a great deal of, you should never take any chances with him.  If
+that wire had been left there for a little time longer he would have
+gone dead lame, and would perhaps have been ruined for life."
+
+Wellington said that at Waterloo the hottest of the battle raged round
+a farmhouse, with an orchard surrounded by a thick hedge, which was so
+important a point in the British position that orders were given to
+hold it at any hazard or sacrifice.  At last the powder and ball ran
+short and the hedges took fire, surrounding the orchard with a wall of
+flame.  A messenger had been sent for ammunition, and soon two loaded
+wagons came galloping toward the farmhouse.  "The driver of the first
+wagon, with the reckless daring of an English boy, spurred his
+struggling and terrified horses through the burning heap; but the
+flames rose fiercely round, and caught the powder, which exploded in an
+instant, sending wagon, horses, and rider in fragments into the air.
+For an instant the driver of the second wagon paused, appalled by his
+comrade's fate; the next, observing that the flames, beaten back for
+the moment by the explosion, afforded him one desperate chance, sent
+his horses at the smouldering breach and, amid the deafening cheers of
+the garrison, landed his terrible cargo safely within.  Behind him the
+flames closed up, and raged more fiercely than ever."
+
+At the battle of Friedland a cannon-ball came over the heads of the
+French soldiers, and a young soldier instinctively dodged.  Napoleon
+looked at him and smilingly said: "My friend, if that ball were
+destined for you, though you were to burrow a hundred feet under ground
+it would be sure to find you there."
+
+When the mine in front of Petersburg was finished, the fuse was
+lighted, and the Union troops were drawn up ready to charge the enemy's
+works as soon as the explosion should make a breach.  But seconds,
+minutes, and tens of minutes passed, without a sound from the mine, and
+the suspense became painful.  Lieutenant Doughty and Sergeant Kees
+volunteered to examine the fuse.  Through the long subterranean
+galleries they hurried in silence, not knowing but they were advancing
+to a horrible death.  They found the defect, fired the train anew, and
+soon a terrible upheaval of earth gave the signal to march to victory.
+
+At the battle of Copenhagen, as Nelson walked the deck slippery with
+blood and covered with the dead, he said: "This is warm work, and this
+day may be the last to any of us in a moment.  But, mark me, I would
+not be elsewhere for thousands."  At the battle of Trafalgar, when
+Nelson was shot and was being carried below, he covered his face, that
+those fighting might not know their chief had fallen.
+
+In a skirmish at Salamanca, while the enemy's guns were pouring shot
+into his regiment, Sir William Napier's men became disobedient.  He at
+once ordered a halt, and flogged four of the ringleaders under fire.
+The men yielded at once, and then marched three miles under a heavy
+cannonade as coolly as if it were a review.
+
+Execute your resolutions immediately.  Thoughts are but dreams till
+their effects be tried.  Does competition trouble you? work away; what
+is your competitor but a man?  _Conquer your place in the world_, for
+all things serve a brave soul.  Combat difficulty manfully; sustain
+misfortune bravely; endure poverty nobly; encounter disappointment
+courageously.  The influence of the brave man is a magnetism which
+creates an epidemic of noble zeal in all about him.  Every day sends to
+the grave obscure men, who have only remained in obscurity because
+their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who,
+if they could have been induced to begin, would, in all probability,
+have gone great lengths in the career of usefulness and fame.  "No
+great deed is done," says George Eliot, "by falterers who ask for
+certainty."  The brave, cheerful man will survive his blighted hopes
+and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully
+forward in the battle of life.  Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills
+with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded.
+He is the true hero.
+
+  Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
+  Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
+  Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
+  Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
+        LOWELL.
+
+            Our doubts are traitors,
+  And make us lose the good we oft might win,
+  By fearing to attempt.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+After the great inward struggle was over, and he had determined to
+remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the
+block.  His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy
+prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his
+doctrines, as some of the bishops had done.  But he preferred death to
+dishonor.  His daughter allowed the power of love to drive away fear.
+She remained true to her father when all others, even her mother, had
+forsaken him.  After his head had been cut off and exhibited on a pole
+on London Bridge, the poor girl begged it of the authorities, and
+requested that it be buried in the coffin with her.  Her request was
+granted, for her death occurred soon.
+
+When Sir Walter Raleigh came to the scaffold he was very faint, and
+began his speech to the crowd by saying that during the last two days
+he had been visited by two ague fits.  "If, therefore, you perceive any
+weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to
+myself."  He took the axe and kissed the blade, and said to the
+sheriff: "'T is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+Don't waste time dreaming of obstacles you may never encounter, or in
+crossing bridges you have not reached.  Don't fool with a nettle!
+Grasp with firmness if you would rob it of its sting.  To half will and
+to hang forever in the balance is to lose your grip on life.
+
+Abraham Lincoln's boyhood was one long struggle with poverty, with
+little education, and no influential friends.  When at last he had
+begun the practice of law, it required no little daring to cast his
+fortune with the weaker side in politics, and thus imperil what small
+reputation he had gained.  Only the most sublime moral courage could
+have sustained him as President to hold his ground against hostile
+criticism and a long train of disaster; to issue the Emancipation
+Proclamation; to support Grant and Stanton against the clamor of the
+politicians and the press; and through it all to do the right as God
+gave him to see the right.
+
+Lincoln never shrank from espousing an unpopular cause when he believed
+it to be right.  At the time when it almost cost a young lawyer his
+bread and butter to defend the fugitive slave, and when other lawyers
+had refused, Lincoln would always plead the cause of the unfortunate
+whenever an opportunity presented.  "Go to Lincoln," people would say,
+when these hounded fugitives were seeking protection; "he's not afraid
+of any cause, if it's right."
+
+As Salmon P. Chase left the court room after making an impassioned plea
+for the runaway slave girl Matilda, a man looked at him in surprise and
+said: "There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself."
+But in thus ruining himself Chase had taken the first important step in
+a career in which he became Governor of Ohio, United States Senator
+from Ohio, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and Chief Justice
+of the United States Supreme Court.
+
+At the trial of William Penn for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, the
+recorder, not satisfied with the first verdict, said to the jury: "We
+will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."
+"You are Englishmen," said Penn; "mind your privileges, give not away
+your right."  At last the jury, after two days and two nights without
+food, returned a verdict of "Not guilty."  The recorder fined them
+forty marks apiece for their independence.
+
+What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd?  The palsied hand moved,
+the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
+ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.
+
+What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
+hisses?  In him "at last the scornful world had met its match."  Were
+Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
+extinguish them?  No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
+thousands to hear and to heed.  Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
+when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head?  She
+silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.
+
+"What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
+leveled at his head, a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
+or a scaffold erected in front of his door.
+
+  "Storms may howl around thee,
+    Foes may hunt and hound thee:
+  Shall they overpower thee?
+    Never, never, never."
+
+
+When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
+York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
+thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged more than one man
+to lamp-posts.  Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
+where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
+it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
+murdered your superiors," and the blood-stained crowd quailed before
+the courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando
+Wood could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.
+
+"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
+"And we are before them," was the cool reply of Leonidas.  "Deliver
+your arms," came the message from Xerxes.  "Come and take them," was
+the answer Leonidas sent back.  A Persian soldier said: "You will not
+be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows."  "Then we will
+fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian.  What wonder that a
+handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
+trod the earth.
+
+"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
+for a daring plan.  "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
+"_impossible_ is the adjective of fools!"  Napoleon went to the edge of
+his possibility.
+
+Grant never knew when he was beaten.  When told that he was surrounded
+by the enemy at Belmont, he quietly replied: "Well, then we must cut
+our way out."
+
+The courageous man is an example to the intrepid.  His influence is
+magnetic.  He creates an epidemic of nobleness.  Men follow him, even
+to the death.
+
+The spirit of courage will transform the whole temper of your life.
+"The wise and active conquer difficulties by daring to attempt them.
+Sloth and folly shiver and sicken at the sight of trial and hazard, and
+make the impossibility they fear."
+
+"The hero," says Emerson, "is the man who is immovably centred."
+
+Emin Pasha, the explorer of Africa, was left behind by his exploring
+party under circumstances that were thought certainly fatal, and his
+death was reported with great assurance.  Early the next winter, as his
+troop was on its toilsome but exciting way through Central Africa, it
+came upon a most wretched sight.  A party of natives had been kidnapped
+by the slave-hunters, and dragged in chains thus far toward the land of
+bondage.  But small-pox had set in, and the miserable company had been
+abandoned to their fate.  Emin sent his men ahead, and stayed behind in
+this camp of death to act as physician and nurse.  How many lives he
+saved is not known, though it is known that he nearly lost his own.
+The age of chivalry is not gone by.  This is as knightly a deed as poet
+ever chronicled.
+
+A mouse that dwelt near the abode of a great magician was kept in such
+constant distress by its fear of a cat, that the magician, taking pity
+on it, turned it into a cat itself.  Immediately it began to suffer
+from its fear of a dog, so the magician turned it into a dog.  Then it
+began to suffer from fear of a tiger.  The magician therefore turned it
+into a tiger.  Then it began to suffer from fear of hunters, and the
+magician said in disgust: "Be a mouse again.  As you have only the
+heart of a mouse, it is impossible to help you by giving you the body
+of a nobler animal."
+
+Men who have dared have moved the world, often before reaching the
+prime of life.  It is astonishing what daring to begin and perseverance
+have enabled even youths to achieve.  Alexander, who ascended the
+throne at twenty, had conquered the known world before dying at
+thirty-three.  Julius Caesar captured eight hundred cities, conquered
+three hundred nations, and defeated three million men, became a great
+orator and one of the greatest statesmen known, and still was a young
+man.  Washington was appointed adjutant-general at nineteen, was sent
+at twenty-one as an ambassador to treat with the French, and won his
+first battle as a colonel at twenty-two.  Lafayette was made general of
+the whole French army at twenty.  Charlemagne was master of France and
+Germany at thirty.  Conde was only twenty-two when he conquered at
+Rocroi.  Galileo was but eighteen when he saw the principle of the
+pendulum in the swinging lamp in the cathedral at Pisa.  Peel was in
+Parliament at twenty-one.  Gladstone was in Parliament before he was
+twenty-two, and at twenty-four he was Lord of the Treasury.  Elizabeth
+Barrett Browning was proficient in Greek and Latin at twelve; De
+Quincey at eleven.  Robert Browning wrote at eleven poetry of no mean
+order.  Cowley, who sleeps in Westminster Abbey, published a volume of
+poems at fifteen.  N. P. Willis won lasting fame as a poet before
+leaving college.  Macaulay was a celebrated author before he was
+twenty-three.  Luther was but twenty-nine when he nailed his famous
+thesis to the door of the bishop and defied the pope.  Nelson was a
+lieutenant in the British Navy before he was twenty.  He was but
+forty-seven when he received his death wound at Trafalgar.  Charles the
+Twelfth was only nineteen when he gained the battle of Narva; at
+thirty-six, Cortez was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty-two, Clive
+had established the British power in India.  Hannibal, the greatest of
+military commanders, was only thirty when, at Cannae, he dealt an
+almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only
+twenty-seven when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneraled and
+defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria.
+
+Equal courage and resolution are often shown by men who have passed the
+allotted limit of life.  Victor Hugo and Wellington were both in their
+prime after they had reached the age of threescore years and ten.
+George Bancroft wrote some of his best historical work when he was
+eighty-five.  Gladstone ruled England with a strong hand at
+eighty-four, and was a marvel of literary and scholarly ability.
+
+"Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of
+Ophir.  But shall it therefore rot in the harbor?  No!  Give its sails
+to the wind!"
+
+Shakespeare says: "He is not worthy of the honeycomb that shuns the
+hive because the bees have stings."
+
+  "The brave man is not he who feels no fear,
+    For that were stupid and irrational;
+  But he whose noble soul its fear subdues
+    And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from."
+
+
+The inscription on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold."  On the second
+gate: "Be bold, be bold, and ever more be bold;" the third gate: "Be
+not too bold."
+
+Many a bright youth has accomplished nothing of worth simply because he
+did not dare to commence.
+
+Begin!  Begin!!  Begin!!!
+
+
+Whatever people may think of you, do that which you believe to be
+right.  Be alike indifferent to censure or praise.--PYTHAGORAS.
+
+Fear makes man a slave to others.  This is the tyrant's chain.  Anxiety
+is a form of cowardice embittering life.--CHANNING.
+
+Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal
+of the most precious things.  Our blood is nearer and dearer to us than
+our money, and our life than our estate.  Women are more taken with
+courage than with generosity.--COLTON.
+
+  Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath.
+      _Merchant of Venice_, Inscription on Leaden Casket.
+
+  I dare to do all that may become a man:
+  Who dares do more is none.
+        SHAKESPEAKE.
+
+For man's great actions are performed in minor struggles.  There are
+obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the
+shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude.  There are
+noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, no renown rewards, and
+no flourish of trumpets salutes.  Life, misfortune, isolation,
+abandonment, and poverty are battlefields which have their
+heroes.--VICTOR HUGO.
+
+  Who waits until the wind shall silent keep,
+    Who never finds the ready hour to sow,
+  Who watcheth clouds, will have no time to reap.
+        HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
+
+Quit yourselves like men.--1 SAMUEL iv. 9.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE WILL AND THE WAY.
+
+"The 'way' will be found by a resolute will."
+
+"I will find a way or make one."
+
+Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.--MIRABEAU.
+
+A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a
+politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.--E. P. WHIPPLE.
+
+  The iron will of one stout heart shall make a thousand quail;
+  A feeble dwarf, dauntlessly resolved, will turn the tide of battle,
+  And rally to a nobler strife the giants that had fled.
+        TUPPER.
+
+"Man alone can perform the impossible.  They can who think they can.
+Character is a perfectly educated will."
+
+The education of the will is the object of our existence.  For the
+resolute and determined there is time and opportunity.--EMERSON.
+
+Invincible determination, and a right nature, are the levers that move
+the world.--PRESIDENT PORTER.
+
+In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood there
+is no such word as fail.--BULWER.
+
+Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and
+make a seeming difficulty give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.
+
+When a firm and decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how
+the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom.--JOHN
+FOSTER.
+
+  The star of the unconquered will,
+  He rises in my breast,
+  Serene, and resolute and still,
+  And calm and self-possessed.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+"As well can the Prince of Orange pluck the stars from the sky, as
+bring the ocean to the wall of Leyden for your relief," was the
+derisive shout of the Spanish soldiers when told that the Dutch fleet
+would raise that terrible four months' siege of 1574.  But from the
+parched lips of William, tossing on his bed of fever at Rotterdam, had
+issued the command: "_Break down the dikes: give Holland back to
+ocean:_" and the people had replied: "Better a drowned land than a lost
+land."  They began to demolish dike after dike of the strong lines,
+ranged one within another for fifteen miles to their city of the
+interior.  It was an enormous task; the garrison was starving; and the
+besiegers laughed in scorn at the slow progress of the puny insects who
+sought to rule the waves of the sea.  But ever, as of old, heaven aids
+those who help themselves.  On the first and second of October a
+violent equinoctial gale rolled the ocean inland, and swept the fleet
+on the rising waters almost to the camp of the Spaniards.  The next
+morning the garrison sallied out to attack their enemies, but the
+besiegers had fled in terror under cover of the darkness.  The next day
+the wind changed, and a counter tempest brushed the water, with the
+fleet upon it, from the surface of Holland.  The outer dikes were
+replaced at once, leaving the North Sea within its old bounds.  When
+the flowers bloomed the following spring, a joyous procession marched
+through the streets to found the University of Leyden, in commemoration
+of the wonderful deliverance of the city.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: WALTER SCOTT]
+
+"The Wizard of the North."
+
+  "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+    So near is God to man,
+  When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
+    The youth replies, 'I can.'"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+At a dinner party given in 1837, at the residence of Chancellor Kent,
+in New York city, some of the most distinguished men in the country
+were invited, and among them was a young and rather melancholy and
+reticent Frenchman.  Professor Morse was one of the guests, and during
+the evening he drew the attention of Mr. Gallatin, then a prominent
+statesman, to the stranger, observing that his forehead indicated great
+intellect.  "Yes," replied Mr. Gallatin, touching his own forehead with
+his finger, "there is a great deal in that head of his: but he has a
+strange fancy.  Can you believe it?  He has the idea that he will one
+day be the Emperor of France.  Can you conceive anything more absurd?"
+
+It did seem absurd, for this reserved Frenchman was then a poor
+adventurer, an exile from his country, without fortune or powerful
+connections, and yet, fourteen years later, his idea became a
+fact,--his dream of becoming Napoleon III. was realized.  True, before
+he accomplished his purpose there were long dreary years of
+imprisonment, exile, disaster, and patient labor and hope, but he
+gained his ambition at last.  He was not scrupulous as to the means
+employed to accomplish his ends, yet he is a remarkable example of what
+pluck and energy can do.
+
+When it was proposed to unite England and America by steam, Dr. Lardner
+delivered a lecture before the Royal Society "proving" that steamers
+could never cross the Atlantic, because they could not carry coal
+enough to produce steam during the whole voyage.  The passage of the
+steamship Sirius, which crossed in nineteen days, was fatal to
+Lardner's theory.  When it was proposed to build a vessel of iron, many
+persons said: "Iron sinks--only wood can float:" but experiments proved
+that the miracle of the prophet in making iron "swim" could be
+repeated, and now not only ships of war, but merchant vessels, are
+built of iron or steel.  A will found a way to make iron float.
+
+Mr. Ingram, publisher of the "London Illustrated News," who lost his
+life on Lake Michigan, walked ten miles to deliver a single paper
+rather than disappoint a customer, when he began life as a newsdealer
+at Nottingham, England.  Does any one wonder that such a youth
+succeeded?  Once he rose at two o'clock in the morning and walked to
+London to get some papers because there was no post to bring them.  He
+determined that his customers should not be disappointed.  This is the
+kind of will that finds a way.
+
+There is scarcely anything in all biography grander than the saying of
+young Henry Fawcett, Gladstone's last Postmaster-General, to his
+grief-stricken father, who had put out both his eyes by bird-shot
+during a game hunt: "Never mind, father, blindness shall not interfere
+with my success in life."  One of the most pathetic sights in London
+streets, long afterward, was Henry Fawcett, M. P., led everywhere by a
+faithful daughter, who acted as amanuensis as well as guide to her
+plucky father.  Think of a young man, scarcely on the threshold of
+active life, suddenly losing the sight of both eyes and yet, by mere
+pluck and almost incomprehensible tenacity of purpose, lifting himself
+into eminence, in any direction, to say nothing of becoming one of the
+foremost men in a country noted for its great men.  Most youth would
+have succumbed to such a misfortune, and would never have been heard
+from again.  But fortunately for the world, there are yet left many
+Fawcetts, many Prescotts, Parkmans, Cavanaghs.
+
+The courageous daughter who was eyes to her father was herself a
+marvelous example of pluck and determination.  For the first time in
+the history of Oxford College, which reaches back centuries, she
+succeeded in winning the post which had only been gained before by
+great men, such as Gladstone,--the post of senior wrangler.  This
+achievement had had no parallel in history up to that date, and
+attracted the attention of the whole civilized world.  Not only had no
+woman ever held this position before, but with few exceptions it had
+only been held by men who in after life became highly distinguished.
+Who can deny that where there is a will, as a rule, there's a way?
+
+When Grant was a boy he could not find "can't" in the dictionary.  It
+is the men who have no "can't" in their dictionaries that make things
+move.
+
+"Circumstances," says Milton, "have rarely favored famous men.  They
+have fought their way to triumph through all sorts of opposing
+obstacles."
+
+The true way to conquer circumstances is to be a greater circumstance
+yourself.
+
+Yet, while desiring to impress in the most forcible manner possible the
+fact that will-power is necessary to success, and that, other things
+being equal, the greater the will-power, the grander and more complete
+the success, we cannot indorse the preposterous theory that there is
+nothing in circumstances or environments, or that any man, simply
+because he has an indomitable will, may become a Bonaparte, a Pitt, a
+Webster, a Beecher, a Lincoln.  We must temper determination with
+discretion, and support it with knowledge and common sense, or it will
+only lead us to run our heads against posts.  We must not expect to
+overcome a stubborn fact by a stubborn will.  We merely have the right
+to assume that we can do anything within the limit of our utmost
+faculty, strength, and endurance.  Obstacles permanently insurmountable
+bar our progress in some directions, but in any direction we may
+reasonably hope and attempt to go, we shall find that the obstacles, as
+a rule, are either not insurmountable or else not permanent.  The
+strong-willed, intelligent, persistent man will find or make a way
+where, in the nature of things, a way can be found or made.
+
+Every schoolboy knows that circumstances do give clients to lawyers and
+patients to physicians; place ordinary clergymen in extraordinary
+pulpits; place sons of the rich at the head of immense corporations and
+large houses, when they have very ordinary ability and scarcely any
+experience, while poor young men with extraordinary abilities, good
+education, good character, and large experience, often have to fight
+their way for years to obtain even very ordinary situations.  Every one
+knows that there are thousands of young men, both in the city and in
+the country, of superior ability, who seem to be compelled by
+circumstances to remain in very ordinary positions for small pay, when
+others about them are raised by money or family influence into
+desirable places.  In other words, we all know that the best men do not
+always get the best places: circumstances do have a great deal to do
+with our position, our salaries, and our station in life.
+
+Many young men who are nature's noblemen, who are natural leaders, are
+working under superintendents, foremen, and managers infinitely their
+inferiors, but whom circumstances have placed above them and will keep
+there, unless some emergency makes merit indispensable.  No, the race
+is not always to the swift.
+
+Every one knows that there is not always a way where there is a will,
+that labor does not always conquer all things; that there are things
+impossible even to him that wills, however strongly; that one cannot
+always make anything of himself he chooses; that there are limitations
+in our very natures which no amount of will-power or industry can
+overcome; that no amount of sun-staring can ever make an eagle out of a
+crow.
+
+The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually
+striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time
+very far toward his chosen goal.
+
+The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most
+possible out of the stuff that has been given to him.  This is success,
+and there is no other.
+
+While it is true that our circumstances or environments do affect us,
+in most things they do not prevent our growth.  The corn that is now
+ripe, whence comes it, and what is it?  Is it not large or small,
+stunted wild maize or well-developed ears, according to the conditions
+under which it has grown?  Yet its environments cannot make wheat of
+it.  Nor can our circumstances alter our nature.  It is part of our
+nature, and wholly within our power, greatly to change and to take
+advantage of our circumstances, so that, unlike the corn, we can rise
+much superior to our natural surroundings simply because we can thus
+vary and improve the surroundings.  In other words, man can usually
+build the very road on which he is to run his race.
+
+It is not a question of what some one else can do or become, which
+every youth should ask himself, but what can I do?  How can I develop
+myself into the grandest possible manhood?
+
+So far, then, from the power of circumstances being a hindrance to men
+in trying to build for themselves an imperial highway to fortune, these
+circumstances constitute the very quarry out of which they are to get
+paving-stones for the road.
+
+While it is true that the will-power cannot perform miracles, yet that
+it is almost omnipotent, that it can perform wonders, all history goes
+to prove.  As Shakespeare says:--
+
+  "Men at some time are masters of their fates:
+  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
+  But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
+
+
+"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit
+once in his life: but when she finds he is not ready to receive her,
+she goes in at the door, and out through the window."  Opportunity is
+coy.  The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it,
+or clutch at it when it has gone.  The sharp fellows detect it
+instantly, and catch it when on the wing.
+
+Show me a man who is, according to popular prejudice, a victim of bad
+luck, and I will show you one who has some unfortunate crooked twist of
+temperament that invites disaster.  He is ill-tempered, or conceited,
+or trifling; lacks character, enthusiasm, or some other requisite for
+success.
+
+Disraeli says that man is not the creature of circumstances, but that
+circumstances are the creatures of men.
+
+What has chance ever done in the world?  Has it built any cities?  Has
+it invented any telephones, any telegraphs?  Has it built any
+steamships, established any universities, any asylums, any hospitals?
+Was there any chance in Caesar's crossing the Rubicon?  What had chance
+to do with Napoleon's career, with Wellington's, or Grant's, or Von
+Moltke's?  Every battle was won before it was begun.  What had luck to
+do with Thermopylae, Trafalgar, Gettysburg?  Our successes we ascribe
+to ourselves; our failures to destiny.
+
+Man is not a helpless atom in this vast creation, with a fixed
+position, and naught to do but obey his own polarity.
+
+Believe in the power of will, which annihilates the sickly, sentimental
+doctrine of fatalism,--you must but can't, you ought but it is
+impossible.
+
+Give me the man
+
+  "Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
+  And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
+  And breasts the blows of circumstance,
+  And grapples with his evil star."
+
+
+It is only the ignorant and superficial who believe in fate.  "The
+first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity."  "Fate is
+unpenetrated causes."  "They may well fear fate who have any infirmity
+of habit or aim: but he who rests on what he is has a destiny beyond
+destiny, and can make mouths at fortune."
+
+The indomitable will, the inflexible purpose, will find a way or make
+one.  There is always room for a man of force.
+
+"He who has a firm will," says Goethe, "moulds the world to himself."
+"People do not lack strength," says Victor Hugo, "they lack will."
+
+"He who resolves upon any great end, by that very resolution has scaled
+the great barriers to it, and he who seizes the grand idea of
+self-cultivation, and solemnly resolves upon it, will find that idea,
+that resolution, burning like fire within him, and ever putting him
+upon his own improvement.  He will find it removing difficulties,
+searching out, or making means; giving courage for despondency, and
+strength for weakness."
+
+Nearly all great men, those who have towered high above their fellows,
+have been remarkable above all things else for their energy of will.
+Of Julius Caesar it was said by a contemporary that it was his activity
+and giant determination, rather than his military skill, that won his
+victories.  The youth who starts out in life determined to make the
+most of his eyes and let nothing escape him which he can possibly use
+for his own advancement; who keeps his ears open for every sound that
+can help him on his way, who keeps his hands open that he may clutch
+every opportunity, who is ever on the alert for everything which can
+help him to get on in the world, who seizes every experience in life
+and grinds it up into paint for his great life's picture, who keeps his
+heart open that he may catch every noble impulse, and everything which
+may inspire him,--that youth will be sure to make his life successful;
+there are no "ifs" or "ands" about it.  If he has his health, nothing
+can keep him from final success.
+
+No tyranny of circumstances can permanently imprison a determined will.
+
+The world always stands aside for the determined man.  Will makes a
+way, even through seeming impossibilities.  "It is the half a neck
+nearer that shows the blood and wins the race; the one march more that
+wins the campaign: the five minutes more of unyielding courage that
+wins the fight."  Again and again had the irrepressible Carter Harrison
+been consigned to oblivion by the educated and moral element of
+Chicago.  Nothing could keep him down.  He was invincible.  A son of
+Chicago, he had partaken of that nineteenth century miracle, that
+phoenix-like nature of the city which, though she was burned, caused
+her to rise from her ashes and become a greater and a grander Chicago,
+a wonder of the world.  Carter Harrison would not down.  He entered the
+Democratic Convention and, with an audacity rarely equaled, in spite of
+their protest, boldly declared himself their candidate.  Every
+newspaper in Chicago, save the "Times," his own paper, bitterly opposed
+his election: but notwithstanding all opposition, he was elected by
+twenty thousand majority.  The aristocrats hated him, the moral element
+feared him, but the poor people believed in him: he pandered to them,
+flattered them, till they elected him.  While we would not by any means
+hold Carter Harrison up to youth as a model, yet there is a great
+lesson in his will-power and wonderful tenacity of purpose.
+
+"The general of a large army may be defeated," said Confucius, "but you
+cannot defeat the determined mind of a peasant."
+
+The poor, deaf pauper, Kitto, who made shoes in the almshouse, and who
+became the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the
+threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I
+think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere
+rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and
+industry, render himself almost anything he wishes to become."
+
+Years ago, a young mechanic took a bath in the river Clyde.  While
+swimming from shore to shore he discerned a beautiful bank,
+uncultivated, and he then and there resolved to be the owner of it, and
+to adorn it, and to build upon it the finest mansion in all the
+borough, and name it in honor of the maiden to whom he was espoused.
+"Last summer," says a well-known American, "I had the pleasure of
+dining in that princely mansion, and receiving this fact from the lips
+of the great shipbuilder of the Clyde."  That one purpose was made the
+ruling passion of his life, and all the energies of his soul were put
+in requisition for its accomplishment.
+
+Lincoln is probably the most remarkable example on the pages of
+history, showing the possibilities of our country.  From the poverty in
+which he was born, through the rowdyism of a frontier town, the
+rudeness of frontier society, the discouragement of early bankruptcy,
+and the fluctuations of popular politics, he rose to the championship
+of union and freedom.
+
+Lincoln's will made his way.  When his friends nominated him as a
+candidate for the legislature, his enemies made fun of him.  When
+making his campaign speeches he wore a mixed jean coat so short that he
+could not sit down on it, flax and tow-linen trousers, straw hat, and
+pot-metal boots.  He had nothing in the world but character and friends.
+
+When his friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his
+being a lawyer.  He said he hadn't brains enough.  He read law barefoot
+under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the
+counter in the store where he worked.  He had to borrow money to buy a
+suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature,
+and walked to take his seat at Vandalia,--one hundred miles.  While he
+was in the legislature, John F. Stuart, an eminent lawyer of
+Springfield, told him how Clay had even inferior chances to his, had
+got all of the education he had in a log schoolhouse without windows or
+doors; and finally induced Lincoln to study law.
+
+See Thurlow Weed, defying poverty and wading through the snow two
+miles, with rags for shoes, to borrow a book to read before the
+sap-bush fire.  See Locke, living on bread and water in a Dutch garret.
+See Heyne, sleeping many a night on a barn floor with only a book for
+his pillow.  See Samuel Drew, tightening his apron strings "in lieu of
+a dinner."  See young Lord Eldon, before daylight copying Coke on
+Littleton over and over again.  History is full of such examples.  He
+who will pay the price for victory needs never fear final defeat.  Why
+were the Roman legionaries victorious?
+
+  "For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,
+  Spared neither land nor gold,
+  Nor son, nor wife, nor limb nor life,
+  In the brave days of old."
+
+
+Fowell Buxton, writing to one of his sons, says: "I am sure that a
+young man may be very much what he pleases."
+
+Dr. Mathews has well said that "there is hardly a word in the whole
+human vocabulary which is more cruelly abused than the word 'luck.'  To
+all the faults and failures of men, their positive sins and their less
+culpable shortcomings, it is made to stand a godfather and sponsor.  Go
+talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by
+wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you
+will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the
+steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by
+'circumstances,' and complacently regarding himself as the victim of
+ill-luck.  Go visit the incarcerated criminal, who has imbued his hands
+in the blood of his fellow-man, or who is guilty of less heinous
+crimes, and you will find that, joining the temptations which were easy
+to avoid with those which were comparatively irresistible, he has
+hurriedly patched up a treaty with conscience, and stifles its
+compunctious visitings by persuading himself that, from first to last,
+he was the victim of circumstances.  Go talk with the mediocre in
+talents and attainments, the weak-spirited man who, from lack of energy
+and application, has made but little headway in the world, being
+outstripped in the race of life by those whom he had despised as his
+inferiors, and you will find that he, too, acknowledges the all-potent
+power of luck, and soothes his humbled pride by deeming himself the
+victim of ill-fortune.  In short, from the most venial offense to the
+most flagrant, there is hardly any wrong act or neglect to which this
+too fatally convenient word is not applied as a palliation."
+
+Paris was in the hands of a mob, the authorities were panic-stricken,
+for they did not dare to trust their underlings.  In came a man who
+said, "I know a young officer who has the courage and ability to quell
+this mob."  "Send for him; send for him; send for him," said they.
+Napoleon was sent for, came, subjugated the mob, subjugated the
+authorities, ruled France, then conquered Europe.
+
+What a lesson is Napoleon's life for the sickly, wishy-washy, dwarfed,
+sentimental "dudes," hanging about our cities, country, and
+universities, complaining of their hard lot, dreaming of success, and
+wondering why they are left in the rear in the great race of life.
+
+Success in life is dependent largely upon the willpower, and whatever
+weakens or impairs it diminishes success.  The will can be educated.
+That which most easily becomes a habit in us is the will.  Learn, then,
+to will decisively and strongly; thus fix your floating life, and leave
+it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by
+every wind that blows.  "It is not talent that men lack, it is the will
+to labor; it is the purpose, not the power to produce."
+
+It was this insatiable thirst for knowledge which held to his task,
+through poverty and discouragement, John Leyden, a Scotch shepherd's
+son.  Barefoot and alone, he walked six or eight miles daily to learn
+to read, which was all the schooling he had.  His desire for an
+education defied the extremest poverty, and no obstacle could turn him
+from his purpose.  He was rich when he discovered a little bookstore,
+and his thirsty soul would drink in the precious treasures from its
+priceless volumes for hours, perfectly oblivious of the scanty meal of
+bread and water which awaited him at his lowly lodging.  Nothing could
+discourage him from trying to improve himself by study.  It seemed to
+him that an opportunity to get at books and lectures was all that any
+man could need.  Before he was nineteen, this poor shepherd boy with no
+chance had astonished the professors of Edinburgh by his knowledge of
+Greek and Latin.
+
+Hearing that a surgeon's assistant in the Civil Service was wanted,
+although he knew nothing whatever of medicine, he determined to apply
+for it.  There were only six months before the place was to be filled,
+but nothing could daunt him, and in six months' time he actually took
+his degree with honor.  Walter Scott, who thought this one of the most
+remarkable illustrations of perseverance, helped to fit him out, and he
+sailed for India.
+
+Webster was very poor even after he entered Dartmouth College.  A
+friend sent him a recipe for greasing his boots.  Webster wrote and
+thanked him, and added: "But my boots need other doctoring, for they
+not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones."  Yet he became
+one of the greatest men in the world.  Sydney Smith said: "Webster was
+a living lie, because no man on earth could be as great as he looked."
+Carlyle said of him: "One would incline at sight to back him against
+the world."
+
+What seemed to be luck followed Stephen Girard all his life.  No matter
+what he did, it always seemed to others to turn to his account.  His
+coming to Philadelphia seemed a lucky accident.  A sloop was seen one
+morning off the mouth of Delaware Bay floating the flag of France and a
+signal of distress.  Young Girard was captain of this sloop, and was on
+his way to a Canadian port with freight from New Orleans.  An American
+skipper, seeing his distress, went to his aid, but told him the
+American war had broken out, and that the British cruisers were all
+along the American coast, and would seize his vessel.  He told him his
+only chance was to make a push for Philadelphia.  Girard did not know
+the way, and had no money.  The skipper loaned him five dollars to get
+the service of a pilot who demanded his money in advance.
+
+His sloop passed into the Delaware just in time to avoid capture by a
+British war vessel.  He sold the sloop and cargo in Philadelphia, and
+began business on the capital.  Being a foreigner, unable to speak
+English, short, stout, and with a repulsive face, blind in one eye, it
+was hard for him to get a start.  But he was not the man to give up.
+He had begun as a cabin boy at thirteen, and for nine years sailed
+between Bordeaux and the French West Indies.  He improved every leisure
+minute at sea, mastering the art of navigation.
+
+At the age of eight he first discovered that he was blind in one eye.
+His father, evidently thinking that he would never amount to anything,
+would not help him to an education beyond that of mere reading and
+writing, but sent his younger brothers to college.  The discovery of
+his blindness, the neglect of his father, and the chagrin of his
+brothers' advancement, soured his whole life.
+
+When he began business for himself in Philadelphia, there seemed to be
+nothing he would not do for money.  He bought and sold anything, from
+groceries to old junk.  He bottled wine and cider, from which he made a
+good profit.  Everything he touched prospered.  In 1780, he resumed the
+New Orleans and St. Domingo trade, in which he had been engaged at the
+breaking out of the Revolution.  Here great success again attended him.
+He had two vessels lying in one of the St. Domingo ports when the great
+insurrection on that island broke out.  A number of the rich planters
+fled to his vessels with their valuables, which they left for safe
+keeping while they went back to their estates to secure more.  They
+probably fell victims to the cruel negroes, for they never returned,
+and Girard was the lucky possessor of $50,000 which the goods brought
+in Philadephia.
+
+Everybody, especially his jealous brother merchants, attributed his
+great success to his luck.  While undoubtedly he was fortunate in
+happening to be at the right place at the right time, yet he was
+precision, method, accuracy, energy itself.  He left nothing to chance.
+His plans and schemes were worked out with mathematical care.  His
+letters, written to his captains in foreign ports, laying out their
+routes and giving detailed instruction from which they were never
+allowed to deviate under any circumstances, are models of foresight and
+systematic planning.  He never left anything of importance to others.
+He was rigidly accurate in his instructions, and would not allow the
+slightest departure from them.  He used to say that while his captains
+might save him money by deviating from instructions once, yet they
+would cause loss in ninety-nine other cases.  Once, when a captain
+returned and had saved him several thousand dollars by buying his cargo
+of cheese in another port than that in which he had been instructed to
+buy, Girard was so enraged, although he was several thousand dollars
+richer, that he discharged the captain on the spot, notwithstanding the
+latter had been faithful in his service for many years, and thought he
+was saving his employer a great deal of money by deviating from his
+instructions.
+
+Girard lived in a dingy little house, poorer than that occupied by many
+of his employees.  He married a servant girl of great beauty, but she
+proved totally unfitted for him, and died at last in the insane asylum.
+
+Girard never lost a ship, and many times what brought financial ruin to
+many others, as the War of 1812, only increased his wealth.  What
+seemed luck with him was only good judgment and promptness in seizing
+opportunities, and the greatest care and zeal in improving them to
+their utmost possibilities.
+
+Luck is not God's price for success: that is altogether too cheap, nor
+does he dicker with men.
+
+The mathematician tells you that if you throw the dice, there are
+thirty chances to one against your turning up a particular number, and
+a hundred to one against your repeating the same throw three times in
+succession: and so on in an augmenting ratio.  What is luck?  Is it, as
+has been suggested, a blind man's buff among the laws? a ruse among the
+elements? a trick of Dame Nature?  Has any scholar defined luck? any
+philosopher explained its nature? any chemist shown its composition?
+Is luck that strange, nondescript fairy, that does all things among men
+that they cannot account for?  If so, why does not luck make a fool
+speak words of wisdom; an ignoramus utter lectures on philosophy?
+
+Many a young man who has read the story of John Wanamaker's romantic
+career has gained very little inspiration or help from it toward his
+own elevation and advancement, for he looks upon it as the result of
+good luck, chance, or fate.  "What a lucky fellow," he says to himself
+as he reads; "what a bonanza he fell into."  But a careful analysis of
+Wanamaker's life only enforces the same lesson taught by the analysis
+of most great lives, namely, that a good mother, a good constitution,
+the habit of hard work, indomitable energy, a determination which knows
+no defeat, a decision which never wavers, a concentration which never
+scatters its forces, courage which never falters, a self-mastery which
+can say No, and stick to it, an "ignominious love of detail," strict
+integrity and downright honesty, a cheerful disposition, unbounded
+enthusiasm in one's calling, and a high aim and noble purpose insure a
+very large measure of success.
+
+Youth should be taught that there is something in circumstances; that
+there is such a thing as a poor pedestrian happening to find no
+obstruction in his way, and reaching the goal when a better walker
+finds the drawbridge up, the street blockaded, and so fails to win the
+race; that wealth often does place unworthy sons in high positions,
+that family influence does gain a lawyer clients, a physician patients,
+an ordinary scholar a good professorship; but that, on the other hand,
+position, clients, patients, professorships, manager's and
+superintendent's positions do not necessarily constitute success.  He
+should be taught that in the long run, as a rule, _the best man does
+win the best place_, and that persistent merit does succeed.
+
+There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real
+success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a
+Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of
+Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
+Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their
+shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry,
+irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt
+and detail.
+
+The youth should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life
+heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;"
+that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere
+bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless,
+the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or
+seize his opportunity.  Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before
+the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize
+her:--
+
+  "In idle wishes fools supinely stay:
+  Be there a will and wisdom finds a way."
+
+
+It has been well said that the very reputation of being strong willed,
+plucky, and indefatigable is of priceless value.  It often cows enemies
+and dispels at the start opposition to one's undertakings which would
+otherwise be formidable.
+
+"If Eric's in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of
+his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland,"
+says Emerson, "he will steer west and his ships will reach
+Newfoundland.  But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man,
+and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred
+miles further, and reach Labrador and New England.  There is no chance
+in results."  Obstacles tower before the living man like mountain
+chains, stopping his path and hindering his progress.  He surmounts
+them by his energy.  He makes a new path over them.  He climbs upon
+them to mountain heights.  They cannot stop him.  They do not much
+delay him.  He transmutes difficulties into power, and makes temporary
+failures into stepping-stones to ultimate success.
+
+How many might have been giants who are only dwarfs.  How many a one
+has died "with all his music in him."
+
+It is astonishing what men who have come to their senses late in life
+have accomplished by a sudden resolution.
+
+Arkwright was fifty years of age when he began to learn English grammar
+and improve his writing and spelling.  Benjamin Franklin was past fifty
+before he began the study of science and philosophy.  Milton, in his
+blindness, was past the age of fifty when he sat down to complete his
+world-known epic, and Scott at fifty-five took up his pen to redeem an
+enormous liability.  "Yet I am learning," said Michael Angelo, when
+threescore years and ten were past, and he had long attained the
+highest triumphs of his art.
+
+Even brains are second in importance to will.  The vacillating man is
+always pushed aside in the race of life.  It is only the weak and
+vacillating who halt before adverse circumstances and obstacles.  A man
+with an iron will, with a determination that nothing shall check his
+career, if he has perseverance and grit, is sure to succeed.  We may
+not find time for what we would like, but what we long for and strive
+for with all our strength, we usually approximate if we do not fully
+reach.  Hunger breaks through stone walls; stern necessity will find a
+way or make one.
+
+Success is also a great physical as well as mental tonic, and tends to
+strengthen the will-power.  Dr. Johnson says: "Resolutions and success
+reciprocally produce each other."  Strong-willed men, as a rule, are
+successful men, and great success is almost impossible without it.
+
+A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns
+neither to the right nor the left, though a paradise tempt him, who
+keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of
+success.  We could almost classify successes and failures by their
+various degrees of will-power.  Men like Sir James Mackintosh,
+Coleridge, La Harpe, and many others who have dazzled the world with
+their brilliancy, but who never accomplished a tithe of what they
+attempted, who were always raising our expectations that they were
+about to perform wonderful deeds, but who accomplished nothing worthy
+of their abilities, have been deficient in will-power.  One talent with
+a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it.  The great
+linguist of Bologna mastered a hundred languages by taking them singly,
+as the lion fought the bulls.
+
+I wish it were possible to show the youth of America the great part
+that the will might play in their success in life and in their
+happiness also.  The achievements of will-power are simply beyond
+computation.  Scarcely anything in reason seems impossible to the man
+who can will strong enough and long enough.
+
+How often we see this illustrated in the case of a young woman who
+suddenly becomes conscious that she is plain and unattractive; who, by
+prodigious exercise of her will and untiring industry, resolves to
+redeem herself from obscurity and commonness; and who not only makes up
+for her deficiencies, but elevates herself into a prominence and
+importance which mere personal attractions could never have given her.
+Charlotte Cushman, without a charm of form or face, climbed to the very
+top of her profession.  How many young men, stung by consciousness of
+physical deformity or mental deficiencies, have, by a strong persistent
+exercise of will-power, raised themselves from mediocrity and placed
+themselves high above those who scorned them.
+
+History is full of examples of men and women who have redeemed
+themselves from disgrace, poverty, and misfortune, by the firm
+resolution of an iron will.  The consciousness of being looked upon as
+inferior, as incapable of accomplishing what others accomplish; the
+sensitiveness at being considered a dunce in school, has stung many a
+youth into a determination which has elevated him far above those who
+laughed at him, as in the case of Newton, of Adam Clark, of Sheridan,
+Wellington, Goldsmith, Dr. Chalmers, Curran, Disraeli, and hundreds of
+others.  "Whatever you wish, that you are; for such is the force of the
+human will, joined to the Divine, that whatever we wish to be
+seriously, and with a true intention, that we become."  While this is
+not strictly true, yet there is a deal of truth in it.
+
+It is men like Mirabeau, who "trample upon impossibilities;" like
+Napoleon, who do not wait for opportunities, but make them; like Grant,
+who has only "unconditional surrender" for the enemy, who change the
+very front of the world.  "We have but what we make, and every good is
+locked by nature in a granite hand, sheer labor must unclench."
+
+What cares Henry L. Bulwer for the suffocating cough, even though he
+can scarcely speak above a whisper?  In the House of Commons he makes
+his immortal speech on the Irish Church just the same.
+
+"I can't, it is impossible," said a foiled lieutenant, to Alexander.
+"Be gone," shouted the conquering Macedonian, "there is nothing
+impossible to him who will try."
+
+Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures
+among those who started out in life with high hopes, I should say
+unhesitatingly, they lacked will-power.  They could not half will.
+What is a man without a will?  He is like an engine without steam, a
+mere sport of chance, to be tossed about hither and thither, always at
+the mercy of those who have wills.  I should call the strength of will
+the test of a young man's possibilities.  Can he will strong enough,
+and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?  It is the iron grip
+that takes the strong hold on life.  What chance is there in this
+crowding, pushing, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or
+pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life?  "The truest
+wisdom," said Napoleon, "is a resolute determination."  An iron will
+without principle might produce a Napoleon; but with character it would
+make a Wellington or a Grant, untarnished by ambition or avarice.
+
+        "The undivided will
+  'T is that compels the elements and wrings
+  A human music from the indifferent air."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
+
+Victories that are easy are cheap.  Those only are worth having which
+come as the result of hard fighting.--BEECHER.
+
+Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will, that
+encounter with difficulty, which we call effort; and it is astonishing
+to find how often results that seemed impracticable are thus made
+possible.--EPES SARGENT.
+
+I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as
+that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, or
+parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but
+wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.--EMERSON.
+
+  Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
+  The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
+  He only earns his freedom and existence
+  Who daily conquers them anew.
+        GOETHE.
+
+Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise
+above them.--WASHINGTON IRVING.
+
+
+"I have here three teams that I want to get over to Staten Island,"
+said a boy of twelve one day in 1806 to the innkeeper at South Amboy,
+N. J.  "If you will put us across, I'll leave with you one of my horses
+in pawn, and if I don't send you back six dollars within forty-eight
+hours you may keep the horse."
+
+The innkeeper asked the reason for this novel proposition, and learned
+that the lad's father had contracted to get the cargo of a vessel
+stranded near Sandy Hook, and take it to New York in lighters.  The boy
+had been sent with three wagons, six horses, and three men, to carry
+the cargo across a sand-spit to the lighters.  The work accomplished,
+he had started with only six dollars to travel a long distance home
+over the Jersey sands, and reached South Amboy penniless.  "I'll do
+it," said the innkeeper, as he looked into the bright honest eyes of
+the boy.  The horse was soon redeemed.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT]
+
+How can you keep a determined man from success: Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way, and he uses them for stepping-stones.  Imprison him, and he
+produces the "Pilgrim's Progress."  Deprive him of eyesight, and he
+writes the "Conquest of Mexico."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"My son," said this same boy's mother, on the first of May, 1810, when
+he asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat, having
+imbibed a strong liking for the sea; "on the twenty-seventh of this
+month you will be sixteen years old.  If, by that time, you will plow,
+harrow, and plant with corn the eight-acre lot, I will advance you the
+money."  The field was rough and stony, but the work was done in time,
+and well done.  From this small beginning Cornelius Vanderbilt laid the
+foundation of a colossal fortune.  He would often work all night; and,
+as he was never absent from his post by day, he soon had the best
+business in New York harbor.
+
+In 1813, when it was expected that New York would be attacked by
+British ships, all the boatmen except Cornelius put in bids to convey
+provisions to the military posts around New York, naming extremely low
+rates, as the contractor would be exempted from military duty.  "Why
+don't you send in a bid?" asked his father.  "Of what use?" replied
+young Vanderbilt; "they are offering to do the work at half price.  It
+can't be done at such rates."  "Well," said his father, "it can do no
+harm to try for it."  So, to please his father, but with no hope of
+success, Cornelius made an offer fair to both sides, but did not go to
+hear the award.  When his companions had all returned with long faces,
+he went to the commissary's office and asked if the contract had been
+given.  "Oh, yes," was the reply; "that business is settled.  Cornelius
+Vanderbilt is the man.  What?" he asked, seeing that the youth was
+apparently thunderstruck, "is it you?"  "My name is Cornelius
+Vanderbilt," said the boatman.  "Well," said the commissary, "don't you
+know why we have given the contract to you?"  "No."  "Why, it is
+because we want this business _done_, and we know you'll do it."
+Character gives confidence.
+
+In 1818 he owned two or three of the finest coasting schooners in New
+York harbor, and had a capital of nine thousand dollars.  Seeing that
+steam-vessels would soon win supremacy over those carrying sails only,
+he gave up his fine business to become the captain of a steamboat at
+one thousand dollars a year.  For twelve years he ran between New York
+city and New Brunswick, N. J.  In 1829 he began business as a steamboat
+owner, in the face of opposition so bitter that he lost his last
+dollar.  But the tide turned, and he prospered so rapidly that he at
+length owned over one hundred steamboats.  He early identified himself
+with the growing railroad interests of the country, and became the
+richest man of his day in America.
+
+Barnum began the race of business life barefoot, for at the age of
+fifteen he was obliged to buy on credit the shoes he wore at his
+father's funeral.  He was a remarkable example of success under
+difficulties.  There was no keeping him down; no opposition daunted
+him, no obstacles were too great for him to overcome.  Think of a man
+being ruined at fifty years of age; yes, worse than ruined, for he was
+heavily in debt besides.  Yet on the very day of his downfall he begins
+to rise again, wringing victory from defeat by his indomitable
+persistence.
+
+"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.
+Curran.  "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was
+born some three and twenty years and some months after me."  Speaking
+of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up,
+trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but
+imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as
+far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived
+that every eye was turned on me.  There were only six or seven present,
+and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my
+panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature,
+and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.
+I became dismayed and dumb.  My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there
+was nothing to hear."  He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he
+deserve the title until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a
+speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous
+anachronisms."  "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator
+Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend
+him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."
+Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"
+speaking quite fluently in his anger.  Encouraged by this success, he
+took great pains to become a good speaker.  He corrected his habit of
+stuttering by reading favorite passages aloud every day slowly and
+distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.
+
+Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to
+cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals.  Gifford wrote his
+first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on
+small scraps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first
+calculated eclipses on his plow handle.
+
+A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him,
+earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.
+Eight cents a day was often all he could earn.  He traveled through
+France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at
+the cottages of the peasantry.  At twenty-eight he was penniless in
+London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane.  In his
+poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London.  He wore a
+second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which
+he adroitly covered with his three-cornered hat during his visits; and
+we have an amusing anecdote of his contest of courtesy with a patient
+who persisted in endeavoring to relieve him of his hat, which only made
+him press it more devoutly to his heart.  He often had to pawn his
+clothes to keep from starving.  He sold his "Life of Voltaire" for
+twenty dollars.  After great hardship he managed to publish his "Polite
+Learning in Europe," and this brought him to public notice.  Next came
+"The Traveller," and the wretched man in a Fleet Street garret found
+himself famous.  His landlady once arrested him for rent, but Dr.
+Johnson came to his relief, took from his desk the manuscript of the
+"Vicar of Wakefield," and sold it for three hundred dollars.  He spent
+two years revising "The Deserted Village" after it was first written.
+Generous to a fault, vain and improvident, imposed on by others, he was
+continually in debt; although for his "History of the Earth and
+Animated Nature" he received four thousand dollars, and some of his
+works, as, for instance, "She Stoops to Conquer," had a large sale.
+But in spite of fortune's frown and his own weakness, he won success
+and fame.  The world, which so often comes too late with its assistance
+and laurels, gave to the weak, gentle, loving author of "The Vicar of
+Wakefield" a monument in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
+
+The poor, scrofulous, and almost blind boy, Samuel Johnson, was taken
+by his mother to receive the touch of Queen Anne, which was supposed to
+heal the "King's Evil."  He entered Oxford as a servant, copying
+lectures from a student's notebooks, while the boys made sport of the
+bare feet showing through great holes in his shoes.  Some one left a
+pair of new shoes at his door, but he was too proud to be helped, and
+threw them out of the window.  He was so poor that he was obliged to
+leave college, and at twenty-six married a widow of forty-eight.  He
+started a private school with his wife's money; but, getting only three
+pupils, was obliged to close it.  He went to London, where he lived on
+nine cents a day.  In his distress he wrote a poem in which appeared in
+capital letters the line, "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,"
+which attracted wide attention.  He suffered greatly in London for
+thirteen years, being arrested once for a debt of thirteen dollars.  At
+forty he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in which were these
+lines:--
+
+  "Then mark what ills the scholar's life assail;
+  Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail."
+
+When asked how he felt about his failures, he replied:
+
+"Like a monument,"--that is, steadfast, immovable.  He was an
+indefatigable worker.  In the evenings of a single week he wrote
+"Rasselas," a beautiful little story of the search for happiness, to
+get money to pay the funeral expenses of his mother.  With six
+assistants he worked seven years on his Dictionary, which made his
+fortune.  His name was then in everybody's mouth, and when he no longer
+needed help, assistance, as usual, came from every quarter.  The great
+universities hastened to bestow their degrees, and King George invited
+him to the palace.
+
+Lord Mansfield raised himself by indefatigable industry from oatmeal
+porridge and poverty to affluence and the Lord Chief Justice's Bench.
+
+Of five thousand articles sent every year to "Lippincott's Magazine,"
+only two hundred were accepted.  How much do you think Homer got for
+his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise?  Only bitter bread and salt, and
+going up and down other people's stairs.  In science, the man who
+discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a
+dungeon: the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died
+from starvation, driven from his home.  It is very clear indeed that
+God means all good work and talk to be done for nothing.  Shakespeare's
+"Hamlet" was sold for about twenty-five dollars; but his autograph has
+sold for five thousand dollars.
+
+During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac
+Newton could hardly pay two shillings a week to the Royal Society of
+which he was a member.  Some of his friends wanted to get him excused
+from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.
+
+There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which
+record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of
+a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount
+(five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.
+
+Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education, that he had to mend
+his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his
+friends.
+
+Who in the days of the First Empire cared to recall the fact that
+Napoleon, Emperor and King, was once forced to borrow a louis from
+Talma, when he lived in a garret on the Quai Conti?
+
+David Livingstone at ten years of age was put into a cotton factory
+near Glasgow.  Out of his first week's wages he bought a Latin Grammar,
+and studied in the night schools for years.  He would sit up and study
+till midnight unless his mother drove him to bed, notwithstanding he
+had to be at the factory at six in the morning.  He mastered Virgil and
+Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany.  So
+eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book
+before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of
+machinery would pore over its pages.
+
+George Eliot said of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I
+began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman."  One of Emerson's
+biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising,
+correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over
+again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left.  It did
+not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make
+clear the possibilities of the orchard, they were unmercifully cast
+aside."  Carlyle's books were literally wrung out of him.  The pains he
+took to satisfy himself of a relatively insignificant fact were
+incredible.  Before writing his essay on Diderot, he read twenty-five
+volumes at the rate of one per day.  He tells Edward Fitzgerald that
+for the twentieth time he is going over the confused records of the
+battle of Naseby, that he may be quite sure of the topography.
+
+"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and
+wonder," says Johnson, "are instances of the resistless force of
+perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that
+distant countries are united with canals.  If a man was to compare the
+effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the
+spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed
+by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations,
+incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and
+mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of
+human beings."
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Nott, a pulpit orator, was especially noted for a
+sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton, the great statesman, who was
+shot in a duel by Aaron Burr.  Although Nott had managed in some way to
+get his degree at Brown University, he was at one time so poor after he
+entered the ministry that he could not buy an overcoat.  His wife
+sheared their only cosset sheep in January, wrapped it in burlap
+blankets to keep it from freezing, carded and spun and wove the wool,
+and made it into an overcoat for him.
+
+Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them.  Nor do they
+wait for facilities or favoring circumstances; they seize upon whatever
+is at hand, work out their problem, and master the situation.  A young
+man determined and willing will find a way or make one.  A Franklin
+does not require elaborate apparatus; he can bring electricity from the
+clouds with a common kite.  A Watt can make a model of the condensing
+steam-engine out of an old syringe used to inject the arteries of dead
+bodies previous to dissection.  A Dr. Black can discover latent heat
+with a pan of water and two thermometers.  A Newton can unfold the
+composition of light and the origin of colors with a prism, a lens, and
+a piece of pasteboard.  A Humphry Davy can experiment with kitchen pots
+and pans, and a Faraday can experiment on electricity by means of old
+bottles, in his spare minutes while a book-binder.  When science was in
+its cradle the Marquis of Worcester, an English nobleman, imprisoned in
+the Tower of London, was certainly not in a very good position to do
+anything for the world, but would not waste his time.  The cover of a
+vessel of hot water blown on before his eyes led to a series of
+observations, which he published later in a book called "Century of
+Inventions."  These observations were a sort of text-book on the power
+of steam, which resulted in Newcomen's steam-engine, which Watt
+afterward perfected.  A Ferguson maps out the heavenly bodies, lying on
+his back, by means of threads with beads stretched between himself and
+the stars.
+
+Not in his day of bodily strength and political power, but blind,
+decrepit, and defeated with his party, Milton composed "Paradise Lost."
+
+Great men have found no royal road to their triumph.  It is always the
+old route, by way of industry and perseverance.
+
+The farmer boy, Elihu B. Washburn, taught school at ten dollars per
+month, and early learned the lesson that it takes one hundred cents to
+make a dollar.  In after years he fought "steals" in Congress, until he
+was called the "Watchdog of the Treasury."  From his long membership he
+became known as the "Father of the House."  He administered the oath to
+Schuyler Colfax as Speaker three times.  He recommended Grant as
+colonel of a regiment of volunteers.  The latter, when President,
+appointed him Secretary of State, and, later, Minister to France.
+During the reign of the Commune, the representatives of nearly all
+other foreign nations fled in dismay, but Washburn remained at his
+post.  Shells exploded close to his office, and fell all around it, but
+he did not leave even when Paris was in flames.  For a time he was
+really the minister of all foreign countries, in Paris; and represented
+Prussia for almost a year.  The Emperor William conferred upon him the
+Order of the Red Eagle, and gave him a jeweled star of great value.
+
+How could the poor boy, Elihu Burritt, working nearly all the daylight
+in a blacksmith's shop, get an education?  He had but one book in his
+library, and carried that in his hat.  But this boy with no chance
+became one of America's wonders.
+
+When teaching school, Garfield was very poor.  He tore his only blue
+jean trousers, but concealed the rents by pins until night, when he
+retired early that his boarding mistress might mend his clothes.  "When
+you get to be a United States Senator," said she, "no one will ask what
+kind of clothes you wore when teaching school."
+
+Although Michael Angelo made himself immortal in three different
+occupations, his fame might well rest upon his dome of St. Peter as an
+architect, upon his "Moses" as a sculptor, and upon his "Last Judgment"
+as a painter; yet we find by his correspondence now in the British
+Museum, that when he was at work on his colossal bronze statue of Pope
+Julius II., he was so poor that he could not have his younger brother
+come to visit him at Bologna, because he had but one bed in which he
+and three of his assistants slept together.
+
+"I was always at the bottom of my purse," said Zola, in describing the
+struggles of his early years of authorship.  "Very often I had not a
+sou left, and not knowing, either, where to get one.  I rose generally
+at four in the morning, and began to study after a breakfast consisting
+of one raw egg.  But no matter, those were good times.  After taking a
+walk along the quays, I entered my garret, and joyfully partaking of a
+dinner of three apples, I sat down to work.  I wrote, and I was happy.
+In winter I would allow myself no fire; wood was too expensive--only on
+fete days was I able to afford it.  But I had several pipes of tobacco
+and a candle for three sous.  A three-sous candle, only think of it!
+It meant a whole night of literature to me."
+
+James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the "New York Daily
+Express," and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a
+store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of
+New England rum.  He was so eager to go to college that he started for
+Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was
+so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station
+when he went home.
+
+When Elias Howe, harassed by want and woe, was in London completing his
+first sewing-machine, he had frequently to borrow money to live on.  He
+bought beans and cooked them himself.  He also borrowed money to send
+his wife back to America.  He sold his first machine for five pounds,
+although it was worth fifty, and then he pawned his letters patent to
+pay his expenses home.
+
+The boy Arkwright begins barbering in a cellar, but dies worth a
+million and a half.  The world treated his novelties just as it treats
+everybody's novelties--made infinite objection, mustered all the
+impediments, but he snapped his fingers at their objections, and lived
+to become honored and wealthy.
+
+There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
+way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and
+persecution.  "Everywhere," says Heine, "that a great soul gives
+utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha."
+
+Nearly every great discovery or invention that has blessed mankind has
+had to fight its way to recognition, even against the opposition of the
+most progressive men.
+
+Even Sir Charles Napier fiercely opposed the introduction of steam
+power into the Royal Navy.  In the House of Commons, he exclaimed, "Mr.
+Speaker, when we enter Her Majesty's naval service and face the chances
+of war, we go prepared to be hacked in pieces, to be riddled by
+bullets, or to be blown to bits by shot and shell; but Mr. Speaker, we
+do not go prepared to be boiled alive."  He said this with tremendous
+emphasis.
+
+"Will any one explain how there can be a light without a wick?" asked a
+member of Parliament, when William Murdock, toward the close of the
+eighteenth century, said that coal gas would give a good light, and
+could be conveyed into buildings in pipes.  "Do you intend taking the
+dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" was the sneering question of even
+the great scientist, Humphry Davy.  Walter Scott ridiculed the idea of
+lighting London by "smoke," but he soon used it at Abbotsford, and Davy
+achieved one of his greatest triumphs by experimenting with gas until
+he had invented his safety lamp.
+
+Titian used to crush the flowers to get their color, and painted the
+white walls of his father's cottage in Tyrol with all sorts of
+pictures, at which the mountaineers gazed in wonder.
+
+"That boy will beat me one day," said an old painter as he watched a
+little fellow named Michael Angelo making drawings of pot and brushes,
+easel and stool, and other articles in the studio.  The barefoot boy
+did persevere until he had overcome every difficulty and become a
+master of his art.
+
+William H. Prescott was a remarkable example of what a boy with "no
+chance" can do.  While at college, he lost one eye by a hard piece of
+bread thrown during a "biscuit battle," then so common after meals;
+and, from sympathy, the other eye became almost useless.  But the boy
+had pluck and determination, and would not lead a useless life.  He set
+his heart upon being a historian, and turned all his energies in that
+direction.  By the aid of others' eyes, he spent ten years studying
+before he even decided upon a particular theme for his first book.
+Then he spent ten years more, poring over old archives and manuscripts,
+before he published his "Ferdinand and Isabella."  What a lesson in his
+life for young men!  What a rebuke to those who have thrown away their
+opportunities and wasted their lives!
+
+"Galileo with an opera-glass," said Emerson, "discovered a more
+splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since with the
+great telescopes.  Columbus found the new world in an undecked boat."
+
+Surroundings which men call unfavorable cannot prevent the unfolding of
+your powers.  From the plain fields and lowlands of Avon came the
+Shakespearean genius which has charmed the world.  From among the
+rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire sprang the greatest of American
+orators and statesmen, Daniel Webster.  From the crowded ranks of toil,
+and homes to which luxury is a stranger, have often come the leaders
+and benefactors of our race.  Indeed, when Christ came upon earth, His
+early abode was a place so poor and so much despised that men thought
+He could not be the Christ, asking, in utter astonishment, "Can any
+good thing come out of Nazareth?"
+
+"I once knew a little colored boy," said Frederick Douglass, "whose
+mother and father died when he was but six years old.  He was a slave,
+and had no one to care for him.  He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel,
+and in cold weather would crawl into a meal-bag head foremost, and
+leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm.  Often he would roast an
+ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he
+crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast
+in the fire and eat.  That boy did not wear pantaloons, as you do, but
+a tow-linen shirt.  Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to
+spell from an old Webster's spelling-book, and to read and write from
+posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him.
+He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known.  He became
+presidential elector, United States marshal, United States recorder,
+United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth.  He wore
+broadcloth, and didn't have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the
+table.  That boy was Frederick Douglass.  What was possible for me is
+possible for you.  Don't think because you are colored you can't
+accomplish anything.  Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge.  So
+long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the
+respect of your fellow-men."
+
+Where shall we find an illustration more impressive than in Abraham
+Lincoln, whose life, career, and death might be chanted by a Greek
+chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial
+theme of modern times?  Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of
+what real parentage we know not, reared in penury, squalor, with no
+gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird
+dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward,
+ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this
+remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity,
+raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the
+destiny of a nation.  The great leaders of his party were made to stand
+aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like
+Seward, and Chase, and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent
+to the rear, while this strange figure was brought by unseen hands to
+the front, and given the reins of power.
+
+The story is told of a man in London deprived of both legs and arms,
+who managed to write with his mouth and perform other things so
+remarkable as to enable him to earn a fair living.  He would lay
+certain sheets of paper together, pinning them at the corner to make
+them hold.  Then he would take a pen and write some verses; after which
+he would proceed to embellish the lines by many skillful flourishes.
+Dropping the pen from his mouth, he would next take up a needle and
+thread, also with his mouth, thread the needle, and make several
+stitches.  He also painted with a brush, and was in many other ways a
+wonderful man.  Instead of being a burden to his family he was the most
+important contributor to their welfare.
+
+Arthur Cavanagh, M. P., was born without arms or legs, yet it is said
+that he was a good shot, a skillful fisherman and sailor, and one of
+the best cross country riders in Ireland.  He was a good
+conversationalist, and an able member of Parliament.  He ate with his
+fork attached to his stump of an arm, and wrote holding his pen in his
+teeth.  In riding he held the bridle in his mouth, his body being
+strapped to the saddle.  He once lost his means of support in India,
+but went to work with his accustomed energy, and obtained employment as
+a carrier of dispatches.
+
+People thought it strange that Gladstone should appoint blind Henry
+Fawcett Postmaster-General of Great Britain; but never before did any
+one fill the office so well.
+
+John B. Herreshoff, of Bristol, R. I., although blind since he was
+fifteen years old, is the founder and head of one of the most noted
+shipbuilding establishments in the world.  He has superintended the
+construction of some of the swiftest torpedo boats and steam and
+sailing yachts afloat.  He frequently takes his turn at the wheel in
+sailing his vessels on trial trips.  He is aided greatly by his younger
+brother Nathaniel, but can plan vessels and conduct business without
+him.  After examining a vessel's hull or a good model of it, he will
+give detailed instructions for building another just like it, and will
+make a more accurate duplicate than can most boat-builders whose sight
+is perfect.
+
+The Rev. William H. Milburn, who lost his sight when a child, studied
+for the ministry, and was ordained before he attained his majority.  In
+ten years he traveled about 200,000 miles in missionary work.  He has
+written half a dozen books, among them a very careful history of the
+Mississippi Valley.  He has long been chaplain of the lower house of
+Congress.
+
+Blind Fanny Crosby, of New York, was a teacher of the blind for many
+years.  She has written nearly three thousand hymns, among which are
+"Pass Me not, O Gentle Saviour," "Rescue the Perishing," "Saviour more
+than Life to Me," and "Jesus keep Me near the Cross."
+
+Nor are these by any means the only examples of blind people now doing
+their full share of the world's work.  In the United States alone there
+are engaged in musical occupation one hundred and fifty blind piano
+tuners, one hundred and fifty blind teachers of music in schools for
+the blind, five hundred blind private teachers, one hundred blind
+church organists, fifteen or more blind composers and publishers of
+music, and several blind dealers in musical instruments.
+
+_There is no open door to the temple of success_.  Every one who enters
+makes his own door, which closes behind him to all others, not even
+permitting his own children to pass.
+
+Nearly forty years ago, on a rainy, dreary day in November, a young
+widow in Philadelphia sat wondering how she could feed and clothe three
+little ones left dependent by the death of her husband, a naval
+officer.  Happening to think of a box of which her husband had spoken,
+she opened it, and found therein an envelope containing directions for
+a code of colored light signals to be used at night on the ocean.  The
+system was not complete, but she perfected it, went to Washington, and
+induced the Secretary of the Navy to give it a trial.  An admiral soon
+wrote that the signals were good for nothing, although the idea was
+valuable.  For months and years she worked, succeeding at last in
+producing brilliant lights of different colors.  She was paid $20,000
+for the right to manufacture them in our navy.  Nearly all the blockade
+runners captured in the Civil War were taken by the aid of the Coston
+signals, which are also considered invaluable in the Life Saving
+Service.  Mrs. Coston introduced them into several European navies, and
+became wealthy.
+
+A modern writer says that it is one of the mysteries of our life that
+genius, that noblest gift of God to man, is nourished by poverty.  Its
+greatest works have been achieved by the sorrowing ones of the world in
+tears and despair.  Not in the brilliant salon, not in the tapestried
+library, not in ease and competence, is genius usually born and
+nurtured; but often in adversity and destitution, amidst the harassing
+cares of a straitened household, in bare and fireless garrets, with the
+noise of squalid children, in the turbulence of domestic contentions,
+and in the deep gloom of uncheered despair.  This is its most frequent
+birthplace, and amid scenes like these unpropitious, repulsive,
+wretched surroundings, have men labored, studied, and trained
+themselves, until they have at last emanated from the gloom of that
+obscurity the shining lights of their times; have become the companions
+of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an
+influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of
+intellectual legislation.
+
+Chauncey Jerome's education was limited to three months in the district
+school each year until he was ten, when his father took him into his
+blacksmith shop at Plymouth, Conn., to make nails.  Money was a scarce
+article with young Chauncey.  He once chopped a load of wood for one
+cent, and often chopped by moonlight for neighbors at less than a dime
+a load.  His father died when he was eleven, and his mother was forced
+to send Chauncey out, with tears in his eyes and a little bundle of
+clothes in his hand, to earn a living on a farm.  His new employer kept
+him at work early and late chopping down trees all day, his shoes
+sometimes full of snow, for he had no boots until he was nearly
+twenty-one.  At fourteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a
+carpenter, who gave him only board and clothes.  Several times during
+his apprenticeship he carried his tools thirty miles on his back to his
+work at different places.  After he had learned his trade he frequently
+walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back.  One day he
+heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to
+make two hundred clocks in one lot.  "He'll never live long enough to
+finish them," said one.  "If he should," said another, "he could not
+possibly sell so many.  The very idea is ridiculous."  Chauncey
+pondered long over this rumor, for it had long been his dream to become
+a great clock-maker.  He tried his hand at the first opportunity, and
+soon learned to make a wooden clock.  When he got an order to make
+twelve at twelve dollars apiece he thought his fortune was made.  One
+night he happened to think that a cheap clock could be made of brass as
+well as of wood, and would not shrink, swell, or warp appreciably in
+any climate.  He acted on the idea, and became the first great
+manufacturer of brass clocks.  He made millions at the rate of six
+hundred a day, exporting them to all parts of the globe.
+
+"The History of the English People" was written while J. R. Green was
+struggling against a mortal illness.  He had collected a vast store of
+materials, and had begun to write, when his disease made a sudden and
+startling progress, and his physicians said they could do nothing to
+arrest it.  In the extremity of ruin and defeat he applied himself with
+greater fidelity to his work.  The time that might still be left to him
+for work must henceforth be wrested, day by day, from the grasp of
+death.  The writing occupied five months, while from hour to hour and
+day to day his life was prolonged, his doctors said, by the sheer force
+of his own will and his inflexible determination to finish the "Making
+of England."  He lay, too weak to lift a book, or to hold a pen,
+dictating every word, sometimes through hours of intense suffering.
+Yet so conscientious was he that, driven by death as he was, the
+greater part of the book was rewritten five times.  When it was done he
+began the "Conquest of England," wrote it, reviewed it, and then,
+dissatisfied with it, rejected it all and began again.  As death laid
+its cold fingers on his heart, he said: "I still have some work to do
+that I know is good.  I will try to win but one week more to write it
+down."  It was not until he was actually dying that he said, "I can
+work no more."
+
+"What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered?"  Schiller
+produced his greatest tragedies in the midst of physical suffering
+almost amounting to torture.  Handel was never greater than when,
+warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress
+and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made
+his name immortal in music.  Mozart composed his great operas, and last
+of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a
+fatal disease.  Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy
+sorrow, when oppressed by almost total deafness.
+
+Perhaps no one ever battled harder to overcome obstacles which would
+have disheartened most men than Demosthenes.  He had such a weak voice,
+and such an impediment in his speech, and was so short of breath, that
+he could scarcely get through a single sentence without stopping to
+rest.  All his first attempts were nearly drowned by the hisses, jeers,
+and scoffs of his audiences.  His first effort that met with success
+was against his guardian, who had defrauded him, and whom he compelled
+to refund a part of his fortune.  He was so discouraged by his defeats
+that he determined to give up forever all attempts at oratory.  One of
+his auditors, however, believed the young man had something in him, and
+encouraged him to persevere.  He accordingly appeared again in public,
+but was hissed down as before.  As he withdrew, hanging his head in
+great confusion, a noted actor, Satyrus, encouraged him still further
+to try to overcome his impediment.  He stammered so much that he could
+not pronounce some of the letters at all, and his breath would give out
+before he could get through a sentence.  Finally, he determined to be
+an orator cost what it might.  He went to the seashore and practiced
+amid the roar of the breakers with small pebbles in his mouth, in order
+to overcome his stammering, and at the same time accustom himself to
+the hisses and tumults of his audience.  He overcame his short breath
+by practicing speaking while running up steep and difficult places on
+the shore.  His awkward gestures were also corrected by long and
+determined drill before a mirror.
+
+Disheartened by the expense of removing the troublesome seeds, Southern
+planters were seriously considering the abandonment of cotton culture.
+To clean a pound of cotton required the labor of a slave for a day.
+Eli Whitney, a young man from New England, teaching school in Georgia,
+saw the state of affairs, and determined to invent a machine to do the
+work.  He worked in secret for many months in a cellar, and at last
+made a machine which cleaned the cotton perfectly and rapidly.  Just as
+success crowned his long labor thieves broke into the cellar and stole
+his model.  He recovered the model, but the principle was stolen, and
+other machines were made without his consent.  In vain he tried to
+protect his right in the courts, for Southern juries would almost
+invariably decide against him.  He had started the South in a great
+industry, and added millions to her wealth, yet the courts united with
+the men who had infringed his patents to rob him of the reward of his
+ingenuity and industry.  At last he abandoned the whole thing in
+disgust, and turned his attention to making improvements in firearms,
+and with such success that he accumulated a fortune.
+
+Robert Collyer, who brought his bride in the steerage when he came to
+America at the age of twenty-seven, worked at the anvil nine years in
+Pennsylvania, and then became a preacher, soon winning national renown.
+
+A shrewd observer says of John Chinaman: "No sooner does he put his
+foot among strangers than he begins to work.  No office is too menial
+or too laborious for him.  He has come to make money, and he will make
+it.  His frugality requires but little: he barely lives, but he saves
+what he gets; commences trade in the smallest possible way, and is
+continually adding to his store.  The native scorns such drudgery, and
+remains poor; the Chinaman toils patiently on, and grows rich.  A few
+years pass by, and he has warehouses; becomes a contractor for produce;
+buys foreign goods by the cargo; and employs his newly imported
+countrymen, who have come to seek their fortune as he did.  He is not
+particularly scrupulous in matters of opinion.  He never meddles with
+politics, for they are dangerous and not profitable; but he will adopt
+any creed, and carefully follow any observances, if, by so doing, he
+can confirm or improve his position.  He thrives with the Spaniard, and
+works while the latter sleeps.  He is too quick for the Dutchman, and
+can smoke and bargain at the same time.  He has harder work with the
+Englishman, but still he is too much for him, and succeeds.  Climate
+has no effect on him: it cannot stop his hands, unless it kills him;
+and if it does, he dies in harness, battling for money till his last
+breath.  Whoever he may be, and in whatever position, whether in his
+own or a foreign country, he is diligent, temperate, and uncomplaining.
+He keeps the word he pledges, pays his debts, and is capable of noble
+and generous actions.  It has been customary to speak lightly of him,
+and to judge a whole people by a few vagabonds in a provincial seaport,
+whose morals and manners have not been improved by foreign society."
+
+Columbus was dismissed as a fool from court after court, but he pushed
+his suit against an incredulous and ridiculing world.  Rebuffed by
+kings, scorned by queens, he did not swerve a hair's breadth from the
+overmastering purpose which dominated his soul.  The words "New World"
+were graven upon his heart; and reputation, ease, pleasure, position,
+life itself if need be, must be sacrificed.  Threats, ridicule,
+ostracism, storms, leaky vessels, mutiny of sailors, could not shake
+his mighty purpose.
+
+You cannot keep a determined man from success.  Place stumbling-blocks
+in his way and he takes them for stepping-stones, and on them will
+climb to greatness.  Take away his money, and he makes spurs of his
+poverty to urge him on.  Cripple him, and he writes the Waverley
+Novels.  Lock him up in a dungeon, and he composes the immortal
+"Pilgrim's Progress."  Put him in a cradle in a log cabin in the
+wilderness of America, and in a few years you will find him in the
+Capitol at the head of the greatest nation on the globe.
+
+Would it were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that
+all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the
+result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, of common
+every-day industry!
+
+When Lavoisier the chemist asked that his execution might be postponed
+for a few days in order to ascertain the results of the experiments he
+was conducting in prison, the communists refused to grant the request,
+saying: "The Republic has no need of philosophers."  Dr. Priestley's
+house was burned and his chemical library destroyed by a mob shouting:
+"No philosophers," and he was forced to flee from his country.  Bruno
+was burned in Rome for revealing the heavens, and Versalius
+[Transcriber's note: Vesalius?] was condemned for dissecting the human
+body; but their names shall live as long as time shall last.  Kossuth
+was two years in prison at Buda, but he kept on working, undaunted.
+John Hunter said: "The few things I have been enabled to do have been
+accomplished under the greatest difficulties, and have encountered the
+greatest opposition."
+
+Roger Bacon, one of the profoundest thinkers the world has produced,
+was terribly persecuted for his studies in natural philosophy, yet he
+persevered and won success.  He was accused of dealing in magic, his
+books were burned in public, and he was kept in prison for ten years.
+Even our own revered Washington was mobbed in the streets because he
+would not pander to the clamor of the people and reject the treaty
+which Mr. Jay had arranged with Great Britain.  But he remained firm,
+and the people adopted his opinion.  The Duke of Wellington was mobbed
+in the streets of London and his windows were broken while his wife lay
+dead in the house; but the "Iron Duke" never faltered in his course, or
+swerved a hair's breadth from his purpose.
+
+William Phips, when a young man, heard some sailors on the street, in
+Boston, talking about a Spanish ship, wrecked off the Bahama Islands,
+which was supposed to have money on board.  Young Phips determined to
+find it.  He set out at once, and, after many hardships, discovered the
+lost treasure.  He then heard of another ship, wrecked off Port De La
+Plata many years before.  He set sail for England and importuned
+Charles II. for aid.  To his delight the king fitted up the ship Rose
+Algier for him.  He searched and searched for a long time in vain.  He
+had to return to England to repair his vessel.  James II. was then on
+the throne, and he had to wait for four years before he could raise
+money to return.  His crew mutinied and threatened to throw him
+overboard, but he turned the ship's guns on them.  One day an Indian
+diver went down for a curious sea plant and saw several cannon lying on
+the bottom.  They proved to belong to the wreck for which he was
+looking, sunk fifty years before.  He had nothing but dim traditions to
+guide him, but he returned to England with $1,500,000.  The King made
+him High Sheriff of New England, and he was afterward made Governor of
+Massachusetts Bay Colony.
+
+Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's
+Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket.  Joseph
+Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a
+druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons.  Dante and Descartes
+were soldiers.  Andrew Johnson was a tailor.  Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe,
+and Kirke White were butchers' sons.  Faraday was the son of a
+blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an
+apothecary.  Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a
+tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker.  The boy Herschel played
+the oboe for his meals.  Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose
+from the ranks.  His great industry gained for him the name of "The
+Indefatigable."  Soult served fourteen years before he was made a
+sergeant.  When made Foreign Minister of France he knew very little of
+geography, even.  Richard Cobden was a boy in a London warehouse.  His
+first speech in Parliament was a complete failure; but he was not
+afraid of defeat, and soon became one of the greatest orators of his
+day.  Seven shoemakers sat in Congress during the first century of our
+government: Roger Sherman, Henry Wilson, Gideon Lee, William Graham,
+John Halley, H. P. Baldwin, and Daniel Sheffey.
+
+A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.
+
+The man who has not fought his way up to his own loaf, and does not
+bear the scar of desperate conflict, does not know the highest meaning
+of success.
+
+The money acquired by those who have thus struggled upward to success
+is not their only, or indeed their chief reward.  When, after years of
+toil, of opposition, of ridicule, of repeated failure, Cyrus W. Field
+placed his hand upon the telegraph instrument ticking a message under
+the sea, think you that the electric thrill passed no further than the
+tips of his fingers?  When Thomas A. Edison demonstrated in Menlo Park
+that the electric light had at last been developed into a commercial
+success, do you suppose those bright rays failed to illuminate the
+inmost recesses of his soul?  Edward Everett said: "There are occasions
+in life in which a great mind lives years of enjoyment in a single
+moment.  I can fancy the emotion of Galileo when, first raising the
+newly constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand
+prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the
+moon.  It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of
+Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their
+hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus, through
+the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, beheld the shores of San
+Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself
+to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw, by the
+stiffening fibres of the hemp cord of his kite, that he held the
+lightning in his grasp, like that when Leverrier received back from
+Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found."
+
+"Observe yon tree in your neighbor's garden," says Zanoni to Viola in
+Bulwer's novel.  "Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted.  Some
+wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the
+rock.  Choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and
+man, its life has been one struggle for the light.  You see how it has
+writhed and twisted,--how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has
+labored and worked, stem and branch, towards the clear skies at last.
+What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and
+circumstances--why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the
+vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open
+sunshine?  My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the
+struggle,--because the labor for the light won to the light at length.
+So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and
+of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven; this it is that
+gives knowledge to the strong and happiness to the weak."
+
+          "Each petty hand
+  Can steer a ship becalmed; but he that will
+  Govern her and carry her to her ends, must know
+  His tides, his currents; how to shift his sails;
+  What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers;
+  What her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop them;
+  What strands, what shelves, what rocks to threaten her;
+  The forces and the natures of all winds,
+  Gusts, storms, and tempests; when her keel plows hell,
+  And deck knocks heaven; then to manage her
+  Becomes the name and office of a pilot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+USES OF OBSTACLES.
+
+Nature, when she adds difficulties, adds brains.--EMERSON.
+
+Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous
+difficulties.--SPURGEON.
+
+  The good are better made by ill,
+  As odors crushed are sweeter still.
+        ROGERS.
+
+  Aromatic plants bestow
+  No spicy fragrance while they grow;
+  But crushed or trodden to the ground,
+  Diffuse their balmy sweets around.
+        GOLDSMITH.
+
+As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.--YOUNG.
+
+There is no possible success without some opposition as a fulcrum:
+force is always aggressive and crowds something.--HOLMES.
+
+The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the
+more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will
+be.--HORACE BUSHMILL.
+
+Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous
+circumstances would have lain dormant.--HORACE.
+
+For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity.--SIRACH.
+
+  Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe,
+  There's wit there ye'll get there, ye'll find no other where.
+        BURNS.
+
+Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens
+it.--HAZLITT.
+
+"Adversity is the prosperity of the great."
+
+No man ever worked his way in a dead calm.--JOHN NEAL.
+
+"Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
+
+
+"Many and many a time since," said Harriet Martineau, referring to her
+father's failure in business, "have we said that, but for that loss of
+money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of
+ladies with small means, sewing and economizing and growing narrower
+every year; whereas, by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own
+resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation,
+and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home; in
+short, have truly lived instead of vegetating."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN]
+
+  "Sculptor of souls, I lift to Thee
+    Encumbered heart and hands;
+  Spare not the chisel, set me free,
+    However dear the bands.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"I do believe God wanted a grand poem of that man," said George
+Macdonald of Milton, "and so blinded him that he might be able to write
+it."
+
+Two of the three greatest epic poets of the world were blind,--Homer
+and Milton; while the third, Dante, was in his later years nearly, if
+not altogether, blind.  It almost seems as though some great characters
+had been physically crippled in certain respects so that they would not
+dissipate their energy, but concentrate it all in one direction.
+
+"I have been beaten, but not cast down," said Thiers, after making a
+complete failure of his first speech in the Chamber of Deputies.  "I am
+making my first essay in arms.  In the tribune, as under fire, a defeat
+is as useful as a victory."
+
+A distinguished investigator in science said that when he encountered
+an apparently insuperable obstacle, he usually found himself upon the
+brink of some discovery.
+
+"Returned with thanks" has made many an author.  Failure often leads a
+man to success by arousing his latent energy, by firing a dormant
+purpose, by awakening powers which were sleeping.  Men of mettle turn
+disappointments into helps as the oyster turns into pearl the sand
+which annoys it.
+
+"Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of
+the storm wind is to the eagle,--a force against him that lifts him
+higher."
+
+A kite would not fly unless it had a string tying it down.  It is just
+so in life.  The man who is tied down by half a dozen blooming
+responsibilities and their mother will make a higher and stronger
+flight than the bachelor who, having nothing to keep him steady, is
+always floundering in the mud.  If you want to ascend in the world tie
+yourself to somebody.
+
+"It was the severe preparation for the subsequent harvest," said
+Pemberton Leigh, the eminent English lawyer, speaking of his early
+poverty and hard work.  "I learned to consider indefatigable labor as
+the indispensable condition of success, pecuniary independence as
+essential alike to virtue and happiness, and no sacrifice too great to
+avoid the misery of debt."
+
+When Napoleon's companions made sport of him on account of his humble
+origin and poverty he devoted himself entirely to books, and soon
+rising above them in scholarship, commanded their respect.  Soon he was
+regarded as the brightest ornament of the class.
+
+"To make his way at the bar," said an eminent jurist, "a young man must
+live like a hermit and work like a horse.  There is nothing that does a
+young lawyer so much good as to be half starved."
+
+Thousands of men of great native ability have been lost to the world
+because they have not had to wrestle with obstacles, and to struggle
+under difficulties sufficient to stimulate into activity their dormant
+powers.  No effort is too dear which helps us along the line of our
+proper career.
+
+Poverty and obscurity of origin may impede our progress, but it is only
+like the obstruction of ice or debris in the river temporarily forcing
+the water into eddies, where it accumulates strength and a mighty
+reserve which ultimately sweeps the obstruction impetuously to the sea.
+Poverty and obscurity are not insurmountable obstacles, but they often
+act as a stimulus to the naturally indolent, and develop a firmer fibre
+of mind, a stronger muscle and stamina of body.  If the germ of the
+seed has to struggle to push its way up through the stones and hard
+sod, to fight its way up to sunlight and air, and then to wrestle with
+storm and tempest, with snow and frost, the fibre of its timber will be
+all the tougher and stronger.
+
+"Do you wish to live without a trial?" asks a modern teacher.  "Then
+you wish to die but half a man.  Without trial you cannot guess at your
+own strength.  Men do not learn to swim on a table.  They must go into
+deep water and buffet the waves.  Hardship is the native soil of
+manhood and self-reliance.  Trials are rough teachers, but rugged
+schoolmasters make rugged pupils.  A man who goes through life
+prosperous, and comes to his grave without a wrinkle, is not half a
+man.  Difficulties are God's errands.  And when we are sent upon them
+we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.  We should reach after
+the highest good."
+
+"If you wish to rise," said Talleyrand, "make enemies."
+
+There is good philosophy in the injunction to love our enemies, for
+they are often our best friends in disguise.  They tell us the truth
+when friends flatter.  Their biting sarcasm and scathing rebuke are
+often mirrors which reveal us to ourselves.  These unkind stings and
+thrusts are spurs which urge us on to grander success and nobler
+endeavor.  Friends cover our faults and rarely rebuke; enemies drag out
+to the light all our weaknesses without mercy.  We dread these thrusts
+and exposures as we do the surgeon's knife, but are the better for
+them.  They reach depths before untouched, and we are led to resolve to
+redeem ourselves from scorn and inferiority.
+
+We are the victors of our opponents.  They have developed in us the
+very power by which we overcome them.  Without their opposition we
+could never have braced and anchored and fortified ourselves, as the
+oak is braced and anchored for its thousand battles with the tempests.
+Our trials, our sorrows, and our griefs develop us in a similar way.
+
+The man who has triumphed over difficulties bears the signs of victory
+in his face.  An air of triumph is seen in every movement.
+
+John Calvin, who made a theology for the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, was tortured with disease for many years, and so was Robert
+Hall.  The great men who have lifted the world to a higher level were
+not developed in easy circumstances, but were rocked in the cradle of
+difficulties and pillowed on hardships.
+
+"The gods look on no grander sight than an honest man struggling with
+adversity."
+
+"Then I must learn to sing better," said Anaximander, when told that
+the very boys laughed at his singing.  Strong characters, like the
+palm-tree, seem to thrive best when most abused.  Men who have stood up
+bravely under great misfortune for years are often unable to bear
+prosperity.  Their good fortune takes the spring out of their energy,
+as the torrid zone enervates races accustomed to a vigorous climate.
+Some people never come to themselves until baffled, rebuffed, thwarted,
+defeated, crushed, in the opinion of those around them.  Trials unlock
+their virtues; defeat is the threshold of their victory.
+
+It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle
+to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible; it is defeat that
+has made those heroic natures that are now in the ascendency, and that
+has given the sweet law of liberty instead of the bitter law of
+oppression.
+
+Difficulties call out great qualities, and make greatness possible.
+How many centuries of peace would have developed a Grant?  Few knew
+Lincoln until the great weight of the war showed his character.  A
+century of peace would never have produced a Bismarck.  Perhaps
+Phillips and Garrison would never have been known to history had it not
+been for slavery.
+
+"Will he not make a great painter?" was asked in regard to an artist
+fresh from his Italian tour.  "No, never," replied Northcote.  "Why
+not?"  "Because he has an income of six thousand pounds a year."  In
+the sunshine of wealth a man is, as a rule, warped too much to become
+an artist of high merit.  A drenching shower of adversity would
+straighten his fibres out again.  He should have some great thwarting
+difficulty to struggle against.
+
+The best tools receive their temper from fire, their edge from
+grinding; the noblest characters are developed in a similar way.  The
+harder the diamond, the more brilliant the lustre, and the greater the
+friction necessary to bring it out.  Only its own dust is hard enough
+to make this most precious stone reveal its full beauty.
+
+The spark in the flint would sleep forever but for friction; the fire
+in man would never blaze but for antagonism.  The friction which
+retards a train upon the track, robbing the engine of a fourth of its
+power, is the very secret of locomotion.  Oil the track, remove the
+friction, and the train will not move an inch.  The moment man is
+relieved of opposition or friction, and the track of his life is oiled
+with inherited wealth or other aids, that moment he often ceases to
+struggle and therefore ceases to grow.
+
+"It is this scantiness of means, this continual deficiency, this
+constant hitch, this perpetual struggle to keep the head above water
+and the wolf from the door, that keeps society from falling to pieces.
+Let every man have a few more dollars than he wants, and anarchy would
+follow."
+
+Suddenly, with much jarring and jolting, an electric car came to a
+standstill just in front of a heavy truck that was headed in an
+opposite direction.  The huge truck wheels were sliding uselessly round
+on the car tracks that were wet and slippery from rain.  All the urging
+of the teamster and the straining of the horses in vain,--until the
+motorman quietly tossed a shovelful of sand on the track under the
+heavy wheels, then the truck lumbered on its way.  "Friction is a very
+good thing," remarked a passenger.
+
+The philosopher Kant observes that a dove, inasmuch as the only
+obstacle it has to overcome is the resistance of the air, might suppose
+that if only the air were out of the way it could fly with greater
+rapidity and ease.  Yet if the air were withdrawn, and the bird should
+try to fly in a vacuum, it would fall instantly to the ground unable to
+fly at all.  The very element that offers the opposition to flying is
+at the same time the condition of any flight whatever.
+
+Rough seas and storms make sailors.  Emergencies make giant men.  But
+for our Civil War the names of its grand heroes would not be written
+among the greatest of our time.
+
+The effort or struggle to climb to a higher place in life has strength
+and dignity in it, and cannot fail to leave us stronger for the
+struggle, even though we miss the prize.
+
+From an aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out
+powers and virtues before unknown and suspected.  How often we see a
+young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a
+parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has
+knocked the props and crutches from under him.  The prison has roused
+the slumbering fire in many a noble mind.  "Robinson Crusoe" was
+written in prison.  The "Pilgrim's Progress" appeared in Bedford Jail.
+The "Life and Times" of Baxter, Eliot's "Monarchia of Man," and Penn's
+"No Cross, No Crown," were written by prisoners.  Sir Walter Raleigh
+wrote "The History of the World" during his imprisonment of thirteen
+years.  Luther translated the Bible while confined in the Castle of
+Wartburg.  For twenty years Dante worked in exile, and even under
+sentence of death.  His works were burned in public after his death;
+but genius will not burn.
+
+Take two acorns from the same tree, as nearly alike as possible; plant
+one on a hill by itself, and the other in the dense forest, and watch
+them grow.  The oak standing alone is exposed to every storm.  Its
+roots reach out in every direction, clutching the rocks and piercing
+deep into the earth.  Every rootlet lends itself to steady the growing
+giant, as if in anticipation of fierce conflict with the elements.
+Sometimes its upward growth seems checked for years, but all the while
+it has been expending its energy in pushing a root across a large rock
+to gain a firmer anchorage.  Then it shoots proudly aloft again,
+prepared to defy the hurricane.  The gales which sport so rudely with
+its wide branches find more than their match, and only serve still
+further to toughen every minutest fibre from pith to bark.
+
+The acorn planted in the deep forest shoots up a weak, slender sapling.
+Shielded by its neighbors, it feels no need of spreading its roots far
+and wide for support.
+
+Take two boys, as nearly alike as possible.  Place one in the country
+away from the hothouse culture and refinements of the city, with only
+the district school, the Sunday-school, and a few books.  Remove wealth
+and props of every kind; and, if he has the right kind of material in
+him, he will thrive.  Every obstacle overcome lends him strength for
+the next conflict.  If he falls, he rises with more determination than
+before.  Like a rubber ball, the harder the obstacle he meets the
+higher he rebounds.  Obstacles and opposition are but apparatus of the
+gymnasium in which the fibres of his manhood are developed.  He compels
+respect and recognition from those who have ridiculed his poverty.  Put
+the other boy in a Vanderbilt family.  Give him French and German
+nurses; gratify every wish.  Place him under the tutelage of great
+masters and send him to Harvard.  Give him thousands a year for
+spending money, and let him travel extensively.
+
+The two meet.  The city lad is ashamed of his country brother.  The
+plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner
+of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of
+the other.  The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no
+chance in life," and envies the city youth.  He thinks that it is a
+cruel Providence that places such a wide gulf between them.  They meet
+again as men, but how changed!  It is as easy to distinguish the
+sturdy, self-made man from the one who has been propped up all his life
+by wealth, position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder
+to tell the difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak
+and one from the sapling of the forest.  If you think there is no
+difference, place each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in
+a hurricane at sea.
+
+When God wants to educate a man, he does not send him to school to the
+Graces, but to the Necessities.  Through the pit and the dungeon Joseph
+came to a throne.  We are not conscious of the mighty cravings of our
+half divine humanity; we are not aware of the god within us until some
+chasm yawns which must be filled, or till the rending asunder of our
+affections forces us to become conscious of a need.  Paul in his Roman
+cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his
+prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of
+revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
+Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
+alone,--what failures they might all to themselves have seemed to be,
+yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
+humiliations!
+
+Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
+"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!"  "Tut,
+you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
+if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman."  Just so
+with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties that scare
+and keep out unworthy competitors.
+
+"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
+"If there were no difficulties, there would be no success.  In this
+necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
+advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations.  It has led
+to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."
+
+"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
+entering the Birmingham orchestra.  "Don't tell me what you like but
+what you don't like."
+
+John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
+professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
+their successes.
+
+"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
+way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
+"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
+satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
+discouragements.  But if they are properly met, they are not what they
+seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances.  There is no more
+helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."
+
+It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would
+have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
+continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
+will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to
+hear!
+
+It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote."  He was
+so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
+writing, and had to write on scraps of leather.  A rich Spaniard was
+asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his
+necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world
+rich."
+
+"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
+inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."
+
+"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless
+cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something,
+everything.  If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I
+would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she
+would be the greatest singer in Europe."
+
+"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
+Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is
+spoiled by the ease with which he composes."
+
+We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart
+covets.  Martin Luther did his greatest work, and built up his best
+character, while engaged in sharp controversy with the Pope.  Later in
+life his wife asks, "Doctor, how is it that whilst subject to Papacy we
+prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
+utmost coldness and very seldom?"
+
+When Lord Eldon was poor, Lord Thurlow withheld a promised
+commissionership of bankruptcy, saying that it was a favor not to give
+it then.  "What he meant was," said Eldon, "that he had learned I was
+by nature very indolent, and it was only want that could make me very
+industrious."
+
+Waters says that the struggle to obtain knowledge and to advance one's
+self in the world strengthens the mind, disciplines the faculties,
+matures the judgment, promotes self-reliance, and gives one
+independence of thought and force of character.
+
+"The gods in bounty work up storms about us," says Addison, "that give
+mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw out into
+practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth
+seasons and the calms of life."
+
+The hothouse plant may tempt a pampered appetite or shed a languid
+odor, but the working world gets its food from fields of grain and
+orchards waving in the sun and free air, from cattle that wrestle on
+the plains, from fishes that struggle with currents of river or ocean;
+its choicest perfumes from flowers that bloom unheeded, and in
+wind-tossed forests finds its timber for temples and for ships.
+
+"I do not see," says Emerson, "how any man can afford, for the sake of
+his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.
+It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.  Drudgery, calamity,
+exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.  The true
+scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by as a loss of
+power."
+
+Kossuth called himself "a tempest-tossed soul, whose eyes have been
+sharpened by affliction."
+
+Benjamin Franklin ran away, and George Law was turned out of doors.
+Thrown upon their own resources, they early acquired the energy and
+skill to overcome difficulties.
+
+As soon as young eagles can fly the old birds tumble them out and tear
+the down and feathers from their nest.  The rude and rough experience
+of the eaglet fits him to become the bold king of birds, fierce and
+expert in pursuing his prey.
+
+Boys who are bound out, crowded out, kicked out, usually "turn out,"
+while those who do not have these disadvantages frequently fail to
+"come out."
+
+"It was not the victories but the defeats of my life which have
+strengthened me," said the aged Sidenham Poyntz.
+
+Almost from the dawn of history, oppression has been the lot of the
+Hebrews, yet they have given the world its noblest songs, its wisest
+proverbs, its sweetest music.  With them persecution seems to bring
+prosperity.  They thrive where others would starve.  They hold the
+purse-strings of many nations.  To them hardship has been "like spring
+mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin,
+but will let the plant live."
+
+In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside the
+fort, crashing through a beautiful garden.  But from the ugly chasm
+there burst forth a spring of water which ever afterward flowed a
+living fountain.  From the ugly gashes which misfortunes and sorrows
+make in our hearts, perennial fountains of rich experience and new joys
+often spring.
+
+Don't lament and grieve over lost wealth.  The Creator may see
+something grand and mighty which even He cannot bring out as long as
+your wealth stands in the way.  You must throw away the crutches of
+riches and stand upon your own feet, and develop the long unused
+muscles of manhood.  God may see a rough diamond in you which only the
+hard hits of poverty can polish.
+
+God knows where the richest melodies of our lives are, and what drill
+and what discipline are necessary to bring them out.  The frost, the
+snows, the tempests, the lightnings, are the rough teachers that bring
+the tiny acorn to the sturdy oak.  Fierce winters are as necessary to
+it as long summers.  It is its half-century's struggle with the
+elements for existence, wrestling with the storm, fighting for its life
+from the moment that it leaves the acorn until it goes into the ship,
+that gives it value.  Without this struggle it would have been
+character-less, stamina-less, nerve-less, and its grain would have
+never been susceptible of high polish.  The most beautiful as well as
+the strongest woods are found not in tropical climates, but in the
+severe climates, where they have to fight the frosts and the winter's
+cold.
+
+Many a man has never found himself until he has lost his all.
+Adversity stripped him only to discover him.  Obstacles, hardships are
+the chisel and mallet which shape the strong life into beauty.  The
+rough ledge on the hillside complains of the drill, of the blasting
+powder which disturbs its peace of centuries: it is not pleasant to be
+rent with powder, to be hammered and squared by the quarryman.  But
+look again: behold the magnificent statue, the monument, chiseled into
+grace and beauty, telling its grand story of valor in the public square
+for centuries.
+
+The statue would have slept in the marble forever but for the blasting,
+the chiseling, and the polishing.  The angel of our higher and nobler
+selves would remain forever unknown in the rough quarries of our lives
+but for the blastings of affliction, the chiseling of obstacles, and
+the sand-papering of a thousand annoyances.
+
+Who has not observed the patience, the calm endurance, the sweet
+loveliness chiseled out of some rough life by the reversal of fortune
+or by some terrible affliction.
+
+How many business men have made their greatest strides toward manhood,
+have developed their greatest virtues, when the reverses of fortune
+have swept away everything they had in the world; when disease had
+robbed them of all they held dear in life.  Often we cannot see the
+angel in the quarry of our lives, the statue of manhood, until the
+blasts of misfortune have rent the ledge, and difficulties and
+obstacles have squared and chiseled the granite blocks into grace and
+beauty.
+
+Many a man has been ruined into salvation.  The lightning which smote
+his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him
+glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen.
+
+The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered possibilities in his
+nature of patience, endurance, and hope which he never dreamed he
+possessed before.
+
+"Adversity is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by
+one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better
+too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
+skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This conflict with difficulty
+makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in
+all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial."
+
+Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their
+personality, and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances.
+You cannot keep them down.  Every obstacle seems only to add to their
+ability to get on.
+
+"Under different circumstances," says Castelar, "Savonarola would
+undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father, a man unknown to
+history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the
+human soul the deep trace which he has left, but misfortune came to
+visit him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy
+which characterizes a soul in grief, and the grief that circled his
+brows with a crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the
+splendor of immortality.  His hopes were centred in the woman he loved,
+his life was set upon the possession of her, and when her family
+finally rejected him, partly on account of his profession, and partly
+on account of his person, he believed that it was death that had come
+upon him, when in truth it was immortality."
+
+The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks.  It
+is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
+and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.
+
+The youth Opie earned his bread by sawing wood, but he reached a
+professorship in the Royal Academy.  When but ten years old he showed
+the material he was made of by a beautiful drawing on a shingle.
+Antonio Canova was the son of a day laborer.  Thorwaldsen's parents
+were poor, but, like hundreds of others, they did with their might what
+their hands found to do, and ennobled their work.  They rose by being
+greater than their calling, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering,
+Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above
+rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning.  By being first-class barbers,
+tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power
+which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
+generals.
+
+Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, draws out the faculties
+of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying
+their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious.  Neither
+do uninterrupted success and prosperity qualify men for usefulness and
+happiness.  The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the
+faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of
+the voyager.  The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to
+outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism
+worth a lifetime of softness and security.  A man upon whom continuous
+sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry
+and hard and close-grained.  Men have drawn from adversity the elements
+of greatness.  If you have the blues, go and see the poorest and
+sickest families within your knowledge.  The darker the setting, the
+brighter the diamond.  Don't run about and tell acquaintances that you
+have been unfortunate; people do not like to have unfortunate men for
+acquaintances.
+
+Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he
+produced his greatest works.  Schiller wrote his best books in great
+bodily suffering.  He was not free from pain for fifteen years.  Milton
+wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick.  "Who best
+can suffer," said he, "best can do."  Bunyan said that, if it were
+lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater
+comfort's sake.
+
+"Do you know what God puts us on our backs for?" asked Dr. Payson,
+smiling, as he lay sick in bed.  "No," replied the visitor.  "In order
+that we may look upward."  "I am not come to condole but to rejoice
+with you," said the friend, "for it seems to me that this is no time
+for mourning."  "Well, I am glad to hear that," said Dr. Payson, "it is
+not often I am addressed in such a way.  The fact is I never had less
+need of condolence, and yet everybody persists in offering it; whereas,
+when I was prosperous and well, and a successful preacher, and really
+needed condolence, they flattered and congratulated me."
+
+A German knight undertook to make an immense Aeolian harp by stretching
+wires from tower to tower of his castle.  When he finished the harp it
+was silent; but when the breezes began to blow he heard faint strains
+like the murmuring of distant music.  At last a tempest arose and swept
+with fury over his castle, and then rich and grand music came from the
+wires.  Ordinary experiences do not seem to touch some lives--to bring
+out any poetry, any higher manhood.
+
+Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand
+lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London,
+did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and
+mighty city.
+
+True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.
+
+"Every man who makes a fortune has been more than once a bankrupt, if
+the truth were known," said Albion Tourgee.  "Grant's failure as a
+subaltern made him commander-in-chief, and for myself, my failure to
+accomplish what I set out to do led me to what I never had aspired to."
+
+The appeal for volunteers in the great battle of life, in exterminating
+ignorance and error, and planting high on an everlasting foundation the
+banner of intelligence and right, is directed to _you_.  Burst the
+trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope.  Place high thy
+standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.
+
+Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
+Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of
+a great character is one of its special necessities.  Many of our best
+poets
+
+  "Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
+  And learn in suffering what they teach in song."
+
+
+Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
+criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
+but nineteen years of age.  Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
+in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
+reached."  In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
+Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
+genius.  Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
+as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and
+abuse.
+
+This is the crutch age.  "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
+We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
+newspapers, magazines.  Our thinking is done for us.  Our problems are
+all worked out in "explanations" and "keys."  Our boys are too often
+tutored through college with very little study.  "Short roads" and
+"abridged methods" are characteristic of the century.  Ingenious
+methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college
+course.  Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
+Self-help and self-reliance are getting old fashioned.  Nature, as if
+conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her
+wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and
+emancipate him from Eden's curse.
+
+But do not misinterpret her edict.  She emancipates from the lower only
+to call to the higher.  She does not bid the world go and play while
+she does the work.  She emancipates the muscles only to employ the
+brain and heart.
+
+The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not
+developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on
+trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying
+climate and on a stubborn soil.  It is no chance that returns to the
+Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily
+toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England
+with its granite and ice rich.  It is rugged necessity, it is the
+struggle to obtain, it is poverty the priceless spur, that develops the
+stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism.  Labor found
+the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.
+
+As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble
+block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human
+being.  The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has
+little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay.  The sculptor will
+chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel.  Nature will
+chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities.  She
+will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let
+us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways,
+if she can develop a little character.  Everything must give way to
+that.  Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing,
+_manhood is everything_.
+
+Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a _man_, Nature is after.
+In every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure
+which stands out boldly beyond everything else.  Every other idea or
+figure on the canvas is subordinate to it, but pointing to the central
+idea, finds its true expression there.  So in the vast universe of God,
+every object of creation is but a guideboard with an index-finger
+pointing to the central figure of the created universe--Man.  Nature
+writes this thought upon every leaf, she thunders it in every creation.
+It is exhaled from every flower; it twinkles in every star.
+
+Oh, what price will Nature not pay for a man!  Ages and aeons were
+nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or to make his
+existence possible.  She has rifled the centuries for his development,
+and placed the universe at his disposal.  The world is but his
+kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the
+unseen universe.  Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a
+perfect type of her grandest creation.  To do this she must induce him
+to fight his way up to his own loaf.  She never allows him once to lose
+sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the
+man.  The moment we put our hand upon that which looks so attractive at
+a distance, and which we struggled so hard to reach, Nature robs it of
+its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive.
+
+"Life," says a philosopher, "refuses to be so adjusted as to eliminate
+from it all strife and conflict and pain.  There are a thousand tasks
+that, in larger interests than ours, must be done, whether we want them
+or no.  The world refuses to walk upon tiptoe, so that we may be able
+to sleep.  It gets up very early and stays up very late, and all the
+while there is the conflict of myriads of hammers and saws and axes
+with the stubborn material that in no other way can be made to serve
+its use and do its work for man.  And then, too, these hammers and axes
+are not wielded without strain or pang, but swung by the millions of
+toilers who labor with their cries and groans and tears.  Nay, our
+temple-building, whether it be for God or man, exacts its bitter toll,
+and fills life with cries and blows.  The thousand rivalries of our
+daily business, the fiercer animosities when we are beaten, the even
+fiercer exultation when we have beaten, the crashing blows of disaster,
+the piercing scream of defeat,--these things we have not yet gotten rid
+of, nor in this life ever will.  Why should we wish to get rid of them?
+We are here, my brother, to be hewed and hammered and planed in God's
+quarry and on God's anvil for a nobler life to come."  Only the muscle
+that is used is developed.
+
+The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and
+disappointments, who takes them just for what they are, lessons, and
+perhaps blessings in disguise, is the true hero.
+
+  There is a strength
+  Deep bedded in our hearts of which we reck
+  But little, till the shafts of heaven have pierced
+  Its fragile dwelling.  Must not earth be rent
+  Before her gems are found?
+        MRS. HEMANS.
+
+  "If what shone afar so grand
+  Turns to ashes in the hand,
+  On again, the virtue lies
+  In the struggle, not the prize."
+
+  "The hero is not fed on sweets,
+    Daily his own heart he eats;
+  Chambers of the great are jails,
+    And head-winds right for royal sails."
+
+          "So many great
+  Illustrious spirits have conversed with woe,
+  Have in her school been taught, as are enough
+  To consecrate distress, and make ambition
+  Even wish the frown beyond the smile of fortune."
+
+  Then welcome each rebuff,
+  That turns earth's smoothness rough,
+  Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go.
+        BROWNING.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ONE UNWAVERING AIM.
+
+  Life is an arrow--therefore you must know
+  What mark to aim at, how to use the bow--
+  Then draw it to the head and let it go.
+        HENRY VAN DYKE.
+
+The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the
+aptitude and perseverance to attain it.--GOETHE.
+
+Concentration alone conquers.--C. BUXTON.
+
+"He who follows two hares is sure to catch neither."
+
+"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
+
+Let every one ascertain his special business and calling, and then
+stick to it if he would be successful.--FRANKLIN.
+
+"Digression is as dangerous as stagnation in the career of a young man
+in business."
+
+Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows
+unconsciously into genius.--BULWER.
+
+Genius is intensity.--BALZAC.
+
+
+"Why do you lead such a solitary life?" asked a friend of Michael
+Angelo.  "Art is a jealous mistress," replied the artist; "she requires
+the whole man."  During his labors at the Sistine Chapel, according to
+Disraeli, he refused to meet any one, even at his own house.
+
+"That day we sailed westward, which was our course," were the simple
+but grand words which Columbus wrote in his journal day after day.
+Hope might rise and fall, terror and dismay might seize upon the crew
+at the mysterious variations of the compass, but Columbus, unappalled,
+pushed due west and nightly added to his record the above words.
+
+"Cut an inch deeper," said a member of the Old Guard to the surgeon
+probing his wound, "and you will find the Emperor,"--meaning his heart.
+By the marvelous power of concentrated purpose Napoleon had left his
+name on the very stones of the capital, had burned it indelibly into
+the heart of every Frenchman, and had left it written in living letters
+all over Europe.  France to-day has not shaken off the spell of that
+name.  In the fair city on the Seine the mystic "N" confronts you
+everywhere.
+
+Oh, the power of a great purpose to work miracles!  It has changed the
+face of the world.  Napoleon knew that there were plenty of great men
+in France, but they did not know the might of the unwavering aim by
+which he was changing the destinies of Europe.  He saw that what was
+called the "balance of power" was only an idle dream; that, unless some
+master-mind could be found which was a match for events, the millions
+would rule in anarchy.  His iron will grasped the situation; and like
+William Pitt, he did not loiter around balancing the probabilities of
+failure or success, or dally with his purpose.  There was no turning to
+the right nor to the left; no dreaming away time, nor building
+air-castles; but one look and purpose, forward, upward and onward,
+straight to his goal.  He always hit the bull's-eye.  His great success
+in war was due largely to his definiteness of aim.  He was like a great
+burning-glass, concentrating the rays of the sun upon a single spot; he
+burned a hole wherever he went.  The secret of his power lay in his
+ability to concentrate his forces upon a single point.  After finding
+the weak place in the enemy's ranks, he would mass his men and hurl
+them like an avalanche upon the critical point, crowding volley upon
+volley, charge upon charge, till he made a breach.  What a lesson of
+the power of concentration there is in this man's life!  He was able to
+focus all his faculties upon the smallest detail, as well as upon an
+empire.  But, alas!  Napoleon was himself defeated by violation of his
+own tactics,--the constantly repeated crushing force of heavy
+battalions upon one point.
+
+To succeed to-day a man must concentrate all the faculties of his mind
+upon one unwavering aim, and have a tenacity of purpose which means
+death or victory.  Every other inclination which tempts him from his
+aim must be suppressed.
+
+New Jersey has many ports, but they are so shallow and narrow that the
+shipping of the entire state amounts to but little.  On the other hand,
+New York has but one ocean port, and yet it is so broad, deep, and
+grand, that it leads America in its enormous shipping trade.  She sends
+her vessels into every port of the world, while the ships of her
+neighbor are restricted to local voyages.
+
+A man may starve on a dozen half-learned trades or occupations; he may
+grow rich and famous upon one trade thoroughly mastered, even though it
+be the humblest.
+
+Even Gladstone, with his ponderous yet active brain, says he cannot do
+two things at once; he throws his entire strength upon whatever he
+does.  The intensest energy characterizes everything he undertakes,
+even his recreation.  If such concentration of energy is necessary for
+the success of a Gladstone, what can we common mortals hope to
+accomplish by "scatteration?"
+
+All great men have been noted for their power of concentration which
+makes them oblivious of everything outside their aim.  Victor Hugo
+wrote his "Notre Dame" during the revolution of 1830, while the bullets
+were whistling across his garden.  He shut himself up in one room,
+locking his clothes up, lest they should tempt him to go out into the
+street, and spent most of that winter wrapped in a big gray comforter,
+pouring his very life into his work.
+
+Genius is intensity.  Abraham Lincoln possessed such power of
+concentration that he could repeat quite correctly a sermon to which he
+had listened in his boyhood.  Dr. O. W. Holmes, when an Andover
+student, riveted his eyes on the book he was studying as though he were
+reading a will that made him heir to a million.
+
+A New York sportsman, in answer to an advertisement, sent twenty-five
+cents for a sure receipt to prevent a shotgun from scattering, and
+received the following; "Dear Sir: To keep a gun from scattering put in
+but a single shot."
+
+It is the men who do one thing in this world who come to the front.
+Who is the favorite actor?  It is a Jefferson, who devotes a lifetime
+to a "Rip Van Winkle," a Booth, an Irving, a Kean, who plays one
+character until he can play it better than any other man living, and
+not the shallow players who impersonate all parts.  It is the man who
+never steps outside of his specialty or dissipates his individuality.
+It is an Edison, a Morse, a Bell, a Howe, a Stephenson, a Watt.  It is
+Adam Smith, spending ten years on the "Wealth of Nations."  It is
+Gibbon, giving twenty years to his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire."  It is a Hume, writing thirteen hours a day on his "History of
+England."  It is a Webster, spending thirty-six years on his
+dictionary.  It is a Bancroft, working twenty-six years on his "History
+of the United States."  It is a Field, crossing the ocean fifty times
+to lay a cable, while the world ridicules.  It is a Newton, writing his
+"Chronology of Ancient Nations" sixteen times.  It is a Grant, who
+proposes to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  These
+are the men who have written their names prominently in the history of
+the world.
+
+A one-talent man who decides upon a definite object accomplishes more
+than the ten-talent man who scatters his energies and never knows
+exactly what he will do.  The weakest living creature, by concentrating
+his powers upon one thing, can accomplish something; the strongest, by
+dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.  Drop after
+drop, continually falling, wears a passage through the hardest rock.
+The hasty tempest, as Carlyle points out, rushes over it with hideous
+uproar and leaves no trace behind.
+
+A great purpose is cumulative; and, like a great magnet, it attracts
+all that is kindred along the stream of life.
+
+A Yankee can splice a rope in many different ways; an English sailor
+only knows one way, but that is the best one.  It is the one-sided man,
+the sharp-edged man, the man of single and intense purpose, the man of
+one idea, who turns neither to the right nor to the left, though a
+paradise tempt him, who cuts his way through obstacles and forges to
+the front.  The time has gone forever when a Bacon can span universal
+knowledge; or when, absorbing all the knowledge of the times, a Dante
+can sustain arguments against fourteen disputants in the University of
+Paris, and conquer in them all.  The day when a man can successfully
+drive a dozen callings abreast is a thing of the past.  Concentration
+is the keynote of the century.
+
+Scientists estimate that there is energy enough in less than fifty
+acres of sunshine to run all the machinery in the world, if it could be
+concentrated.  But the sun might blaze out upon the earth forever
+without setting anything on fire; although these rays focused by a
+burning-glass would melt solid granite, or even change a diamond into
+vapor.  There are plenty of men who have ability enough; the rays of
+their faculties, taken separately, are all right, but they are
+powerless to collect them, to bring them all to bear upon a single
+spot.  Versatile men, universal geniuses, are usually weak, because
+they have no power to concentrate their talents upon one point, and
+this makes all the difference between success and failure.
+
+Chiseled upon the tomb of a disappointed, heart-broken king, Joseph II.
+of Austria, in the Royal Cemetery at Vienna, a traveler tells us, is
+this epitaph: "Here lies a monarch who, with the best of intentions,
+never carried out a single plan."
+
+Sir James Mackintosh was a man of remarkable ability.  He excited in
+every one who knew him the greatest expectations.  Many watched his
+career with much interest, expecting that he would dazzle the world.
+But there was no purpose in his life.  He had intermittent attacks of
+enthusiasm for doing great things, but his zeal all evaporated before
+he could decide what to do.  This fatal defect in his character kept
+him balancing between conflicting motives; and his whole life was
+almost thrown away.  He lacked power to choose one object and persevere
+with a single aim, sacrificing every interfering inclination.  He
+vacillated for weeks trying to determine whether to use "usefulness" or
+"utility" in a composition.
+
+One talent utilized in a single direction will do infinitely more than
+ten talents scattered.  A thimbleful of powder behind a ball in a rifle
+will do more execution than a carload of powder unconfined.  The
+rifle-barrel is the purpose that gives direct aim to the powder, which
+otherwise, no matter how good it might be, would be powerless.  The
+poorest scholar in school or college often, in practical life, far
+outstrips the class leader or senior wrangler, simply because what
+little ability he has he employs for a definite object, while the
+other, depending upon his general ability and brilliant prospects,
+never concentrates his powers.
+
+"A sublime self-confidence," says E. P. Whipple, "springing not from
+self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his
+object, lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, and
+communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: RICHARD ARKWRIGHT]
+
+What a sublime spectacle is that of a man going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles which
+dishearten others, as though they were stepping-stones.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It is fashionable to ridicule the man of one idea, but the men who have
+changed the front of the world have been men of a single aim.  No man
+can make his mark on this age of specialties who is not a man of one
+idea, one supreme aim, one master passion.  The man who would make
+himself felt on this bustling planet, who would make a breach in the
+compact conservatism of our civilization, must play all his guns on one
+point.  A wavering aim, a faltering purpose, has no place in the
+nineteenth century.  "Mental shiftlessness" is the cause of many a
+failure.  The world is full of unsuccessful men who spend their lives
+letting empty buckets down into empty wells.
+
+"Mr. A. often laughs at me," said a young American chemist, "because I
+have but one idea.  He talks about everything, aims to excel in many
+things; but I have learned that, if I ever wish to make a breach, I
+must play my guns continually upon one point."  This great chemist,
+when an obscure schoolmaster, used to study by the light of a pine knot
+in a log cabin.  Not many years later he was performing experiments in
+electro-magnetism before English earls, and subsequently he was at the
+head of one of the largest scientific institutes of this country.  This
+man was the late Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution,
+Washington.
+
+Douglas Jerrold once knew a man who was familiar with twenty-four
+languages but could not express a thought in one of them.
+
+We should guard against a talent which we cannot hope to practice in
+perfection, says Goethe.  Improve it as we may, we shall always, in the
+end, when the merit of the matter has become apparent to us, painfully
+lament the loss of time and strength devoted to such botching.  An old
+proverb says: "The master of one trade will support a wife and seven
+children, and the master of seven will not support himself."
+
+_It is the single aim that wins_.  Men with monopolizing ambitions
+rarely live in history.  They do not focus their powers long enough to
+burn their names indelibly into the roll of honor.  Edward Everett,
+even with his magnificent powers, disappointed the expectations of his
+friends.  He spread himself over the whole field of knowledge and
+elegant culture; but the mention of the name of Everett does not call
+up any one great achievement as does that of names like Garrison and
+Phillips.  Voltaire called the Frenchman La Harpe an oven which was
+always heating, but which never cooked anything.  Hartley Coleridge was
+splendidly endowed with talent, like Sir James Mackintosh, but there
+was one fatal lack in his character--he had no definite purpose, and
+his life was a failure.  Unstable as water, he could not excel.
+Southey, his uncle, says:
+
+"Coleridge has two left hands."  He was so morbidly shy from living
+alone in his dreamland that he could not open a letter without
+trembling.  He would often rally from his purposeless life, and resolve
+to redeem himself from the oblivion he saw staring him in the face;
+but, like Mackintosh, he remained a man of promise merely to the end of
+his life.
+
+The world always makes way for the man with a purpose in him, like
+Bismarck or Grant.  Look at Rufus Choate, concentrating all his
+attention first on one juryman, then on another, going back over the
+whole line again and again, until he has burned his arguments into
+their souls; until he has hypnotized them with his purpose; until they
+see with his eyes, think his thoughts, feel his sensations.  He never
+stopped until he had projected his mind into theirs, and permeated
+their lives with his individuality.  There was no escape from his
+concentration of purpose, his persuasive rhetoric, his convincing
+logic.  "Carry the jury at all hazards," he used to say to young
+lawyers; "move heaven and earth to carry the jury, and then fight it
+out with the judge on the law questions as best you can."
+
+The man who succeeds has a programme.  He fixes his course and adheres
+to it.  He lays his plans and executes them.  He goes straight to his
+goal.  He is not pushed this way and that every time a difficulty is
+thrown in his path; if he can't get over it he goes through it.
+Constant and steady use of the faculties under a central purpose gives
+strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end
+only weakens them.  The mind must be focused on a definite end, or,
+like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself to pieces.
+
+This age of concentration calls, not for educated men merely, not for
+talented men, not for geniuses, not for jacks-of-all-trades, but for
+men who are trained to do one thing as well as it can be done.
+Napoleon could go through the drill of his soldiers better than any one
+of his men.
+
+_Stick to your aim_.  The constant changing of one's occupation is
+fatal to all success.  After a young man has spent five or six years in
+a dry goods store, he concludes that he would rather sell groceries,
+thereby throwing away five years of valuable experience which will be
+of very little use to him in the grocery business; and so he spends a
+large part of his life drifting around from one kind of employment to
+another, learning part of each, but all of none, forgetting that
+experience is worth more to him than money, and that the years devoted
+to learning his trade or occupation are the most valuable.
+Half-learned trades, no matter if a man has twenty, will never give him
+a good living, much less a competency, while wealth is absolutely out
+of the question.
+
+How many young men fail to reach the point of efficiency in one line of
+work before they get discouraged and venture into something else.  How
+easy to see the thorns in one's own profession or vocation, and only
+the roses in that of another.  A young man in business, for instance,
+seeing a physician riding about town in his carriage, visiting his
+patients, imagines that a doctor must have an easy, ideal life, and
+wonders that he himself should have embarked in an occupation so full
+of disagreeable drudgery and hardships.  He does not know of the years
+of dry, tedious study which the physician has consumed, the months and
+perhaps years of waiting for patients, the dry detail of anatomy, the
+endless names of drugs and technical terms.
+
+Scientists tell us that there is nothing in nature so ugly and
+disagreeable but intense light will make it beautiful.  The complete
+mastery of one profession will render even the driest details
+interesting.  The consciousness of thorough knowledge, the habit of
+doing everything to a finish, gives a feeling of strength, of
+superiority, which takes the drudgery out of an occupation.  The more
+completely we master a vocation the more thoroughly we enjoy it.  In
+fact, the man who has found his place and become master in it could
+scarcely be induced, even though he be a farmer, or a carpenter, or
+grocer, to exchange places with a governor or congressman.  To be
+successful is to _find your sphere and fill it, to get into your place
+and master it_.
+
+There is a sense of great power in a vocation after a man has reached
+the point of efficiency in it, the point of productiveness, the point
+where his skill begins to tell and bring in returns.  Up to this point
+of efficiency, while he is learning his trade, the time seems to have
+been almost thrown away.  But he has been storing up a vast reserve of
+knowledge of detail, laying foundations, forming his acquaintances,
+gaining his reputation for truthfulness, trustworthiness, and
+integrity, and in establishing his credit.  When he reaches this point
+of efficiency, all the knowledge and skill, character, influence, and
+credit thus gained come to his aid, and he soon finds that in what
+seemed almost thrown away lies the secret of his prosperity.  The
+credit he established as a clerk, the confidence, the integrity, the
+friendships formed, he finds equal to a large capital when he starts
+out for himself and takes the highway to fortune; while the young man
+who half learned several trades, and got discouraged and stopped just
+short of the point of efficiency, just this side of success, is a
+failure because he didn't go far enough; he did not press on to the
+point at which his acquisition would have been profitable.
+
+In spite of the fact that nearly all very successful men have made a
+life work of one thing, we see on every hand hundreds of young men and
+women flitting about from occupation to occupation, trade to trade, in
+one thing to-day and another to-morrow,--just as though they could go
+from one thing to another by turning a switch, as if they could run as
+well on another track as on the one they have left, regardless of the
+fact that no two careers have the same gauge, that every man builds his
+own road upon which another's engine cannot run either with speed or
+safety.  This fickleness, this disposition to shift about from one
+occupation to another, seems to be peculiar to American life, so much
+so that, when a young man meets a friend whom he has not seen for some
+time, the commonest question to ask is, "What are you doing now?"
+showing the improbability or uncertainty that he is doing to-day what
+he was doing when they last met.
+
+Some people think that if they "keep everlastingly at it" they will
+succeed, but this is not so.  Working without a plan is as foolish as
+going to sea without a compass.  A ship which has broken its rudder in
+mid-ocean may "keep everlastingly at it," may keep on a full head of
+steam, driving about all the time, but it never arrives anywhere, it
+never reaches any port unless by accident, and if it does find a haven,
+its cargo may not be suited to the people, the climate, or conditions
+among which it has accidentally drifted.  The ship must be directed to
+a definite port, for which its cargo is adapted, and where there is a
+demand for it, and it must aim steadily for that port through sunshine
+and storm, through tempest and fog.  So a man who would succeed must
+not drift about rudderless on the ocean of life.  He must not only
+steer straight toward his destined port when the ocean is smooth, when
+the currents and winds serve, but he must keep his course in the very
+teeth of the wind and the tempest, and even when enveloped in the fogs
+of disappointment and mists of opposition.  The Cunarders do not stop
+for fogs or storms; they plow straight through the rough seas with only
+one thing in view, their destined port, and no matter what the weather
+is, no matter what obstacles they encounter, their arrival in port can
+be predicted to within a few hours.  It is practically certain, too,
+that the ship destined for Boston will not turn up at Fort Sumter or at
+Sandy Hook.
+
+On the prairies of South America there grows a flower that always
+inclines in the same direction.  If a traveler loses his way and has
+neither compass nor chart, by turning to this flower he will find a
+guide on which he can implicitly rely; for no matter how the rains
+descend or the winds blow, its leaves point to the north.  So there are
+many men whose purposes are so well known, whose aims are so constant,
+that no matter what difficulties they may encounter, or what opposition
+they may meet, you can tell almost to a certainty where they will come
+out.  They may be delayed by head winds and counter currents, but they
+will _always head for the port_ and will steer straight towards the
+harbor.  You know to a certainty that whatever else they may lose, they
+will not lose their compass or rudder.
+
+Whatever may happen to a man of this stamp, even though his sails may
+be swept away and his mast stripped to the deck, though he may be
+wrecked by the storms of life, the needle of his compass will still
+point to the North Star of his hope.  Whatever comes, his life will not
+be purposeless.  Even a wreck that makes its port is a greater success
+than a full-rigged ship with all its sails flying, with every mast and
+rope intact; which merely drifts into an accidental harbor.
+
+To fix a wandering life and give it direction is not an easy task, but
+a life which has no definite aim is sure to be frittered away in empty
+and purposeless dreams.  "Listless triflers," "busy idlers,"
+"purposeless busybodies," are seen everywhere.  A healthy, definite
+purpose is a remedy for a thousand ills which attend aimless lives.
+Discontent, dissatisfaction, flee before a definite purpose.  An aim
+takes the drudgery out of life, scatters doubts to the winds, and
+clears up the gloomiest creeds.  What we do without a purpose
+begrudgingly, with a purpose becomes a delight, and no work is well
+done nor healthily done which is not enthusiastically done.  It is just
+that added element which makes work immortal.
+
+Mere energy is not enough, it must be concentrated on some steady,
+unwavering aim.  What is more common than "unsuccessful geniuses," or
+failures with "commanding talents"?  Indeed, "unrewarded genius" has
+become a proverb.  Every town has unsuccessful educated and talented
+men.  But education is of no value, talent is worthless, unless it can
+do something, achieve something.  Men who can do something at
+everything, and a very little at anything, are not wanted in this age.
+In Paris, a certain Monsieur Kenard announced himself as a "public
+scribe, who digests accounts, explains the language of flowers, and
+sells fried potatoes."  Jacks-at-all-trades are at war with the genius
+of the times.
+
+What this age wants is young men and women who can do one thing without
+losing their identity or individuality, or becoming narrow, cramped, or
+dwarfed.  Nothing can take the place of an all-absorbing purpose;
+education will not, genius will not, talent will not, industry will
+not, will-power will not.  The purposeless life must ever be a failure.
+What good are powers, faculties, unless we can use them for a purpose?
+What good would a chest of tools do a carpenter unless he could use
+them?  A college education, a head full of knowledge, are worth little
+to the men who cannot use them to some definite end.
+
+The man without a purpose never leaves his mark upon the world.  He has
+no individuality; he is absorbed in the mass, lost in the crowd, weak,
+wavering, incompetent.  His outlines of individuality and angles of
+character have been worn off, planed down to suit the common thought
+until he has, as a man, been lost in the throng of humanity.
+
+"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself
+to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle
+spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity."
+
+What a great directness of purpose may be traced in the career of Pitt,
+who lived--ay, and died--for the sake of political supremacy.  From a
+child, the idea was drilled into him that he must accomplish a public
+career worthy of his illustrious father.  Even from boyhood he bent all
+his energy to this one great purpose.  He went straight from college to
+the House of Commons.  In one year he was Chancellor of the Exchequer;
+two years later he was Prime Minister of England, and reigned virtually
+king for a quarter of a century.  He was utterly oblivious of
+everything outside his aim; insensible to the claims of love, art,
+literature, living and steadily working for the sole purpose of
+wielding the governing power of the nation.  His whole soul was
+absorbed in the overmastering passion for political power.
+
+"Consider, my lord," said Rowland Hill to the Prime Minister of
+England, "that a letter to Ireland and the answer back would cost
+thousands upon thousands of my affectionate countrymen more than a
+fifth of their week's wages.  If you shut the post office to them,
+which you do now, you shut out warm hearts and generous affections from
+home, kindred, and friends."  The lad learned that it cost to carry a
+letter from London to Edinburgh, four hundred and four miles, one
+eighteenth of a cent, while the government charged for a simple folded
+sheet of paper twenty-eight cents, and twice as much if there was the
+smallest inclosure.  Against the opposition and contempt of the
+post-office department he at length carried his point, and on January
+10, 1840, penny postage was established throughout Great Britain.  Mr.
+Hill was chosen to introduce the system, at a salary of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year.  His success was most encouraging, but at the end of two
+years a Tory minister dismissed him without paying for his services, as
+agreed.  The public was indignant, and at once contributed sixty-five
+thousand dollars; and, at the request of Queen Victoria, Parliament
+voted him one hundred thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars a year
+for life.
+
+Christ knew that one affection rules in man's life when he said, "No
+man can serve two masters."  One affection, one object, will be supreme
+in us.  Everything else will be neglected and done with half a heart.
+One may have subordinate plans, but he can have but one supreme aim,
+and from this aim all others will take their character.
+
+It is a great purpose which gives meaning to life, it unifies all our
+powers, binds them together in one cable; makes strong and united what
+was weak, separated, scattered.
+
+"Painting is my wife and my works are my children," replied Michael
+Angelo when asked why he did not marry.
+
+"Smatterers" are weak and superficial.  Of what use is a man who knows
+a little of everything and not much of anything?  It is the momentum of
+constantly repeated acts that tells the story.  "Let thine eyes look
+straight before thee.  Ponder the path of thy feet and let all thy ways
+be established.  Turn not to the right hand nor to the left."  One
+great secret of St. Paul's power lay in his strong purpose.  Nothing
+could daunt him, nothing intimidate.  The Roman Emperor could not
+muzzle him, the dungeon could not appall him, no prison suppress him,
+obstacles could not discourage him.  "This one thing I do" was written
+all over his work.  The quenchless zeal of his mighty purpose burned
+its way down through the centuries, and its contagion will never cease
+to fire the hearts of men.
+
+"Try and come home somebody," said the fond mother to Gambetta as she
+sent him off to Paris to school.  Poverty pinched this lad hard in his
+little garret study and his clothes were shabby, but what of that?  He
+had made up his mind to get on in the world.  For years this youth was
+chained to his desk and worked like a hero.  At last his opportunity
+came.  Jules Favre was to plead a great cause on a certain day; but,
+being ill, he chose this young man, absolutely unknown, rough and
+uncouth, to take his place.  For many years Gambetta had been preparing
+for such an opportunity, and he was equal to it, for he made one of the
+greatest speeches that up to that time had ever been made in France.
+That night all the papers in Paris were sounding the praises of this
+ragged, uncouth Bohemian, and soon all France recognized him as the
+Republican leader.  This sudden rise was not due to luck or accident.
+He had been steadfastly working and fighting his way up against
+opposition and poverty for just such an occasion.  Had he not been
+equal to it, it would only have made him ridiculous.  What a stride;
+yesterday, poor and unknown, living in a garret, to-day, deputy elect,
+in the city of Marseilles, and the great Republican leader!  The
+gossipers of France had never heard his name before.  He had been
+expelled from the priest-making seminary as totally unfit for a priest
+and an utterly undisciplinable character.  In two weeks, this ragged
+son of an Italian grocer arose in the Chamber, and moved that the
+Napoleon dynasty be disposed of and the Republic be declared
+established.
+
+When Louis Napoleon had been defeated at Sedan and had delivered his
+sword to William of Prussia, and when the Prussian army was marching on
+Paris, the brave Gambetta went out of the besieged city in a balloon
+barely grazed by the Prussian guns, landed in Amiens, and by almost
+superhuman skill raised three armies of 800,000 men, provided for their
+maintenance, and directed their military operations.  A German officer
+said, "This colossal energy is the most remarkable event of modern
+history, and will carry down Gambetta's name to remote posterity."
+This youth who was poring over his books in an attic while other youths
+were promenading the Champs Elysees, although but thirty-two years old,
+was now virtually dictator of France, and the greatest orator in the
+Republic.  What a striking example of the great reserve of personal
+power, which, even in dissolute lives, is sometimes called out by a
+great emergency or sudden sorrow, and ever after leads the life to
+victory!  When Gambetta found that his first speech had electrified all
+France, his great reserve rushed to the front, he was suddenly weaned
+from dissipation, and resolved to make his mark in the world.  Nor did
+he lose his head in his quick leap into fame.  He still lived in the
+upper room in the musty Latin quarter, and remained a poor man, without
+stain of dishonor, though he might easily have made himself a
+millionaire.  When Gambetta died the "Figaro" said, "The Republic has
+lost its greatest man."  American boys should study this great man, for
+he loved our country, and made our Republic the pattern for France.
+
+There is no grander sight in the world than that of a young man fired
+with a great purpose, dominated by one unwavering aim.  He is bound to
+win; the world stands one side and lets him pass; it always makes way
+for the man with a will in him.  He does not have one half the
+opposition to overcome that the undecided, purposeless man has who,
+like driftwood, runs against all sorts of snags to which he must yield,
+because he has no momentum to force them out of his way.  What a
+sublime spectacle it is to see a youth going straight to his goal,
+cutting his way through difficulties, and surmounting obstacles, which
+dishearten others, as though they were but stepping-stones!  Defeat,
+like a gymnasium, only gives him new power; opposition only doubles his
+exertions, dangers only increase his courage.  No matter what comes to
+him, sickness, poverty, disaster, he never turns his eye from his goal.
+
+"Duos qui sequitur lepores, neutrum capit."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+SOWING AND REAPING.
+
+Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that
+shall he also reap.--GALATIANS.
+
+Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a
+character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.--G. D. BOARDMAN.
+
+Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.--POPE.
+
+How use doth breed a habit in a man.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  All habits gather, by unseen degrees,
+  As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
+        DRYDEN.
+
+Infinite good comes from good habits which must result from the common
+influence of example, intercourse, knowledge, and actual
+experience--morality taught by good morals.--PLATO.
+
+The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt till they are
+too strong to be broken.--SAMUEL JOHNSON.
+
+Man is first startled by sin; then it becomes pleasing, then easy, then
+delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed.  Then man is
+impenitent, then obstinate, then he is damned.--JEREMY TAYLOR.
+
+"Rogues differ little.  Each began as a disobedient son."
+
+In the great majority of things, habit is a greater plague than ever
+afflicted Egypt.--JOHN FOSTER.
+
+You cannot in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to
+be true if the habit of your life has been insincere.--F. W. ROBERTSON.
+
+  The tissue of the life to be,
+    We weave with colors all our own;
+  And in the field of destiny,
+    We reap as we have sown.
+        WHITTIER.
+
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, you will now consider your verdict," said the
+great lawyer, Lord Tenterden, as he roused from his lethargy a moment,
+and then closed his eyes forever.  "Tete d'armee" (head of the army),
+murmured Napoleon faintly; and then, "on the wings of a tempest that
+raged with unwonted fury, up to the throne of the only power that
+controlled him while he lived, went the fiery soul of that wonderful
+warrior."  "Give Dayrolles a chair," said the dying Chesterfield with
+his old-time courtesy, and the next moment his spirit spread its wings.
+"Young man, keep your record clean," thrilled from the lips of John B.
+Gough as he sank to rise no more.  What power over the mind of man is
+exercised by the dominant idea of his life "that parts not quite with
+parting breath!"  It has shaped his purpose throughout his earthly
+career, and he passes into the Great Unknown, moving in the direction
+of his ideal; impelled still, amid the utter retrocession of the vital
+force, by all the momentum resulting from his weight of character and
+singleness of aim.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: VICTOR HUGO]
+
+"Every one is the son of his own works."
+
+"Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working
+universe: it is seed-grain that cannot die."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+ "It is a beautiful arrangement in the mental and
+moral economy of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty
+may, by frequent repetitions, become a habit, and the habit of stern
+virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around the neck like a wreath
+of flowers."
+
+Cholera appeared mysteriously in Toulon, and, after a careful
+examination, the medical inspectors learned that the first victims were
+two sailors on the Montebello, a government transport, long out of
+service, anchored at the entrance to the port.  For many years the
+vessel had been used for storing old, disused military equipments.
+Some of these had belonged to French soldiers who had died before
+Sebastopol.  The doctors learned that the two poor sailors were seized,
+suddenly and mortally, a few days after displacing a pile of equipments
+stored deep in the hold of the Montebello.  The cholera of Toulon came
+in a direct line from the hospital of Varna.  It went to sleep,
+apparently gorged, on a heap of the cast-off garments of its victims,
+to awaken thirty years later to victorious and venomous life.
+
+Professor Bonelli, of Turin, punctured an animal with the tooth of a
+rattlesnake.  The head of this serpent had lain in a dry state for
+sixteen years exposed to the air and dust, and, moreover, had
+previously been preserved more than thirty years in spirits of wine.
+To his great astonishment an hour afterward the animal died.  So
+habits, good or bad, that have been lost sight of for years will spring
+into a new life to aid or injure us at some critical moment, as kernels
+of wheat which had been clasped in a mummy's hand four thousand years
+sprang into life when planted.  They only awaited moisture, heat,
+sunlight, and air to develop them.
+
+In Jefferson's play, Rip Van Winkle, after he had "sworn off," at every
+invitation to drink said, "Well, this time don't count."  True, as
+Professor James says, he may not have counted it, as thousands of
+others have not counted it, and a kind heaven may not count it, but it
+is being counted none the less.  Down among his nerve cells and fibres
+the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes.  Nothing we ever do is in
+strict scientific literalness wiped out.  There is a tendency in the
+nervous system to repeat the same mode of action at regularly recurring
+intervals.  Dr. Combe says that all nervous diseases have a marked
+tendency to observe regular periods.  "If we repeat any kind of mental
+effort at the same hour daily, we at length find ourselves entering
+upon it without premeditation when the time approaches."
+
+"The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our
+ally instead of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our
+acquisition, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.  For this
+we must make automatic and habitual, as soon as possible, as many
+useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that
+are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard against the
+plague."
+
+The nervous system is a living phonograph, infinitely more marvelous
+than that of Edison.  No sound, however feeble, however slight, can
+escape being recorded in its wonderful mechanism.  Although the
+molecules of this living machine may all be entirely changed many times
+during a lifetime, yet these impressions are never erased or lost.
+They become forever fixed in the character.  Like Rip Van Winkle, the
+youth may say to himself, I will do this just once "just to see what it
+is like," no one will ever know it, and "I won't count this time."  The
+country youth says it when he goes to the city.  The young man says it
+when he drinks "just to be social."  Americans, who are good church
+people at home, say it when in Paris and Vienna.  Yes, "just to see
+what it is like" has ruined many a noble life.  Many a man has lost his
+balance and fallen over the precipice into the sink of iniquity while
+just attempting "to see what it was like."  "If you have been pilot on
+these waters twenty-five years," said a young man to the captain of a
+steamer, "you must know every rock and sandbank in the river."  "No, I
+don't, but I know where the deep water is."
+
+Just one little lie to help me out of this difficulty; "I won't count
+this."  Just one little embezzlement; no one will know it, and I can
+return the money before it will be needed.  Just one little indulgence;
+I won't count it, and a good night's sleep will make me all right
+again.  Just one small part of my work slighted; it won't make any
+great difference, and, besides, I am usually so careful that a little
+thing like this ought not to be counted.
+
+But, my young friend, it will be counted, whether you will or not; the
+deed has been recorded with an iron pen, even to the smallest detail.
+The Recording Angel is no myth; it is found in ourselves.  Its name is
+Memory, and it holds everything.  We think we have forgotten thousands
+of things until mortal danger, fever, or some other great stimulus
+reproduces them to the consciousness with all the fidelity of
+photographs.  Sometimes all one's past life will seem to pass before
+him in an instant; but at all times it is really, although
+unconsciously, passing before him in the sentiments he feels, in the
+thoughts he thinks, in the impulses that move him apparently without
+cause.
+
+  "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
+  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
+
+
+In a fable one of the Fates spun filaments so fine that they were
+invisible, and she became a victim of her cunning, for she was bound to
+the spot by these very threads.
+
+Father Schoenmaker, missionary to the Indians, tried for years to
+implant civilization among the wild tribes.  After fifteen years' labor
+he induced a chief to lay aside his blanket, the token of savagery; but
+he goes on to say, "It took fifteen years to get it off, and just
+fifteen minutes to get it on him again."
+
+Physiologists say that dark-colored stripes similar to those on the
+zebra reappear, after a hundred or a thousand generations, on the legs
+and shoulders of horses, asses, and mules.  Large birds on sea islands
+where there are no beasts to molest them lose the power of flight.
+
+After a criminal's head had been cut off his breast was irritated, and
+he raised his hands several times as if to brush away the exciting
+cause.  It was said that the cheek of Charlotte Corday blushed on being
+struck by a rude soldier after the head had been severed from the body.
+
+Humboldt found in South America a parrot which was the only living
+creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe.  The
+bird retained the habit of speech after his teachers had died.
+
+Caspar Hauser was confined, probably from birth, in a dungeon where no
+light or sound from the outer world, could reach him.  At seventeen he
+was still a mental infant, crying and chattering without much apparent
+intelligence.  When released, the light was disagreeable to his eyes;
+and, after the babbling youth had been taught to speak a few words, he
+begged to be taken back to the dungeon.  Only cold and dismal silence
+seemed to satisfy him.  All that gave pleasure to others gave his
+perverted senses only pain.  The sweetest music was a source of anguish
+to him, and he could eat only his black crust without violent vomiting.
+
+Deep in the very nature of animate existence is that principle of
+facility and inclination, acquired by repetition, which we call habit.
+Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts.  In spite of the
+protests of his weakened will the trained nerves continue to repeat the
+acts even when the doer abhors them.  What he at first chooses, at last
+compels.  Man is as irrevocably chained to his deeds as the atoms are
+chained by gravitation.  You can as easily snatch a pebble from
+gravitation's grasp as you can separate the minutest act of life from
+its inevitable effect upon character and destiny.  "Children may be
+strangled," says George Eliot, "but deeds never, they have an
+indestructible life."  The smirched youth becomes the tainted man.
+
+Practically all the achievements of the human race are but the
+accomplishments of habit.  We speak of the power of Gladstone to
+accomplish so much in a day as something marvelous; but when we analyze
+that power we find it composed very largely of the results of habit.
+His mighty momentum has been rendered possible only by the law of the
+power of habit.  He is now a great bundle of habits, which all his life
+have been forming.  His habit of industry no doubt was irksome and
+tedious at first, but, practiced so conscientiously and persistently,
+it has gained such momentum as to astonish the world.  His habit of
+thinking, close, persistent, and strong, has made him a power.  He
+formed the habit of accurate, keen observation, allowing nothing to
+escape his attention, until he could observe more in half a day in
+London than a score of men who have eyes but see not.  Thus he has
+multiplied himself many times.  By this habit of accuracy he has
+avoided many a repetition; and so, during his lifetime, he has saved
+years of precious time, which many others, who marvel at his
+achievements, have thrown away.
+
+Gladstone early formed the habit of cheerfulness, of looking on the
+bright side of things, which, Sydney Smith says, "is worth a thousand
+pounds a year."  This again has saved him enormous waste of energy, as
+he tells us he has never yet been kept awake a single hour by any
+debate or business in Parliament.  This loss of energy has wasted years
+of many a useful life, which might have been saved by forming the
+economizing habit of cheerfulness.
+
+The habit of happy thought would transform the commonest life into
+harmony and beauty.  The will is almost omnipotent to determine habits
+which virtually are omnipotent.  The habit of directing a firm and
+steady will upon those things which tend to produce harmony of thought
+would produce happiness and contentment even in the most lowly
+occupations.  The will, rightly drilled, can drive out all discordant
+thoughts, and produce a reign of perpetual harmony.  Our trouble is
+that we do not half will.  After a man's habits are well set, about all
+he can do is to sit by and observe which way he is going.  Regret it as
+he may, how helpless is a weak man bound by the mighty cable of habit,
+twisted from the tiny threads of single acts which he thought were
+absolutely within his control!
+
+Drop a stone down a precipice.  By the law of gravitation it sinks with
+rapidly increasing momentum.  If it falls sixteen feet the first
+second, it will fall forty-eight feet the next second, and eighty feet
+the third second, and one hundred and forty-four feet the fifth second,
+and if it falls for ten seconds it will in the last second rush through
+three hundred and four feet till earth stops it.  Habit is cumulative.
+After each act of our lives we are not the same person as before, but
+quite another, better or worse, but not the same.  There has been
+something added to, or deducted from, our weight of character.
+
+"There is no fault nor folly of my life," said Ruskin; "that does not
+rise against me and take away my joy, and shorten my power of
+possession, of sight, of understanding; and every past effort of my
+life, every gleam of righteousness or good in it, is with me now to
+help me in my grasp of this hour and its vision."
+
+"Many men of genius have written worse scrawls than I do," said a boy
+at Rugby when his teacher remonstrated with him for his bad penmanship;
+"it is not worth while to worry about so trivial a fault."  Ten years
+later, when he had become an officer in the Crimea, his illegible copy
+of an order caused the loss of many brave men.
+
+"Resist beginning" was an ancient motto which is needed in our day.
+The folly of the child becomes the vice of the youth, and then the
+crime of the man.
+
+In 1880 one hundred and forty-seven of the eight hundred and
+ninety-seven inmates of Auburn State Prison were there on a second
+visit.  What brings the prisoner back the second, third, or fourth
+time?  It is habit which drives him on to commit the deed which his
+heart abhors and which his very soul loathes.  It is the momentum made
+up from a thousand deviations from the truth and right, for there is a
+great difference between going just right and a little wrong.  It is
+the result of that mysterious power which the repeated act has of
+getting itself repeated again and again.
+
+When a woman was dying from the effects of her husband's cruelty and
+debauchery from drink she asked him to come to her bedside, and pleaded
+with him again for the sake of their children to drink no more.
+Grasping his hand with her thin, long fingers, she made him promise
+her: "Mary, I will drink no more till I take it out of this hand which
+I hold in mine."  That very night he poured out a tumbler of brandy,
+stole into the room where she lay cold in her coffin, put the tumbler
+into her withered hand, and then took it out and drained it to the
+bottom.  John B. Gough told this as a true story.  How powerless a man
+is in the presence of a mighty habit, which has robbed him of
+will-power, of self-respect, of everything manly, until he becomes its
+slave!
+
+Walpole tells of a gambler who fell at the table in a fit of apoplexy,
+and his companions began to bet upon his chances of recovery.  When the
+physician came they refused to let him bleed the man because they said
+it would affect the bet.  When President Garfield was hanging between
+life and death men bet heavily upon the issue, and even sold pools.
+
+No disease causes greater horror or dread than cholera; yet when it is
+once fastened upon a victim he is perfectly indifferent, and wonders at
+the solicitude of his friends.  His tears are dried; he cannot weep if
+he would.  His body is cold and clammy and feels like dead flesh, yet
+he tells you he is warm, and calls for ice water.  Have you never seen
+similar insensibility to danger in those whose habits are already
+dragging them to everlasting death?
+
+Etherized by the fascinations of pleasure, we are often unconscious of
+pain while the devil amputates the fingers, the feet and hands, or even
+the arms and legs of our character.  But oh, the anguish that visits
+the sad heart when the lethe passes away, and the soul becomes
+conscious of virtue sacrificed, of manhood lost.
+
+The leper is often the last to suspect his danger, for the disease is
+painless in its early stages.  A leading lawyer and public official in
+the Sandwich Islands once overturned a lighted lamp on his hand, and
+was surprised to find that it caused no pain.  At last it dawned upon
+his mind that he was a leper.  He resigned his offices and went to the
+leper's island, where he died.  So sin in its early stages is not only
+painless but often even pleasant.
+
+The hardening, deadening power of depraving habits and customs was
+strikingly illustrated by the Romans.
+
+Under Nero, the taste of the people had become so debauched and morbid
+that no mere representation of tragedy would satisfy them.  Their
+cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of "a refined, delicate,
+aesthetic age," demanded that the heroes should actually be killed on
+the stage.  The debauched and sanguinary Romans reckoned life worthless
+without the most thrilling experiences of horror or delight.  Tragedy
+must be genuine bloodshed, comedy, actual shame.  When "The
+Conflagration" was represented on the stage they demanded that a house
+be actually burned and the furniture plundered.  When "Laureolus" was
+played they demanded that the actor be really crucified and mangled by
+a bear, and he had to fling himself down and deluge the stage with his
+own blood.  Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in
+very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull, and Orpheus be torn to
+pieces by a real bear, and Icarus was compelled to fly, even though it
+was known he would be dashed to death.  When the heroism of "Mucius
+Scaevola" was represented, a real criminal was compelled to thrust his
+hand into the flame without a murmur, and stand motionless while it was
+being burned.  Hercules was compelled to ascend the funeral pyre, and
+there be burned alive.  The poor slaves and criminals were compelled to
+play their parts heroically until the flames enveloped them.
+
+The pirate Gibbs, who was executed in New York, said that when he
+robbed the first vessel his conscience made a hell in his bosom; but
+after he had sailed for years under the black flag, he could rob a
+vessel and murder all the crew, and lie down and sleep soundly.  A man
+may so accustom himself to error as to become its most devoted slave,
+and be led to commit the most fearful crimes in order to defend it, or
+to propagate it.
+
+When Gordon, the celebrated California stage-driver, was dying, he put
+his foot out of the bed and swung it to and fro.  When asked why he did
+so, he replied, "I am on the down grade and cannot get my foot on the
+brake."
+
+In our great museums you see stone slabs with the marks of rain that
+fell hundreds of years before Adam lived, and the footprint of some
+wild bird that passed across the beach in those olden times.  The
+passing shower and the light foot left their prints on the soft
+sediment; then ages went on, and the sediment hardened into stone; and
+there the prints remain, and will remain forever.  So the child, so
+soft, so susceptible to all impressions, so joyous to receive new
+ideas, treasures them all up, gathers them all into itself, and retains
+them forever.
+
+A tribe of Indians attacked a white settlement and murdered the few
+inhabitants.  A woman of the tribe, however, carried away a very young
+infant, and reared it as her own.  The child grew up with the Indian
+children, different in complexion, but like them in everything else.
+To scalp the greatest possible number of enemies was, in his view, the
+most glorious thing in the world.  While he was still a youth he was
+seen by some white traders, and by them conducted back to civilized
+life.  He showed great relish for his new life, and especially a strong
+desire for knowledge and a sense of reverence which took the direction
+of religion, so that he desired to become a clergyman.  He went through
+his college course with credit, and was ordained.  He fulfilled his
+function well, and appeared happy and satisfied.  After a few years he
+went to serve in a settlement somewhere near the seat of war which was
+then going on between Britain and the United States, and before long
+there was fighting not far off.  He went forth in his usual
+dress--black coat and neat white shirt and neckcloth.  When he returned
+he was met by a gentleman of his acquaintance, who was immediately
+struck by an extraordinary change in the expression of his face and the
+flush on his cheek, and also by his unusually shy and hurried manner.
+After asking news of the battle the gentleman observed, "But you are
+wounded?"  "No."  "Not wounded!  Why, there is blood upon the bosom of
+your shirt!"  The young man quickly crossed his hands firmly upon his
+breast; and his friend, supposing that he wished to conceal a wound
+which ought to be looked to, pulled open his shirt, and saw--what made
+the young man let fall his hands in despair.  From between his shirt
+and his breast the friend took out--a bloody scalp!  "I could not help
+it," said the poor victim of early habits, in an agonized voice.  He
+turned and ran, too swiftly to be overtaken, betook himself to the
+Indians, and never more appeared among the whites.
+
+An Indian once brought up a young lion, and finding him weak and
+harmless, did not attempt to control him.  Every day the lion gained in
+strength and became more unmanageable, until at last, when excited by
+rage, he fell upon his master and tore him to pieces.  So what seemed
+to be an "innocent" sin has grown until it strangled him who was once
+its easy master.
+
+Beware of looking at sin, for at each view it is apt to become better
+looking.
+
+Habit is practically, for a middle-aged person, fate; for is it not
+practically certain that what I have done for twenty years I shall
+repeat to-day?  What are the chances for a man who has been lazy and
+indolent all his life starting in to-morrow morning to be industrious;
+or a spendthrift, frugal; a libertine, virtuous; a profane,
+foul-mouthed man, clean and chaste?
+
+A Grecian flute-player charged double fees for pupils who had been
+taught by inferior masters, on the ground that it was much harder to
+undo than to form habits.
+
+Habit tends to make us permanently what we are for the moment.  We
+cannot possibly hear, see, feel, or experience anything which is not
+woven in the web of character.  What we are this minute and what we do
+this minute, what we think this minute, will be read in the future
+character as plainly as words spoken into the phonograph can be
+reproduced in the future.
+
+"The air itself," says Babbage, "is one vast library on whose pages are
+written forever all that man has ever said, whispered, or done."  Every
+sin you ever committed becomes your boon companion.  It rushes to your
+lips every time you speak, and drags its hideous form into your
+imagination every time you think.  It throws its shadow across your
+path whichever way you turn.  Like Banquo's ghost, it will not down.
+You are fastened to it for life, and it will cling to you in the vast
+forever.  Do you think yourself free?  You are a slave to every sin you
+ever committed.  They follow your pen and work their own character into
+every word you write.
+
+Rectitude is only the confirmed habit of doing what is right.  Some men
+cannot tell a lie: the habit of truth telling is fixed, it has become
+incorporated with their nature.  Their characters bear the indelible
+stamp of veracity.  You and I know men whose slightest word is
+unimpeachable; nothing could shake our confidence in them.  There are
+other men who cannot speak the truth: their habitual insincerity has
+made a twist in their characters, and this twist appears in their
+speech.
+
+"I never in my life committed more than one act of folly," said
+Rulhiere one day in the presence of Talleyrand.  "But where will it
+end?" inquired the latter.  It was lifelong.  One mistake too many
+makes all the difference between safety and destruction.
+
+How many men would like to go to sleep beggars and wake up Rothschilds
+or Astors?  How many would fain go to bed dunces and wake up Solomons?
+You reap what you have sown.  Those who have sown dunce-seed,
+vice-seed, laziness-seed, always get a crop.  They that sow the wind
+shall reap the whirlwind.
+
+Habit, like a child, repeats whatever is done before it.  Oh, the power
+of a repeated act to get itself repeated again and again!  But, like
+the wind, it is a power which we can use to force our way in its very
+teeth as does the ship, and thus multiply our strength, or we can drift
+with it without exertion upon the rocks and shoals of destruction.
+
+What a great thing it is to "start right" in life.  Every young man can
+see that the first steps lead to the last, with all except his own.
+No, his little prevarications and dodgings will not make him a liar,
+but he can see that they surely will in John Smith's case.  He can see
+that others are idle and on the road to ruin, but cannot see it in his
+own case.
+
+There is a wonderful relation between bad habits.  They all belong to
+the same family.  If you take in one, no matter how small or
+insignificant it may seem, you will soon have the whole.  A man who has
+formed the habit of laziness or idleness will soon be late at his
+engagements; a man who does not meet his engagements will dodge,
+apologize, prevaricate, and lie.  I have rarely known a perfectly
+truthful man who was always behind time.
+
+You have seen a ship out in the bay swinging with the tide and the
+waves; the sails are all up, and you wonder why it does not move, but
+it cannot, for down beneath the water it is anchored.  So we often see
+a young man apparently well equipped, well educated, and we wonder that
+he does not advance toward manhood and character.  But, alas! we find
+that he is anchored to some secret vice, and he can never advance until
+he cuts loose.
+
+  "The first crime past compels us into more,
+  And guilt grows _fate_ that was but _choice_ before."
+
+  "Small habits, well pursued betimes,
+  May reach the dignity of crimes."
+
+
+Thousands can sympathize with David when he cried, "My sins have taken
+such hold upon me that I am not able to look up; my heart faileth me."
+Like the damned spot of blood on Lady Macbeth's hand, these foul spots
+on the imagination will not out.  What a penalty nature exacts for
+physical sins.  The gods are just, and "of our pleasant vices make
+instruments to plague us."
+
+Plato wrote over his door, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter
+here."  The greatest value of the study of the classics and mathematics
+comes from the habits of accurate and concise thought which it induces.
+The habit-forming portion of life is the dangerous period, and we need
+the discipline of close application to hold us outside of our studies.
+
+Washington at thirteen wrote one hundred and ten maxims of civility and
+good behavior, and was most careful in the formation of all habits.
+Franklin, too, devised a plan of self-improvement and character
+building.  No doubt the noble characters of these two men, almost
+superhuman in their excellence, are the natural result of their early
+care and earnest striving towards perfection.
+
+Fielding, describing a game of cards between Jonathan Wild, of
+pilfering propensities, and a professional gambler, says: "Such was the
+power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr.
+Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he
+knew they were empty; nor could the count abstain from palming a card,
+though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."
+
+"Habit," says Montaigne, "is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.
+She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of
+her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
+aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
+tyrannic countenance against which we have no more the courage nor the
+power so much as to lift up our eyes."  It led a New York man actually
+to cut off his hand with a cleaver under a test of what he would resort
+to, to get a glass of whiskey.  It has led thousands of nature's
+noblemen to drunkards' and libertines' graves.
+
+Gough's life is a startling illustration of the power of habit, and of
+the ability of one apparently a hopeless slave to break his fetters and
+walk a free man in the sunlight of heaven.  He came to America when
+nine years old.  Possessed of great powers of song, of mimicry, and of
+acting, and exceedingly social in his tastes, a thousand temptations
+
+  "Widened and strewed with flowers the way
+        Down to eternal ruin."
+
+
+"I would give this right hand to redeem those terrible seven years of
+dissipation and death," he would often say in after years when, with
+his soul still scarred and battered from his conflict with blighting
+passion, he tearfully urged young men to free themselves from the
+chains of bestial habits.
+
+In the laboratory of Faraday a workman one day knocked into a jar of
+acid a silver cup; it disappeared, was eaten up by the acid, and could
+not be found.  The question came up whether it could ever be found.
+The great chemist came in and put certain chemicals into the jar, and
+every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom.  The mass
+was then sent to a silversmith, and the cup restored.  So a precious
+youth who has fallen into the sink of iniquity, lost, dissolved in sin,
+can only be restored by the Great Chemist.
+
+What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.  "Out
+of a church of twenty-seven hundred members, I have never had to
+exclude a single one who was received while a child," said Spurgeon.
+It is the earliest sin that exercises the most influence for evil.
+
+Benedict Arnold was the only general in the Revolution that disgraced
+his country.  He had great military talent, wonderful energy, and a
+courage equal to any emergency.  But Arnold _did not start right_.
+Even when a boy he was despised for his cruelty and his selfishness.
+He delighted in torturing insects and birds that he might watch their
+sufferings.  He scattered pieces of glass and sharp tacks on the floor
+of the shop he was tending, to cut the feet of the barefooted boys.
+Even in the army, in spite of his bravery, the soldiers hated him, and
+the officers dared not trust him.
+
+  Let no man trust the first false step
+  Of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice,
+  Whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
+        YOUNG
+
+
+Years ago there was a district lying near Westminster Abbey, London,
+called the "Devil's Acre,"--a school for vicious habits, where
+depravity was universal; where professional beggars were fitted with
+all the appliances of imposture; where there was an agency for the hire
+of children to be carried about by forlorn widows and deserted wives,
+to move the compassion of street-giving benevolence; where young
+pickpockets were trained in the art and mystery which was to conduct
+them in due course to an expensive voyage for the good of their country
+to Botany Bay.
+
+Victor Hugo describes a strange association of men in the seventeenth
+century who bought children and distorted and made monstrosities of
+them to amuse the nobility with; and in cultured Boston there is an
+association of so-called "respectable men," who have opened thousands
+of "places of business" for deforming men, women, and children's souls.
+But we deform ourselves with agencies so pleasant that we think we are
+having a good time, until we become so changed and enslaved that we
+scarcely recognize ourselves.  Vice, the pleasant guest which we first
+invited into our heart's parlor, becomes vulgarly familiar, and
+intrenches herself deep in our very being.  We ask her to leave, but
+she simply laughs at us from the hideous wrinkles she has made in our
+faces, and refuses to go.  Our secret sins defy us from the hideous
+furrows they have cut in our cheeks.  Each impure thought has chiseled
+its autograph deep into the forehead, too deep for erasure, and the
+glassy, bleary eye adds its testimony to our ruined character.
+
+The devil does not apply his match to the hard coal; but he first
+lights the shavings of "innocent sins," and the shavings the wood, and
+the wood the coal.  Sin is gradual.  It does not break out on a man
+until it has long circulated through his system.  Murder, adultery,
+theft, are not committed in deed until they have been committed in
+thought again and again.
+
+"Don't write there," said a man to a boy who was writing with a diamond
+pin on a pane of glass in the window of a hotel.  "Why not?" inquired
+the boy.  "Because you can't rub it out."  Yet the glass might have
+been broken and all trace of the writing lost, but things written upon
+the human soul can never be removed, for the tablet is immortal.
+
+"In all the wide range of accepted British maxims," said Thomas Hughes,
+"there is none, take it all in all, more thoroughly abominable than
+this one, as to the sowing of wild oats.  Look at it on what side you
+will, and I defy you to make anything but a devil's maxim of it.  What
+man, be he young, old, or middle-aged, sows, that, and nothing else,
+shall he reap.  The only thing to do with wild oats is to put them
+carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to
+dust, every seed of them.  If you sow them, no matter in what ground,
+up they will come with long, tough roots and luxuriant stalks and
+leaves, as sure as there is a sun in heaven.  The devil, too, whose
+special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody
+else, will have to reap them."
+
+  We scatter seeds with careless hand,
+  And dream we ne'er shall see them more;
+  But for a thousand years
+  Their fruit appears,
+  In weeds that mar the land.
+        JOHN KEBLE.
+
+
+Theodora boasted that she could draw Socrates' disciples away from him.
+"That may be," said the philosopher, "for you lead them down an easy
+descent whereas I am forcing them to mount to virtue--an arduous ascent
+and unknown to most men."
+
+"When I am told of a sickly student," said Daniel Wise, "that he is
+'studying himself to death,' or of a feeble young mechanic, or clerk,
+that his hard work is destroying him, I study his countenance, and
+there, too often, read the real, melancholy truth in his dull, averted,
+sunken eye, discolored skin, and timid manner.  These signs proclaim
+that the young man is in some way violating the laws of his physical
+nature.  He is secretly destroying himself.  Yet, say his unconscious
+and admiring friends, 'He is falling a victim to his own diligence!'
+Most lame and impotent conclusion!  He is sapping the very source of
+life, and erelong will be a mind in ruins or a heap of dust.  Young
+man, beware of his example!  'Keep thyself pure;' observe the laws of
+your physical nature, and the most unrelaxing industry will never rob
+you of a month's health, nor shorten the thread of your life; for
+industry and health are companions, and long life is the heritage of
+diligence."
+
+  "How shall I a habit break?"
+  As you did that habit make.
+  As you gathered, you must lose;
+  As you yielded, now refuse.
+  Thread by thread the strands we twist
+  Till they bind us neck and wrist.
+  Thread by thread the patient hand
+  Must untwine ere free we stand.
+  As we builded, stone by stone,
+  We must toil, unhelped, alone,
+  Till the wall is overthrown.
+
+  But remember, as we try,
+  Lighter every test goes by;
+  Wading in, the stream grows deep
+  Toward the centre's downward sweep;
+  Backward turn, each step ashore
+  Shallower is than that before.
+
+  Ah, the precious years we waste
+  Leveling what we raised in haste;
+  Doing what must be undone,
+  Ere content or love be won!
+  First across the gulf we cast
+  Kite-borne threads till lines are passed,
+  And habit builds the bridge at last.
+        JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SELF-HELP.
+
+I learned that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to
+help any other man.--PESTALOZZI.
+
+What I am I have made myself.--HUMPHRY DAVY.
+
+Be sure, my son, and remember that the best men always make
+themselves.--PATRICK HENRY.
+
+  Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
+  Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
+        BYRON.
+
+God gives every bird its food, but he does not throw it into the
+nest.--J. G. HOLLAND.
+
+Never forget that others will depend upon you, and that you cannot
+depend upon them.--DUMAS, FILS.
+
+Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to
+Heaven.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+The best education in the world is that got by struggling to obtain a
+living.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+
+Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and
+one, more important, which he gives himself.--GIBBON.
+
+What the superior man seeks is in himself: what the small man seeks is
+in others.--CONFUCIUS.
+
+  Who waits to have his task marked out,
+  Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.
+        LOWELL.
+
+  In battle or business, whatever the game,
+  In law, or in love, it's ever the same:
+  In the struggle for power, or scramble for pelf,
+  Let this be your motto, "Rely on yourself."
+        SAXE.
+
+  Let every eye negotiate for itself,
+  And trust no agent.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+"Colonel Crockett makes room for himself!" exclaimed a backwoods
+congressman in answer to the exclamation of the White House usher to
+"Make room for Colonel Crockett!"  This remarkable man was not afraid
+to oppose the head of a great nation.  He preferred being right to
+being president.  Though rough, uncultured, and uncouth, Crockett was a
+man of great courage and determination.
+
+Garfield was the youngest member of the House of Representatives when
+he entered, but he had not been in his seat sixty days before his
+ability was recognized and his place conceded.  He stepped to the front
+with the confidence of one who belonged there.  He succeeded because
+all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and
+because when once in the front he played his part with an intrepidity
+and a commanding ease that were but the outward evidences of the
+immense reserves of energy on which it was in his power to draw.
+
+[Illustration: James A. Garfield (missing from book)]
+
+"Take the place and attitude which belong to you," says Emerson, "and
+all men acquiesce.  The world must be just.  It leaves every man with
+profound unconcern to set his own rate."
+
+Grant was no book soldier.  Some of his victories were contrary to all
+instructions in military works.  He did not dare to disclose his plan
+to invest Vicksburg, and he even cut off all communication on the
+Mississippi River for seven days that no orders could reach him from
+General Halleck, his superior officer; for he knew that Halleck went by
+books, and he was proceeding contrary to all military theories.  He was
+making a greater military history than had ever been written up to that
+time.  He was greater than all books of tactics.  The consciousness of
+power is everything.  That man is strongest who owes most to himself.
+
+"Man, it is within yourself," says Pestalozzi, "it is in the inner
+sense of your power that resides nature's instrument for your
+development."
+
+Richard Arkwright, the thirteenth child, in a hovel, with no education,
+no chance, gave his spinning model to the world, and put a sceptre in
+England's right hand such as the queen never wielded.
+
+"A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources
+virtually has them," says Livy.
+
+Solario, a wandering gypsy tinker, fell deeply in love with the
+daughter of the painter Coll' Antonio del Fiore, but was told that no
+one but a painter as good as the father should wed the maiden.  "Will
+you give me ten years to learn to paint, and so entitle myself to the
+hand of your daughter?"  Consent was given, Coll' Antonio thinking that
+he would never be troubled further by the gypsy.  About the time that
+the ten years were to end the king's sister showed Coll' Antonio a
+Madonna and Child, which the painter extolled in terms of the highest
+praise.  Judge of his surprise on learning that Solario was the artist.
+But later, his son-in-law surprised him even more by his rare skill.
+
+Louis Philippe said he was the only sovereign in Europe fit to govern,
+for he could black his own boots.
+
+When asked to name his family coat-of-arms, a self-made President of
+the United States replied, "A pair of shirtsleeves."
+
+"Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify," said James A. Garfield;
+"but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young
+man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for
+himself.  In all my acquaintance I have never known a man to be drowned
+who was worth the saving."
+
+It is not the men who have inherited most, except it be in nobility of
+soul and purpose, who have risen highest; but rather the men with no
+"start" who have won fortunes, and have made adverse circumstances a
+spur to goad them up the steep mount, where
+
+  "Fame's proud temple shines afar."
+
+To such men, every possible goal is accessible, and honest ambition has
+no height that genius or talent may tread, which has not felt the
+impress of their feet.
+
+You may leave your millions to your son, but have you really given him
+anything?  You cannot transfer the discipline, the experience, the
+power which the acquisition has given you; you cannot transfer the
+delight of achieving, the joy felt only in growth, the pride of
+acquisition, the character which trained habits of accuracy, method,
+promptness, patience, dispatch, honesty of dealing, politeness of
+manner have developed.  You cannot transfer the skill, sagacity,
+prudence, foresight, which lie concealed in your wealth.  It meant a
+great deal for you, but means nothing to your heir.  In climbing to
+your fortune, you developed the muscle, stamina, and strength which
+enabled you to maintain your lofty position, to keep your millions
+intact.  You had the power which comes only from experience, and which
+alone enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height.  Your fortune was
+experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it
+will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him.  It
+was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to
+you and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction,
+lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance.  You have taken the priceless
+spur--necessity--away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly
+all the great achievements in the history of the world.
+
+You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son
+might begin where you left off.  You thought to spare him the drudgery,
+the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meagre
+education, which you had on the old farm.  But you have put a crutch
+into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the
+incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self-discipline
+and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no
+great character is ever possible.  His enthusiasm will evaporate, his
+energy will be dissipated, his ambition, not being stimulated by the
+struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away.  If you do
+everything for your son and fight his battles for him, you will have a
+weakling on your hands at twenty-one.
+
+"My life is a wreck," said the dying Cyrus W. Field, "my fortune gone,
+my home dishonored.  Oh, I was so unkind to Edward when I thought I was
+being kind.  If I had only had firmness enough to compel my boys to
+earn their living, then they would have known the meaning of money."
+His table was covered with medals and certificates of honor from many
+nations, in recognition of his great work for civilization in mooring
+two continents side by side in thought, of the fame he had won and
+could never lose.  But grief shook the sands of life as he thought only
+of the son who had brought disgrace upon a name before unsullied, the
+wounds were sharper than those of a serpent's tooth.
+
+During the great financial crisis of 1857 Maria Mitchell, who was
+visiting England, asked an English lady what became of daughters when
+no property was left them.  "They live on their brothers," was the
+reply.  "But what becomes of the American daughters," asked the English
+lady, "when there is no money left?"  "They earn it," was the reply.
+
+Men who have been bolstered up all their lives are seldom good for
+anything in a crisis.  When misfortune comes, they look around for
+somebody to lean upon.  If the prop is not there down they go.  Once
+down, they are as helpless as capsized turtles, or unhorsed men in
+armor.  Many a frontier boy has succeeded beyond all his expectations
+simply because all props were knocked out from under him and he was
+obliged to stand upon his own feet.
+
+"A man's best friends are his ten fingers," said Robert Collyer, who
+brought his wife to America in the steerage.  Young men who are always
+looking for something to lean upon never amount to anything.
+
+There is no manhood mill which takes in boys and turns out men.  What
+you call "no chance" may be your "only chance."  Don't wait for your
+place to be made for you; make it yourself.  Don't wait for somebody to
+give you a lift; lift yourself.  Henry Ward Beecher did not wait for a
+call to a big church with a large salary.  He accepted the first
+pastorate offered him, in a little town near Cincinnati.  He became
+literally the light of the church, for he trimmed the lamps, kindled
+the fires, swept the rooms, and rang the bell.  His salary was only
+about $200 a year,--but he knew that a fine church and great salary
+cannot make a great man.  It was work and opportunity that he wanted.
+He felt that if there was anything in him work would bring it out.
+
+"Physiologists tell us," says Waters, "that it takes twenty-eight years
+for the brain to attain its full development.  If this is so, why
+should not one be able, by his own efforts, to give this long-growing
+organ a particular bent, a peculiar character?  Why should the will not
+be brought to bear upon the formation of the brain as well as of the
+backbone?"  The will is merely our steam power, and we may put it to
+any work we please.  It will do our bidding, whether it be building up
+a character, or tearing it down.  It may be applied to building up a
+habit of truthfulness and honesty, or of falsehood and dishonor.  It
+will help build up a man or a brute, a hero or a coward.  It will brace
+up resolution until one may almost perform miracles, or it may be
+dissipated in irresolution and inaction until life is a wreck.  It will
+hold you to your task until you have formed a powerful habit of
+industry and application, until idleness and inaction are painful, or
+it will lead you into indolence and listlessness until every effort
+will be disagreeable and success impossible.
+
+"The first thing I have to impress upon you is," says J. T. Davidson,
+"that a good name must be the fruit of one's own exertion.  You cannot
+possess it by patrimony; you cannot purchase it with money; you will
+not light on it by chance; it is independent of birth, station,
+talents, and wealth; it must be the outcome of your own endeavor, and
+the reward of good principles and honorable conduct.  Of all the
+elements of success in life none is more vital than self-reliance,--a
+determination to be, under God, the creator of your own reputation and
+advancement.  If difficulties stand in the way, if exceptional
+disadvantages oppose you, all the better, as long as you have pluck to
+fight through them.  I want each young man here (you will not
+misunderstand me) to have faith in himself and, scorning props and
+buttresses, crutches and life-preservers, to take earnest hold of life.
+Many a lad has good stuff in him that never comes to anything because
+he slips too easily into some groove of life; it is commonly those who
+have a tough battle to begin with that make their mark upon their age."
+
+When Beethoven was examining the work of Moscheles, he found written at
+the end "Finis, with God's help."  He wrote under it "Man, help
+yourself."
+
+A young man stood listlessly watching some anglers on a bridge.  He was
+poor and dejected.  At length, approaching a basket filled with fish,
+he sighed, "If now I had these I would be happy.  I could sell them and
+buy food and lodgings."  "I will give you just as many and just as
+good," said the owner, who chanced to overhear his words, "if you will
+do me a trifling favor."  "And what is that?" asked the other.  "Only
+to tend this line till I come back; I wish to go on a short errand."
+The proposal was gladly accepted.  The old man was gone so long that
+the young man began to get impatient.  Meanwhile the fish snapped
+greedily at the hook, and he lost all his depression in the excitement
+of pulling them in.  When the owner returned he had caught a large
+number.  Counting out from them as many as were in the basket, and
+presenting them to the youth, the old fisherman said, "I fulfill my
+promise from the fish you have caught, to teach you whenever you see
+others earning what you need to waste no time in foolish wishing, but
+cast a line for yourself."
+
+A white squall caught a party of tourists on a lake in Scotland, and
+threatened to capsize the boat.  When it seemed that the crisis was
+really come the largest and strongest man in the party, in a state of
+intense fear, said, "Let us pray."  "No, no, my man," shouted the bluff
+old boatman; "_let the little man pray.  You take an oar._"  The
+greatest curse that can befall a young man is to lean.
+
+The grandest fortunes ever accumulated or possessed on earth were and
+are the fruit of endeavor that had no capital to begin with save
+energy, intellect, and the will.  From Croesus down to Rockefeller the
+story is the same, not only in the getting of wealth, but also in the
+acquirement of eminence; those men have won most who relied most upon
+themselves.
+
+It has been said that one of the most disgusting sights in this world
+is that of a young man with healthy blood, broad shoulders, presentable
+calves, and a hundred and fifty pounds, more or less, of good bone and
+muscle, standing with his hands in his pockets longing for help.
+
+"The male inhabitants in the Township of Loaferdom, in the County of
+Hatework," says a printer's squib, "found themselves laboring under
+great inconvenience for want of an easily traveled road between Poverty
+and Independence.  They therefore petitioned the Powers that be to levy
+a tax upon the property of the entire county for the purpose of laying
+out a macadamized highway, broad and smooth, and all the way down hill
+to the latter place."
+
+"It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create
+themselves," says Irving, "springing up under every disadvantage, and
+working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand
+obstacles."
+
+"Every one is the artificer of his own fortune," says Sallust.
+
+Man is not merely the architect of his own fortune, but he must lay the
+bricks himself.  Bayard Taylor, at twenty-three, wrote: "I will become
+the sculptor of my own mind's statue."  His biography shows how often
+the chisel and hammer were in his hands to shape himself into his
+ideal.  "I have seen none, known none, of the celebrities of my time,"
+said Samuel Cox.  "All my energy was directed upon one end, to improve
+myself."
+
+"Man exists for culture," says Goethe; "not for what he can accomplish,
+but for what can be accomplished in him."
+
+When young Professor Tyndall was in the government service, he had no
+definite aim in life until one day a government official asked him how
+he employed his leisure time.  "You have five hours a day at your
+disposal," said he, "and this ought to be devoted to systematic study.
+Had I at your age some one to advise me as I now advise you, instead of
+being in a subordinate position, I might have been at the head of my
+department."  The very next day young Tyndall began a regular course of
+study, and went to the University of Marburg, where he became noted for
+his indomitable industry.  He was so poor that he bought a cask, and
+cut it open for a bathtub.  He often rose before daylight to study,
+while the world was slumbering about him.
+
+Labor is the only legal tender in the world to true success.  The gods
+sell everything for that, nothing without it.  You will never find
+success "marked down."  The door to the temple of success is never left
+open.  Every one who enters makes his own door which closes behind him
+to all others.
+
+Circumstances have rarely favored great men.  They have fought their
+way to triumph over the road of difficulty and through all sorts of
+opposition.  A lowly beginning and a humble origin are no bar to a
+great career.  The farmers' boys fill many of the greatest places in
+legislatures, in syndicates, at the bar, in pulpits, in Congress,
+to-day.  Boys of lowly origin have made many of the greatest
+discoveries, are presidents of our banks, of our colleges, of our
+universities.  Our poor boys and girls have written many of our
+greatest books, and have filled the highest places as teachers and
+journalists.  Ask almost any great man in our large cities where he was
+born, and he will tell you it was on a farm or in a small country
+village.  Nearly all of the great capitalists of the city came from the
+country.  "'T is better to be lowly born."
+
+The founder of Boston University left Cape Cod for Boston to make his
+way with a capital of only four dollars.  Like Horace Greeley, he could
+find no opening for a boy; but what of that?  He made an opening.  He
+found a board, and made it into an oyster stand on the street corner.
+He borrowed a wheelbarrow, and went three miles to an oyster smack,
+bought three bushels of oysters, and wheeled them to his stand.  Soon
+his little savings amounted to $130, and then he bought a horse and
+cart.  This poor boy with no chance kept right on till he became the
+millionaire Isaac Rich.
+
+Chauncey Jerome, the inventor of machine-made clocks, started with two
+others on a tour through New Jersey, they to sell the clocks, and he to
+make cases for them.  On his way to New York he went through New Haven
+in a lumber wagon, eating bread and cheese.  He afterward lived in a
+fine mansion in New Haven.
+
+Self-help has accomplished about all the great things of the world.
+How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose because
+they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good
+luck to give them a lift.  But success is the child of drudgery and
+perseverance.  It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is
+yours.  Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the
+world than Elihu Burritt, apprenticed to a blacksmith, in whose shop he
+had to work at the forge all the daylight, and often by candle-light?
+Yet, he managed, by studying with a book before him at his meals,
+carrying it in his pocket that he might utilize every spare moment, and
+studying nights and holidays, to pick up an excellent education in the
+odds and ends of time which most boys throw away.  While the rich boy
+and the idler were yawning and stretching and getting their eyes open,
+young Burritt had seized the opportunity and improved it.  At thirty
+years of age he was master of every important language in Europe and
+was studying those of Asia.
+
+What chance had such a boy for distinction?  Probably not a single
+youth will read this book who has not a better opportunity for success.
+Yet he had a thirst for knowledge, and a desire for self-improvement,
+which overcame every obstacle in his pathway.  A wealthy gentleman
+offered to pay his expenses at Harvard; but no, he said he could get
+his education himself, even though he had to work twelve or fourteen
+hours a day at the forge.  Here was a determined boy.  He snatched
+every spare moment at the anvil and forge as though it were gold.  He
+believed, with Gladstone, that thrift of time would repay him in after
+years with usury, and that waste of it would make him dwindle.  Think
+of a boy working nearly all the daylight in a blacksmith's shop, and
+yet finding time to study seven languages in a single year!
+
+If the youth of America who are struggling against cruel circumstances,
+to do something and be somebody in the world, could only understand
+that ninety per cent. of what is called genius is merely the result of
+persistent, determined industry, is in most cases downright hard work,
+that it is the slavery to a single idea which has given to many a
+mediocre talent the reputation of being a genius, they would be
+inspired with new hope.  It is interesting to note that the men who
+talk most about genius are the men who like to work the least.  The
+lazier the man, the more he will have to say about great things being
+done by genius.
+
+The greatest geniuses have been the greatest workers.  Sheridan was
+considered a genius, but it was found that the "brilliants" and
+"off-hand sayings" with which he used to dazzle the House of Commons
+were elaborated, polished and repolished, and put down in his
+memorandum book ready for any emergency.
+
+Genius has been well defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.
+If men who have done great things could only reveal to the struggling
+youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard
+digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement
+they would give.  How often I have wished that the discouraged,
+struggling youth could know of the heart-aches, the head-aches, the
+nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears
+and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the
+world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors.  You
+can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book with only
+pleasure and delight, but the days and months of weary plodding over
+details and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger
+belief.
+
+The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated,
+line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times.
+The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which
+have stood the test of time is almost incredible.  Lucretius worked
+nearly a lifetime on one poem.  It completely absorbed his life.  It is
+said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then
+was not satisfied with it.  John Foster would sometimes linger a week
+over a single sentence.  He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the
+roots, or practice any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it
+gained his consent to exist.  Chalmers was once asked what Foster was
+about in London.  "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a
+week."  Dickens, one of the greatest writers of modern fiction, was so
+worn down by hard work that he looked as "haggard as a murderer."  Even
+Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, left large
+numbers of MSS. filled with "sudden thoughts set down for use."  Hume
+toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of England."  Lord Eldon
+astonished the world with his great legal learning, but when he was a
+student too poor to buy books, he had actually borrowed and copied many
+hundreds of pages of large law books, such as Coke upon Littleton, thus
+saturating his mind with legal principles which afterward blossomed out
+into what the world called remarkable genius.  Matthew Hale for years
+studied law sixteen hours a day.  Speaking of Fox, some one declared
+that he wrote "drop by drop."  Rousseau says of the labor involved in
+his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched,
+interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me.
+There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe
+four or five times before it went to press. . . .  Some of my periods I
+have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they
+were fit to be put to paper."
+
+It is said that Waller spent a whole summer over ten lines in one of
+his poems.  Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his
+painstaking fidelity and persistent application.  There is scarcely a
+bar in his music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen
+times.  His favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which
+can say to aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'"
+Gibbon wrote his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every
+morning, summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste
+their evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and
+Fall of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years.  Even
+Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived, wrote the first
+sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied
+with it.  Burke's famous "Letter to a Noble Lord," one of the finest
+things in the English language, was so completely blotted over with
+alterations when the proof was returned to the printing-office that the
+compositors refused to correct it as it was, and entirely reset it.
+Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of Hastings
+sixteen times, and Butler wrote his famous "Analogy" twenty times.  It
+took Virgil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to
+write the Aeneid.  He was so displeased with the latter that he
+attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.
+
+Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and
+lonely, married a servant girl.  He was sent away from home to act as
+errand boy for a music teacher.  He absorbed a great deal of
+information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a
+barber in Vienna.  Here he blacked boots for an influential man, who
+became a friend to him.  In 1798 this poor boy's oratorio, "The
+Creation," came upon the musical world like the rising of a new sun
+which never set.  He was courted by princes and dined with kings and
+queens; his reputation was made; there was no more barbering, no more
+poverty.  But of his eight hundred compositions, "The Creation"
+eclipsed them all.  He died while Napoleon's guns were bombarding
+Vienna, some of the shot falling in his garden.  The greatest creations
+of musicians were written with an effort, to fill the "aching void" in
+the human heart.
+
+Frederick Douglass, America's most representative colored man, born a
+slave, was reared in bondage, liberated by his own exertions, educated
+and advanced by sheer pluck and perseverance to distinguished positions
+in the service of his country, and to a high place in the respect and
+esteem of the whole world.
+
+When a man like Lord Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put
+himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a
+blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a
+great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the
+most possible out of ourselves and opportunities.  Perhaps ninety-nine
+out of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be content
+to remain helpless objects of charity for life.  If it is your call to
+acquire money power instead of brain power, to acquire business power
+instead of professional power, double your talent just the same, no
+matter what it may be.
+
+A glover's apprentice of Glasgow, Scotland, who was too poor to afford
+even a candle or a fire, and who studied by the light of the shop
+windows in the streets, and when the shops were closed climbed the
+lamp-post, holding his book in one hand, and clinging to the lamp-post
+with the other,--this poor boy, with less chance than almost any boy in
+America, became the most eminent scholar of Scotland.
+
+Francis Parkman, half blind, became one of America's greatest
+historians in spite of everything, because he made himself such.
+Personal value is a coin of one's own minting; one is taken at the
+worth he has put into himself.  Franklin was but a poor printer's boy,
+whose highest luxury at one time was only a penny roll, eaten in the
+streets of Philadelphia.  Richard Arkwright, a barber all his earlier
+life, as he rose from poverty to wealth and fame, felt the need of
+correcting the defects of his early education.  After his fiftieth year
+he devoted two hours a day, snatched from his sleep, to improving
+himself in orthography, grammar, and writing.
+
+Michael Faraday was a poor boy, son of a blacksmith, who apprenticed
+him at the age of thirteen to a bookbinder in London.  Michael laid the
+foundations of his future greatness by making himself familiar with the
+contents of the books he bound.  He remained at night, after others had
+gone, to read and study the precious volumes.  Lord Tenterden was proud
+to point out to his son the shop where his father had shaved for a
+penny.  A French doctor once taunted Flechier, Bishop of Nismes, who
+had been a tallow-chandler in his youth, with the meanness of his
+origin, to which he replied, "If you had been born in the same
+condition that I was, you would still have been but a maker of candles."
+
+The Duke of Argyle, walking in his garden, saw a Latin copy of Newton's
+"Principia" on the grass, and supposing that it had been taken from his
+library, called for some one to carry it back.  Edmund Stone, however,
+the son of the duke's gardener, claimed it.  "Yours?" asked the
+surprised nobleman.  "Do you understand geometry, Latin, and Newton?"
+"I know a little of them," replied Edmund.  "But how," asked the duke,
+"came you by the knowledge of all these things?"  "A servant taught me
+to read ten years since," answered Stone.  "Does one need to know
+anything more than the twenty-four letters, in order to learn
+everything else that one wishes?"  The duke was astonished.  "I first
+learned to read," said the lad; "the masons were then at work upon your
+house.  I approached them one day and observed that the architect used
+a rule and compasses, and that he made calculations.  I inquired what
+might be the meaning and use of these things, and I was informed that
+there was a science called arithmetic.  I purchased a book of
+arithmetic and learned it.  I was told that there was another science
+called geometry; I bought the necessary books and learned geometry.  By
+reading I found that there were good books on these sciences in Latin,
+so I bought a dictionary and learned Latin.  I understood, also, that
+there were good books of the same kind in French; I bought a
+dictionary, and learned French.  This, my lord, is what I have done; it
+seems to me that we may learn everything when we know the twenty-four
+letters of the alphabet."
+
+Edwin Chadwick, in his report to the British Parliament, stated that
+children, working on half time, that is, studying three hours a day and
+working the rest of their time out of doors, really made the greatest
+intellectual progress during the year.  Business men have often
+accomplished wonders during the busiest lives by simply devoting one,
+two, three, or four hours daily to study or other literary work.
+
+James Watt received only the rudiments of an education at school, for
+his attendance was irregular on account of delicate health.  He more
+than made up for all deficiencies, however, by the diligence with which
+he pursued his studies at home.  Alexander V. was a beggar; he was
+"born mud, and died marble."  William Herschel, placed at the age of
+fourteen as a musician in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, devoted
+all his leisure to philosophical studies.  He acquired a large fund of
+general knowledge, and in astronomy, a science in which he was wholly
+self-instructed, his discoveries entitle him to rank with the greatest
+astronomers of all time.
+
+George Washington was the son of a widow, born under the roof of a
+Westmoreland farmer; almost from infancy his lot had been the lot of an
+orphan.  No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned
+him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his
+degrees in knowledge.  Shakespeare learned little more than reading and
+writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master
+among literary men.  Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education,
+and his youth was passed in almost abject poverty.
+
+James Ferguson, the son of a half-starved peasant, learned to read by
+listening to the recitations of one of his elder brothers.  While a
+mere boy he discovered several mechanical principles, made models of
+mills and spinning-wheels, and by means of beads on strings worked out
+an excellent map of the heavens.  Ferguson made remarkable things with
+a common penknife.  How many great men have mounted the hill of
+knowledge by out-of-the-way paths.  Gifford worked his intricate
+problems with a shoemaker's awl on a bit of leather.  Rittenhouse first
+calculated eclipses on his plow-handle.  _A will finds a way_.
+
+Julius Caesar, who has been unduly honored for those great military
+achievements in which he appears as the scourge of his race, is far
+more deserving of respect for those wonderful Commentaries, in which
+his military exploits are recorded.  He attained distinction by his
+writings on astronomy, grammar, history, and several other subjects.
+He was one of the most learned men and one of the greatest orators of
+his time.  Yet his life was spent amid the turmoil of a camp or the
+fierce struggle of politics.  If he found abundant time for study, who
+may not?  Frederick the Great, too, was busy in camp the greater part
+of his life, yet whenever a leisure moment came, it was sure to be
+devoted to study.  He wrote to a friend, "I become every day more
+covetous of my time, I render an account of it to myself, and I lose
+none of it but with great regret."
+
+Columbus, while leading the life of a sailor, managed to become the
+most accomplished geographer and astronomer of his time.
+
+When Peter the Great, a boy of seventeen, became the absolute ruler of
+Russia, his subjects were little better than savages, and in himself,
+even, the passions and propensities of barbarism were so strong that
+they were frequently exhibited during his whole career.  But he
+determined to transform himself and the Russians into civilized people.
+He instituted reforms with great energy, and at the age of twenty-six
+started on a visit to the other countries of Europe for the purpose of
+learning about their arts and institutions.  At Saardam, Holland, he
+was so impressed with the sights of the great East India dockyard, that
+he apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, and helped build the St.
+Peter, which he promptly purchased.  Continuing his travels, after he
+had learned his trade, he worked in England in paper-mills, saw-mills,
+rope-yards, watchmaker's shops, and other manufactories, doing the work
+and receiving the treatment of a common laborer.
+
+While traveling, his constant habit was to obtain as much information
+as he could beforehand with regard to every place he was to visit, and
+he would demand, "Let me see all."  When setting out on his
+investigations, on such occasions, he carried his tablets in his hand,
+and whatever he deemed worthy of remembrance was carefully noted down.
+He would often leave his carriage, if he saw the country people at work
+by the wayside as he passed along, and not only enter into conversation
+with them, on agricultural affairs, but accompany them to their houses,
+examine their furniture, and take drawings of their implements of
+husbandry.  Thus he obtained much minute and correct knowledge, which
+he would scarcely have acquired by other means, and which he afterward
+turned to admirable account in the improvement of his own country.
+
+The ancients said, "Know thyself;" the nineteenth century says, "Help
+thyself."  Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul.  A liberal
+education is a true regeneration.  When a man is once liberally
+educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor
+dwindle to a brute.  But if he is not properly educated, if he has
+merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a
+broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the
+examination, he will continue to shrink and shrivel and dwindle, often
+below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence
+and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of
+himself, evaporate from his distended memory.  Many a youth has made
+his greatest effort in his graduating essay.  But, alas! the beautiful
+flowers of rhetoric blossomed only to exhaust the parent stock, which
+blossoms no more forever.
+
+In Strasburg geese are crammed with food several times a day by opening
+their mouths and forcing the pabulum down the throat with the finger.
+The geese are shut up in boxes just large enough to hold them, and are
+not allowed to take any exercise.  This is done in order to increase
+enormously the liver for _pate de fois gras_.  So are our youth
+sometimes stuffed with education.  What are the chances for success of
+students who "cut" recitations or lectures, and gad, lounge about, and
+dissipate in the cities at night until the last two or three weeks,
+sometimes the last few days, before examination, when they employ
+tutors at exorbitant prices with the money often earned by hard-working
+parents, to stuff their idle brains with the pabulum of knowledge; not
+to increase their grasp or power of brain, not to discipline it, not
+for assimilation into the mental tissue to develop personal power, but
+to fatten the memory, the liver of the brain; to fatten it with crammed
+facts until it is sufficiently expanded to insure fifty per cent. in
+the examination.
+
+True teaching will create a thirst for knowledge, and the desire to
+quench this thirst will lead the eager student to the Pierian spring.
+"Man might be so educated that all his prepossessions would be truth,
+and all his feelings virtues."
+
+Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle
+for existence.  The microscope does not create anything new, but it
+reveals marvels.  To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until
+it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness.  It reveals a world
+we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest
+things.  The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds which the uneducated
+eye never dreamed of.  The cultured hand can do a thousand things the
+uneducated hand cannot do.  It becomes graceful, steady of nerve,
+strong, skillful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it
+with intelligence.  The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the
+possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman
+effort.  The educated touch can almost perform miracles.  The educated
+taste can achieve wonders almost past belief.  What a contrast this,
+between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone
+and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his
+reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry
+brick.
+
+"Culture comes from the constant choice of the best within our reach,"
+says Bulwer.  "Continue to cultivate the mind, to sharpen by exercise
+the genius, to attempt to delight or instruct your race; and, even
+supposing you fall short of every model you set before you, supposing
+your name moulder with your dust, still you will have passed life more
+nobly than the unlaborious herd.  Grant that you win not that glorious
+accident, 'a name below,' how can you tell but that you may have fitted
+yourself for high destiny and employ, not in the world of men, but of
+spirits?  The powers of the mind cannot be less immortal than the mere
+sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal
+Progress, and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter, in
+proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our
+intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God."
+
+But be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is
+purchased at the expense of moral vigor.  An observant professor of one
+of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and
+polished by education, so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any
+one faculty.  In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency
+and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to
+fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than
+the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to
+prevent consciousness of his ignorance.  While all the faculties of the
+mind should be cultivated, it is yet desirable that it should have two
+or three rough-hewn features of massive strength.  Young men are too
+apt to forget the great end of life which is to be and do, not to read
+and brood over what other men have been and done."
+
+In a gymnasium you tug, you expand your chest, you push, pull, strike,
+run, in order to develop your physical self; so you can develop your
+moral and intellectual nature only by continued effort.
+
+"I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge but to teach him
+how to acquire it at need," said Rousseau.
+
+All learning is self-teaching.  It is upon the working of the pupil's
+own mind that his progress in knowledge depends.  The great business of
+the master is to teach the pupil to teach himself.
+
+"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood," says Isaac Taylor.  "Accustom
+yourself, therefore, to thinking.  Set yourself to understand whatever
+you see or read.  To join thinking with reading is one of the first
+maxims, and one of the easiest operations."
+
+  "How few think justly of the thinking few:
+  How many never think who think they do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WORK AND WAIT.
+
+What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we
+already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of
+self-discipline.--H. P. LIDDON.
+
+In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be
+made.--CICERO.
+
+I consider a human soul without education like marble in a quarry which
+shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher
+sketches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every
+ornamental cloud, spot, and vein that runs throughout the body of
+it.--ADDISON.
+
+Many a genius has been slow of growth.  Oaks that flourish for a
+thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.--GEORGE HENRY
+LEWES.
+
+Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what
+you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.--ARNOLD.
+
+All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.--THOREAU.
+
+The more haste, ever the worse speed.--CHURCHILL.
+
+Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.--SENECA.
+
+"Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."
+
+How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed-time
+of character?--THOREAU.
+
+I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to
+perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both
+public and private, of peace and war.--MILTON.
+
+The safe path to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of
+appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the
+art and assiduity in practicing it.--EDWARD EVERETT.
+
+The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which
+belongs to you, and do more work with less effort.--CHARLES KINGSLEY.
+
+
+"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry
+Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831.  Although but
+eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon
+made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on
+cardboard.  His method was so simple that one could learn in ten
+minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny.  Having
+ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official
+papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a
+perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document.
+At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government
+was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps
+from old parchments and using them again.  The chief also appreciated
+the new danger of easy counterfeiting.  So he offered Bessemer a
+definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at
+eight hundred pounds a year.  Bessemer chose the office, and hastened
+to tell the good news to a young woman with whom he had agreed to share
+his fortune.  In explaining his invention, he told how it would prevent
+any one from taking a valuable stamp from a document a hundred years
+old and using it a second time.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS ALVA EDISON]
+
+"The Wizard of Menlo Park."
+
+"What the world wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work
+and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all
+stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used
+without detection."
+
+This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a
+single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved
+the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed,
+that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British
+revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden
+of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year.  And the
+same little word, if published in its connection, would render Henry's
+perforation device of far less value than a last year's bird's nest.
+Henry felt proud of the young woman's ingenuity, and suggested the
+improvement at the stamp office.  As a result his system of perforation
+was abandoned and he was deprived of his promised office, the
+government coolly making use from that day to this, without
+compensation, of the idea conveyed by that little insignificant word.
+
+So Bessemer's financial prospects were not very encouraging; but,
+realizing that the best capital a young man can have is a capital wife,
+he at once entered into a partnership which placed at his command the
+combined ideas of two very level heads.  The result, after years of
+thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel
+cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the
+world.  His method consists simply in forcing hot air from below into
+several tons of melted pig-iron, so as to produce intense combustion;
+and then adding enough spiegel-eisen (looking-glass iron), an ore rich
+in carbon, to change the whole mass to steel.  He discovered this
+simple process only after trying in vain much more difficult and
+expensive methods.
+
+  "All things come round to him who will but wait."
+
+
+The great lack of the age is want of thoroughness.  How seldom you find
+a young man or woman who is willing to take time to prepare for his
+life work.  A little education is all they want, a little smattering of
+books, and then they are ready for business.
+
+"Can't wait" is characteristic of the century, and is written on
+everything; on commerce, on schools, on society, on churches.  Can't
+wait for a high school, seminary, or college.  The boy can't wait to
+become a youth, nor the youth a man.  Youth rush into business with no
+great reserve of education or drill; of course they do poor, feverish
+work, and break down in middle life, and many die of old age in the
+forties.  Everybody is in a hurry.  Buildings are rushed up so quickly
+that they will not stand, and everything is made "to sell."
+
+Not long ago a professor in one of our universities had a letter from a
+young woman in the West, asking him if he did not think she could teach
+elocution if she could come to the university and take twelve lessons.
+Our young people of to-day want something, and want it quickly.  They
+are not willing to lay broad, deep foundations.  The weary years in
+preparatory school and college dishearten them.  They only want a
+"smattering" of an education.  But as Pope says,--
+
+  "A little learning is a dangerous thing;
+  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
+  There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
+  And drinking largely sobers us again."
+
+
+The shifts to cover up ignorance, and "the constant trembling lest some
+blunder should expose one's emptiness," are pitiable.  Short cuts and
+abridged methods are the demand of the hour.  But the way to shorten
+the road to success is to take plenty of time to lay in your reserve
+power.  You can't stop to forage your provender as the army advances;
+if you do the enemy will get there first.  Hard work, a definite aim,
+and faithfulness, will shorten the way.  Don't risk a life's
+superstructure upon a day's foundation.
+
+Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the
+opportunity will only make you ridiculous.  A great occasion is
+valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to
+make use of it.  Beware of that fatal facility of thoughtless speech
+and superficial action which has misled many a young man into the
+belief that he could make a glib tongue or a deft hand take the place
+of deep study or hard work.
+
+Patience is nature's motto.  She works ages to bring a flower to
+perfection.  What will she not do for the greatest of her creation?
+Ages and aeons are nothing to her, out of them she has been carving her
+great statue, a perfect man.
+
+Johnson said a man must turn over half a library to write one book.
+When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he
+replied that he would have spent six weeks.  Think of Bishop Hall
+spending thirty years on one of his works.  Owens was working on the
+"Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty years.  Moore
+spent several weeks on one of his musical stanzas which reads as if it
+were a dash of genius.  Carlyle wrote with the utmost difficulty, and
+never executed a page of his great histories till he had consulted
+every known authority, so that every sentence is the quintessence of
+many books, the product of many hours of drudging research in the great
+libraries.  To-day, "Sartor Resartus" is everywhere.  You can get it
+for a mere trifle at almost any bookseller's, and hundreds of thousands
+of copies are scattered over the world.  But when Carlyle brought it to
+London in 1851, it was refused almost contemptuously by three prominent
+publishers.  At last he managed to get it into "Fraser's Magazine," the
+editor of which conveyed to the author the pleasing information that
+his work had been received with "unqualified disapprobation."  Henry
+Ward Beecher sent a half dozen articles to the publisher of a religious
+paper to pay for his subscription, but they were respectfully declined.
+The publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly" returned Miss Alcott's
+manuscript, suggesting that she had better stick to teaching.  One of
+the leading magazines ridiculed Tennyson's first poems, and consigned
+the young poet to oblivion.  Only one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books
+had a remunerative sale.  Washington Irving was nearly seventy years
+old before the income from his books paid the expenses of his household.
+
+In some respects it is very unfortunate that the old system of binding
+boys out to a trade has been abandoned.  To-day very few boys learn any
+trade.  They pick up what they know, as they go along, just as a
+student crams for a particular examination, just to "get through,"
+without any effort to see how much he may learn on any subject.
+
+Think of an American youth spending twelve years with Michael Angelo,
+studying anatomy that he might create the masterpiece of all art; or
+with Da Vinci devoting ten years to the model of an equestrian statue
+that he might master the anatomy of the horse.  Most young American
+artists would expect, in a quarter of that time, to sculpture an Apollo
+Belvidere.  While Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel he
+would not allow himself time for meals or to dress or undress; but he
+kept bread within reach that he might eat when hunger impelled, and he
+slept in his clothes.
+
+A rich man asked Howard Burnett to do a little thing for his album.
+Burnett complied and charged a thousand francs.  "But it took you only
+five minutes," objected the rich man.  "Yes, but it took me thirty
+years to learn how to do it in five minutes."
+
+"I prepared that sermon," said a young sprig of divinity, "in half an
+hour, and preached it at once, and thought nothing of it."  "In that,"
+said an older minister, "your hearers are at one with you, for they
+also thought nothing of it."
+
+What the age wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work and
+wait, whether the world applaud or hiss.  It wants a Bancroft, who can
+spend twenty-six years on the "History of the United States;" a Noah
+Webster, who can devote thirty-six years to a dictionary; a Gibbon, who
+can plod for twenty years on the "Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire;" a Mirabeau, who can struggle on for forty years before he has
+a chance to show his vast reserve, destined to shake an empire; a
+Farragut, a Von Moltke, who have the persistence to work and wait for
+half a century for their first great opportunities; a Garfield, burning
+his lamp fifteen minutes later than a rival student in his academy; a
+Grant, fighting on in heroic silence, when denounced by his brother
+generals and politicians everywhere; a Field's untiring perseverance,
+spending years and a fortune laying a cable when all the world called
+him a fool; a Michael Angelo, working seven long years decorating the
+Sistine Chapel with his matchless "Creation" and the "Last Judgment,"
+refusing all remuneration therefor, lest his pencil might catch the
+taint of avarice; a Titian, spending seven years on the "Last Supper;"
+a Stephenson, working fifteen years on a locomotive; a Watt, twenty
+years on a condensing engine; a Lady Franklin, working incessantly for
+twelve long years to rescue her husband from the polar seas; a Thurlow
+Weed, walking two miles through the snow with rags tied around his feet
+for shoes, to borrow the history of the French Revolution, and eagerly
+devouring it before the sap-bush fire; a Milton, elaborating "Paradise
+Lost" in a world he could not see, and then selling it for fifteen
+pounds; a Thackeray, struggling on cheerfully after his "Vanity Fair"
+was refused by a dozen publishers; a Balzac, toiling and waiting in a
+lonely garret, whom neither poverty, debt, nor hunger could discourage
+or intimidate; not daunted by privations, not hindered by
+discouragements.  It wants men who can work and wait.
+
+When a young lawyer Daniel Webster once looked in vain through all the
+law libraries near him, and then ordered at an expense of fifty dollars
+the necessary books, to obtain authorities and precedents in a case in
+which his client was a poor blacksmith.  He won his cause, but, on
+account of the poverty of his client, only charged fifteen dollars,
+thus losing heavily on the books bought, to say nothing of his time.
+Years after, as he was passing through New York city, he was consulted
+by Aaron Burr on an important but puzzling case then pending before the
+Supreme Court.  He saw in a moment that it was just like the
+blacksmith's case, an intricate question of title, which he had solved
+so thoroughly that it was to him now as simple as the multiplication
+table.  Going back to the time of Charles II. he gave the law and
+precedents involved with such readiness and accuracy of sequence that
+Burr asked in great surprise if he had been consulted before in the
+case.  "Most certainly not," he replied, "I never heard of your case
+till this evening."  "Very well," said Burr, "proceed," and, when he
+had finished, Webster received a fee that paid him liberally for all
+the time and trouble he had spent for his early client.
+
+Albert Bierstadt first crossed the Rocky Mountains with a band of
+pioneers in 1859, making sketches for the paintings of western scenes
+for which he had become famous.  As he followed the trail to Pike's
+Peak, he gazed in wonder upon the enormous herds of buffaloes which
+dotted the plains as far as the eye could reach, and thought of the
+time when they would have disappeared before the march of civilization.
+The thought haunted him and found its final embodiment in "The Last of
+the Buffaloes" in 1890.  To perfect this great work he had spent twenty
+years.
+
+Everything which endures, which will stand the test of time, must have
+a deep, solid foundation.  In Rome the foundation is often the most
+expensive part of an edifice, so deep must they dig to build on the
+living rock.
+
+Fifty feet of Bunker Hill Monument is under ground; unseen and
+unappreciated by those who tread about that historic shaft, but it is
+this foundation, apparently thrown away, which enables it to stand
+upright, true to the plumb-line through all the tempests that lash its
+granite sides.  A large part of every successful life must be spent in
+laying foundation stones under ground.  Success is the child of
+drudgery and perseverance and depends upon "knowing how long it takes
+to succeed."  Havelock joined the army at twenty-eight, and for
+thirty-four years worked and waited for his opportunity; conscious of
+his power, "fretting as a subaltern while he saw drunkards and fools
+put above his head."
+
+But during all these years he was fitting himself to lead that
+marvelous march to Lucknow.
+
+It was many years of drudgery and reading a thousand volumes that
+enabled George Eliot to get fifty thousand dollars for "Daniel
+Deronda."  How came writers to be famous?  By writing for years without
+any pay at all; by writing hundreds of pages for mere practice work; by
+working like galley-slaves at literature for half a lifetime.  It was
+working and waiting many long and weary years that put one hundred and
+twenty-five thousand dollars into "The Angelus."  Millet's first
+attempts were mere daubs, the later were worth fortunes.  Schiller
+"never could get done."  Dante sees himself "growing lean over his
+Divine Comedy."  It is working and waiting that gives perfection.
+
+"I do not remember," said Beecher, "a book in all the depths of
+learning, nor a scrap in literature, nor a work in all the schools of
+art, from which its author has derived a permanent renown, that is not
+known to have been long and patiently elaborated."
+
+Endurance is a much better test of character than any one act of
+heroism, however noble.
+
+The pianist Thalberg said he never ventured to perform one of his
+celebrated pieces in public until he had played it at least fifteen
+hundred times.  He laid no claim whatever to genius; he said it was all
+a question of hard work.  The accomplishments of such industry, such
+perseverance, would put to shame many a man who claims genius.
+
+Before Edmund Kean would consent to appear in that character which he
+acted with such consummate skill, The Gentleman Villain, he practiced
+constantly before a glass, studying expression for a year and a half.
+When he appeared upon the stage, Byron, who went to see him with Moore,
+said he never looked upon so fearful and wicked a face.  As the great
+actor went on to delineate the terrible consequences of sin, Byron
+fainted.
+
+"For years I was in my place of business by sunrise," said a wealthy
+banker who had begun without a dollar, "and often I did not leave it
+for fifteen or eighteen hours."
+
+_Festina lente_--hasten slowly--is a good Latin motto.  Patience, it is
+said, changes the mulberry leaf to satin.  The giant oak on the
+hillside was detained months or years in its upward growth while its
+roots took a great turn around some rock, in order to gain a hold by
+which the tree was anchored to withstand the storms of centuries.  Da
+Vinci spent four years on the head of Mona Lisa, perhaps the most
+beautiful ever painted, but he left therein, an artistic thought for
+all time.
+
+Said Captain Bingham: "You can have no idea of the wonderful machine
+that the German army is and how well it is prepared for war.  A chart
+is made out which shows just what must be done in the case of wars with
+the different nations.  And every officer's place in the scheme is laid
+out beforehand.  There is a schedule of trains which will supersede all
+other schedules the moment war is declared, and this is so arranged
+that the commander of the army here could telegraph to any officer to
+take such a train and go to such a place at a moment's notice.  When
+the Franco-Prussian war was declared, Von Moltke was awakened at
+midnight and told of the fact.  He said coolly to the official who
+aroused him, 'Go to pigeonhole No. ---- in my safe and take a paper
+from it and telegraph as there directed to the different troops of the
+empire.'  He then turned over and went to sleep and awoke at his usual
+hour in the morning.  Every one else in Berlin was excited about the
+war, but Von Moltke took his morning walk as usual, and a friend who
+met him said, 'General, you seem to be taking it very easy.  Aren't you
+afraid of the situation?  I should think you would be busy.'  'Ah,'
+replied Von Moltke, 'all of my work for this time has been done long
+beforehand and everything that can be done now has been done.'"
+
+That is done soon enough which is done well.  Soon ripe, soon rotten.
+He that would enjoy the fruit must not gather the flower.  He who is
+impatient to become his own master is more likely to become his own
+slave.  Better believe yourself a dunce and work away than a genius and
+be idle.  One year of trained thinking is worth more than a whole
+college course of mental absorption of a vast series of undigested
+facts.  The facility with which the world swallows up the ordinary
+college graduate who thought he was going to dazzle mankind should bid
+you pause and reflect.  But just as certainly as man was created not to
+crawl on all fours in the depths of primeval forests, but to develop
+his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education,
+and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,--man,
+in the highest sense of the word.  Ignorance is not simply the negation
+of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind.  "One step in
+knowledge," says Bulwer, "is one step from sin; one step from sin is
+one step nearer to Heaven."
+
+A learned clergyman was thus accosted by an illiterate preacher who
+despised education: "Sir, you have been to college, I presume?"  "Yes,
+sir," was the reply.  "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord
+opened my mouth without any learning."  "A similar event," retorted the
+clergyman, "happened in Balaam's time."
+
+"If a cloth were drawn around the eyes of Praxiteles' statue of Love,"
+says Bulwer, "the face looked grave and sad; but as the bandage was
+removed, a beautiful smile would overspread the countenance.  Even so
+does the removal of the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the mind
+bring radiant happiness to the heart of man."
+
+A young man just graduated told the President of Trinity College that
+he had completed his education, and had come to say good-by.  "Indeed,"
+said the President, "I have just begun my education."
+
+Many an extraordinary man has been made out of a very ordinary boy; but
+in order to accomplish this we must begin with him while he is young.
+It is simply astonishing what training will do for a rough, uncouth,
+and even dull lad, if he has good material in him, and comes under the
+tutelage of a skilled educator before his habits have become confirmed.
+Even a few weeks' or months' drill of the rawest and roughest recruits
+in the late Civil War so straightened and dignified stooping and
+uncouth soldiers, and made them so manly, erect, and courteous in their
+bearing, that their own friends scarcely knew them.  If this change is
+so marked in the youth who has grown to maturity, what a miracle is
+possible in the lad who is taken early and put under a course of drill
+and systematic training, both physical, mental, and moral.  How many a
+man who is now in the penitentiary, in the poorhouse, or among the
+tramps, or living out a miserable existence in the slums of our cities,
+bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering
+within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man,
+an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he
+only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under efficient
+and systematic training.
+
+Laziness begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains.  The more business
+a man has, the more he can do, for be learns to economize his time.
+
+The industry that acquired riches, according to a wise teacher, the
+patience that is required in obtaining them, the reserved self-control,
+the measuring of values, the sympathy felt for fellow-toilers, the
+knowledge of what a dollar costs to the average man, the memory of
+it--all these things are preservative.  But woe to the young farmer who
+hates farming; does not like sowing and reaping; is impatient with the
+dilatory and slow path to a small though secure fortune in the
+neighborhood where he was born, and comes to the city, hoping to become
+suddenly rich, thinking that he can break into the palace of wealth and
+rob it of its golden treasures!
+
+Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce
+an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for
+the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.'  I
+said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument
+responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.'  It was enough to drive one mad.  But
+I held firm, and I have succeeded."
+
+The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and
+hard work.
+
+Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of
+Massachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience
+which can work and wait.  His only inheritance was poverty and hard
+work.  But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a
+determination to get on in the world.  He braided straw to get money to
+buy books which his soul thirsted for.
+
+To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a
+piano.  Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and
+fortune.  Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared
+with accuracy and knowledge.  He could afford to work and wait, for
+quality, not quantity, was his aim.  Fifty years ago the piano was a
+miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day.
+Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the
+fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the
+player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve
+its purity and truthfulness of tone.  And he strove patiently and
+persistently till he succeeded.
+
+"Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no
+idle dream, but a solemn reality," said Carlyle.  "It is thy own.  It
+is all thou hast to comfort eternity with.  Work then like a star,
+unhasting, yet unresting."
+
+Gladstone was bound to win; although he had spent many years of
+preparation for his life work, in spite of the consciousness of
+marvelous natural endowments which would have been deemed sufficient by
+many young men, and notwithstanding he had gained the coveted prize of
+a seat in Parliament, yet he decided to make himself master of the
+situation; and amid all his public and private duties, he not only
+spent eleven terms more in the study of the law, but he studied Greek
+constantly and read every well written book or paper he could obtain,
+so determined was he that his life should be rounded out to its fullest
+measure, and that his mind should have broad and liberal culture.
+
+Emperor William I. was not a genius, but the secret of his power lay in
+tireless perseverance.  A friend says of him, "When I passed the palace
+at Berlin night after night, however late, I always saw that grand
+imperial figure standing beside the green lamp, and I used to say to
+myself, 'That is how the imperial crown of Germany was won.'"
+
+Ole Bull said, "If I practice one day, I can see the result.  If I
+practice two days my friends can see it; if I practice three days the
+great public can see it."
+
+The habit of seizing every bit of knowledge, no matter how
+insignificant it may seem at the time, every opportunity, every
+occasion, and grinding them all up into experience, cannot be
+overestimated.  You will find use for all of it.  Webster once repeated
+an anecdote with effect which he heard fourteen years before, and which
+he had not thought of in the mean time.  It exactly fitted the
+occasion.  "It is an ill mason that rejects any stone."
+
+Webster was once urged to speak on a subject of great importance, but
+refused, saying he was very busy and had no time to master the subject.
+"But," replied his friend, "a very few words from you would do much to
+awaken public attention to it."  Webster replied, "If there be so much
+weight in my words, it is because I do not allow myself to speak on any
+subject until my mind is imbued with it."  On one occasion Webster made
+a remarkable speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, when
+a book was presented to him, but after he had gone, his "impromptu"
+speech, carefully written out, was found in the book which he had
+forgotten to take away.
+
+Demosthenes was once urged to speak on a great and sudden emergency,
+but replied, "I am not prepared."  In fact, it was thought by many that
+Demosthenes did not possess any genius whatever, because he never
+allowed himself to speak on any subject without thorough preparation.
+In any meeting or assembly, when called upon, he would never rise, even
+to make remarks, it was said, without previously preparing himself.
+
+Alexander Hamilton said, "Men give me credit for genius.  All the
+genius I have lies just in this: when I have a subject in hand I study
+it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  I explore it in all its
+bearings.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.  Then the effort which I
+make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius; it is the
+fruit of labor and thought."  The law of labor is equally binding on
+genius and mediocrity.
+
+Are the results so distant that you delay the preparation in the hope
+that fortuitous good luck may make it unnecessary?  As well might the
+husbandman delay sowing his seed until the spring and summer are past
+and the ground hardened by the frosts of a rigorous winter.  As well
+might one who is desirous of enjoying firm health inoculate his system
+with the seeds of disease, and expect at such time as he may see fit to
+recover from its effects, and banish the malady.  Nelaton, the great
+surgeon, said that if he had four minutes in which to perform an
+operation, on which a life depended, he would take one minute to
+consider how best to do it.
+
+"Many men," says Longfellow, "do not allow their principles to take
+root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do flowers they
+have planted, to see if they are growing."  We must not only work, but
+wait.
+
+"The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his
+mustache and boots and shiny hat, of getting along nicely and easily
+during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast
+horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the
+business and make a man of himself, because he will not join in wasting
+his time in dissipation, will see the day, if his useless life is not
+earlier blasted by vicious indulgences, when he will be glad to accept
+a situation from his fellow-clerk whom he now ridicules and affects to
+despise, when the latter shall stand in the firm, dispensing benefits
+and acquiring fortune."
+
+"I have been watching the careers of young men by the thousand in this
+busy city of New York for over thirty years," said Dr. Cuyler, "and I
+find that the chief difference between the successful and the failures
+lies in the single element of staying power.  Permanent success is
+oftener won by holding on than by sudden dash, however brilliant.  The
+easily discouraged, who are pushed back by a straw, are all the time
+dropping to the rear--to perish or to be carried along on the stretcher
+of charity.  They who understand and practice Abraham Lincoln's homely
+maxim of 'pegging away' have achieved the solidest success."
+
+"When a man has done his work," says Ruskin, "and nothing can any way
+be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest
+with his fate if he will, but what excuse can you find for willfulness
+of thought at the very lime when every crisis of fortune hangs on your
+decisions?  A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home
+forever depends on the chances or the passions of the hour!  A youth
+thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity
+of a moment!  A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a
+foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a foundation
+of life or death!  Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than
+now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly
+thoughtless, his deathbed.  Nothing should ever be left to be done
+there."
+
+The Duke of Wellington became so discouraged because he did not advance
+in the army that he applied for a much inferior position in the customs
+department, but was refused.  Napoleon had applied for every vacant
+position for seven years before he was recognized, but meanwhile he
+studied with all his might, supplementing what was considered a
+thorough military education by researches and reflections which in
+later years enabled him easily to teach the art of war to veterans who
+had never dreamed of his novel combinations.
+
+Reserves which carry us through great emergencies are the result of
+long working and long waiting.  Collyer declares that reserves mean to
+a man also achievement,--"the power to do the grandest thing possible
+to your nature when you feel you must, or some precious thing will be
+lost,--to do well always, but best in the crisis on which all things
+turn; to stand the strain of a long fight, and still find you have
+something left, and so to never know you are beaten, because you never
+are beaten."  Every defeat is a Waterloo to him who has no reserves.
+
+He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in
+preparation and self-culture.  "Not for school, but for life, we
+learn;" and our habits--of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness,
+or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality--are the things
+acquired most readily and longest retained.
+
+"One who reads the chronicles of discoveries is struck with the
+prominent part that accident has played in such annals.  For some of
+the most useful processes and machinery the world is indebted to
+apparently chance occurrences.  Inventors in search of one object have
+failed in their quest, but have stumbled on something more valuable
+than that for which they were looking.  Saul is not the only man who
+has gone in search of asses and found a kingdom.  Astrologers sought to
+read from the heavens the fate of men and the fortune of nations, and
+they led to a knowledge of astronomy.  Alchemists were seeking for the
+philosopher's stone, and from their efforts sprung the science of
+chemistry.  Men explored the heavens for something to explain
+irregularities in the movements of the planets, and discovered a star
+other than the one for which they were looking.  A careless glance at
+such facts might encourage the delusion that aimless straying in
+bypaths is quite as likely to be rewarded as is the steady pressing
+forward, with fixed purpose, towards some definite goal.
+
+"But it is to be remembered that the men who made the accidental
+discoveries were men who were looking for something.  The unexpected
+achievement was but the return for the toil after what was attained.
+Others might have encountered the same facts, but only the eye made
+eager by the strain of long watching would be quick to note the
+meaning.  If vain search for hidden treasure has no other recompense,
+it at least gives ability to detect the first gleam of the true metal.
+Men may wake at times surprised to find themselves famous, but it was
+the work they did before going to sleep, and not the slumber, that gave
+the eminence.  When the ledge has been drilled and loaded and the
+proper connections have been made, a child's touch on the electric key
+may be enough to annihilate the obstacle, but without the long
+preparation the pressure of a giant's hand would be without effect.
+
+"In the search for truth and the shaping of character the principle
+remains the same as in science and literature.  Trivial causes are
+followed by wonderful results, but it is only the merchantman who is on
+the watch for goodly pearls who is represented as finding the pearl of
+great price."
+
+To vary the language of another, the three great essentials to success
+in mental and physical labor are Practice, Patience, and Perseverance,
+but the greatest of these is Perseverance.
+
+  Let us, then, be up and doing,
+    With a heart for any fate;
+  Still achieving, still pursuing,
+    Learn to labor and to wait.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CLEAR GRIT.
+
+  I shall show the cinders of my spirits
+    Through the ashes of my chance.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+  What though ten thousand faint,
+    Desert, or yield, or in weak terror flee!
+  Heed not the panic of the multitude;
+    Thine be the captain's watchword,--Victory!
+        HORATIUS BONAR.
+
+      Better to stem with heart and hand
+    The roaring tide of life, than lie,
+      Unmindful, on its flowery strand,
+    Of God's occasions drifting by!
+      Better with naked nerve to hear
+    The needles of this goading air,
+  Than in the lap of sensual ease forego
+  The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know.
+        WHITTIER.
+
+  Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me,
+  I have a soul that, like an ample shield,
+  Can take in all, and verge enough for more.
+        DRYDEN.
+
+  There's a brave fellow!  There's a man of pluck!
+  A man who's not afraid to say his say,
+  Though a whole town's against him.
+        LONGFELLOW.
+
+Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we
+fall.--GOLDSMITH.
+
+  Attempt the end and never stand to doubt;
+  Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.
+        HERRICK.
+
+The barriers are not yet erected which shall say to aspiring talent,
+"Thus far and no farther."--BEETHOVEN.
+
+
+"Friends and comrades," said Pizarro, as he turned toward the south,
+after tracing with his sword upon the sand a line from east to west,
+"on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm,
+desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure.  There lies Peru
+with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty.  Choose, each man, what
+best becomes a brave Castilian.  For my part, I go to the south."  So
+saying, he crossed the line and was followed by thirteen Spaniards in
+armor.  Thus, on the little island of Gallo in the Pacific, when his
+men were clamoring to return to Panama, did Pizarro and his few
+volunteers resolve to stake their lives upon the success of a desperate
+crusade against the powerful empire of the Incas.  At the time they had
+not even a vessel to transport them to the country they wished to
+conquer.  Is it necessary to add that all difficulties yielded at last
+to such resolute determination?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON]
+
+"Old Hickory."
+
+  "Stick to your aim: the mongrel's hold will slip,
+  But only crowbars loose the bull-dog's grip."
+
+"The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blenches, the thought
+that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+  "Perseverance is a Roman virtue,
+  That wins each godlike act, and plucks success
+  E'en from the spear-proof crest of rugged danger."
+
+
+At a time when abolitionists were dangerously unpopular, a crowd of
+brawny Cape Cod fishermen had made such riotous demonstrations that all
+the speakers announced, except Stephen Foster and Lucy Stone, had fled
+from an open-air platform.  "You had better run, Stephen," said she,
+"they are coming."  "But who will take care of you?" asked Foster.
+"This gentleman will take care of me," she replied, calmly laying her
+hand within the arm of a burly rioter with a club, who had just sprung
+upon the platform.  "Wh--what did you say?" stammered the astonished
+rowdy, as he looked at the little woman; "yes, I'll take care of you,
+and no one shall touch a hair of your head."  With this he forced a way
+for her through the crowd, and, at her earnest request, placed her upon
+a stump and stood guard with his club while she delivered an address so
+effective that the audience offered no further violence, and even took
+up a collection of twenty dollars to repay Mr. Foster for the damage
+his clothes had received when the riot was at its height.
+
+"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till
+it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer," said Harriet
+Beecher Stowe, "never give up then, for that's just the place and time
+that the tide'll turn."
+
+Charles Sumner said, "Three things are necessary: first, backbone;
+second, backbone; third, backbone."
+
+While digging among the ruins of Pompeii, which was buried by the dust
+and ashes from an eruption of Vesuvius, A. D. 79, the workmen found the
+skeleton of a Roman soldier in the sentry-box at one of the city's
+gates.  He might have found safety under sheltering rocks close by;
+but, in the face of certain death, he had remained at his post, a mute
+witness to the thorough discipline, the ceaseless vigilance and
+fidelity which made the Roman legionaries masters of the known world.
+Bulwer, describing the flight of a party amid the dust, and ashes, and
+streams of boiling water, and huge hurtling fragments of scoria, and
+gusty winds, and lurid lightnings, continues: "The air was now still
+for a few minutes; the lamp from the gate streamed out far and clear;
+the fugitives hurried on.  They gained the gate.  They passed by the
+Roman sentry.  The lightning flashed over his livid face and polished
+helmet, but his stern features were composed even in their awe!  He
+remained erect and motionless at his post.  That hour itself had not
+animated the machine of the ruthless majesty of Rome into the reasoning
+and self-acting man.  There he stood amidst the crashing elements; he
+had not received the permission to desert his station and escape."
+
+The world admires the man who never flinches from unexpected
+difficulties, who calmly, patiently, and courageously grapples with his
+fate, who dies, if need be, at his post.
+
+"Clear grit" always commands respect.  It is that quality which
+achieves, and everybody admires achievement.  In the strife of parties
+and principles, backbone without brains will carry against brains
+without backbone.  "A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no
+match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong."  You
+cannot, by tying an opinion to a man's tongue, make him the
+representative of that opinion; at the close of any battle for
+principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the
+wounded, but among the missing.
+
+The "London Times" was an insignificant sheet published by Mr. Walter
+and was steadily losing money.  John Walter, Jr., then only
+twenty-seven years old, begged his father to give him full control of
+the paper.  After many misgivings, the father finally consented.  The
+young journalist began to remodel the establishment and to introduce
+new ideas everywhere.  The paper had not attempted to mould public
+opinion, and had no individuality or character of its own.  The
+audacious young editor boldly attacked every wrong, even the
+government, when he thought it corrupt.  Thereupon the public customs,
+printing, and the government advertisements were withdrawn.  The father
+was in utter dismay.  The son he was sure would ruin the paper and
+himself.  But no remonstrance could swerve him from his purpose, to
+give the world a great journal which should have weight, character,
+individuality, and independence.
+
+The public soon saw that a new power stood behind the "Times"; that its
+articles meant business; that new life and new blood and new ideas had
+been infused into the insignificant sheet; that a man with brains and
+push and tenacity of purpose stood at the helm,--a man who could make a
+way when he could not find one.  Among other new features foreign
+dispatches were introduced, and they appeared in the "Times" several
+days before their appearance in the government organs.  The "leading
+article" also was introduced to stay.  But the aggressive editor
+antagonized the government, and his foreign dispatches were all stopped
+at the outpost, while those of the ministerial journalists were allowed
+to proceed.  But nothing could daunt this resolute young spirit.  At
+enormous expense he employed special couriers.  Every obstacle put in
+his way, and all opposition from the government, only added to his
+determination to succeed.  Enterprise, push, grit were behind the
+"Times," and nothing could stay its progress.  Walter was the soul of
+the paper, and his personality pervaded every detail.  In those days
+only three hundred copies of the "Times" could be struck off in an hour
+by the best presses, and Walter had duplicate and even triplicate types
+set.  Then he set his brain to work, and finally the Walter Press,
+throwing off 17,000 copies, both sides printed, per hour, was the
+result.  It was the 29th of November, 1814, that the first steam
+printed paper was given to the world.  Walter's tenacity of purpose was
+remarkable.  He shrank from no undertaking, and neglected no detail.
+
+"Mean natures always feel a sort of terror before great natures, and
+many a base thought has been unuttered, many a sneaking vote withheld,
+through the fear inspired by the rebuking presence of one noble man."
+As a rule, pure grit, character, has the right of way.  In the presence
+of men permeated with grit and sound in character, meanness and
+baseness slink out of sight.  Mean men are uncomfortable, dishonesty
+trembles, hypocrisy is uncertain.
+
+Lincoln, being asked by an anxious visitor what he would do after three
+or four years if the rebellion was not subdued, replied: "Oh, there is
+no alternative but to keep pegging away."
+
+"It is in me and it shall come out," said Sheridan, when told that he
+would never make an orator, as he had failed in his first speech in
+Parliament.  He became known as one of the foremost orators of his day.
+
+When a boy Henry Clay was very bashful and diffident, and scarcely
+dared recite before his class at school, but he determined to become an
+orator.  So he committed speeches and recited them in the cornfields,
+or in the barn with the horse and cows for an audience.
+
+Look at Garrison reading this advertisement in a Southern paper: "Five
+thousand dollars will be paid for the head of W. L. Garrison by the
+Governor of Georgia."  Behold him again; a broadcloth mob is leading
+him through the streets of Boston by a rope.  He is hurried to jail.
+See him return calmly and unflinchingly to his work, beginning at the
+point at which he was interrupted.  Note this heading in the
+"Liberator," the type of which he set himself in an attic on State
+Street, in Boston: "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not
+excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."  Was
+Garrison heard?  Ask a race set free largely by his efforts.  Even the
+gallows erected in front of his own door did not daunt him.  He held
+the ear of an unwilling world with that burning word "freedom," which
+was destined never to cease its vibrations until it had breathed its
+sweet secret to the last slave.
+
+If impossibilities ever exist, popularly speaking, they ought to have
+been found somewhere between the birth and the death of Kitto, that
+deaf pauper and master of Oriental learning.  But Kitto did not find
+them there.  In the presence of his decision and imperial energy they
+melted away.  Kitto begged his father to take him out of the poorhouse,
+even if he had to subsist like the Hottentots.  He told him that he
+would sell his books and pawn his handkerchief, by which he thought he
+could raise about twelve shillings.  He said he could live upon
+blackberries, nuts, and field turnips, and was willing to sleep on a
+hayrick.  Here was real grit.  What were impossibilities to such a
+resolute will?  Patrick Henry voiced that decision which characterized
+the great men of the Revolution when he said, "Is life so dear, or
+peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
+Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others may take; but
+as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
+
+Grit is a permanent, solid quality, which enters into the very
+structure, the very tissues of the constitution.  A weak man, a
+wavering, irresolute man, may be "spunky" upon occasion, he may be
+"plucky" in an emergency; but pure "grit" is a part of the very
+character of strong men alone.  Lord Erskine was a plucky man; he even
+had flashes of heroism, and when he was with weaker men, he was thought
+to have nerve and even grit; but when he entered the House of Commons,
+although a hero at the bar, the imperiousness, the audacious scorn, and
+the intellectual supremacy of Pitt disturbed his equanimity and exposed
+the weak places in his armor.  In Pitt's commanding presence he lost
+his equilibrium.  His individuality seemed off its centre; he felt
+fluttered, weak, and uneasy.
+
+Many of our generals in the late war exhibited heroism.  They were
+"plucky," and often displayed great determination, but Grant had pure
+"grit" in the most concentrated form.  He could not be moved from his
+base; he was self-centred, immovable.  "If you try to wheedle out of
+him his plans for a campaign, he stolidly smokes; if you call him an
+imbecile and a blunderer, he blandly lights another cigar; if you
+praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff
+from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the presidency,
+it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales
+the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises.
+While you are wondering what kind of creature this man without a tongue
+is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid
+victory, proving that behind the cigar, and behind the face discharged
+of all tell-tale expression, is the best brain to plan and the
+strongest heart to dare among the generals of the Republic."
+
+Demosthenes was a man who could rise to sublime heights of heroism, but
+his bravery was not his normal condition and depended upon his genius
+being aroused.
+
+He had "pluck" and "spunk" on occasions, but Lincoln had pure "grit."
+When the illustrated papers everywhere were caricaturing him, when no
+epithet seemed too harsh to heap upon him, when his methods were
+criticised by his own party, and the generals in the war were
+denouncing his "foolish" confidence in Grant, and delegations were
+waiting upon him to ask for that general's removal, the great President
+sat with crossed legs, and was reminded of a story.
+
+Lincoln and Grant both had that rare nerve which cares not for
+ridicule, is not swerved by public clamor, can bear abuse and hatred.
+There is a mighty force in truth and in the sublime conviction and
+supreme self-confidence behind it, in the knowledge that truth is
+mighty and the conviction and confidence that it will prevail.
+
+Pure grit is that element of character which enables a man to clutch
+his aim with an iron grip, and keep the needle of his purpose pointing
+to the star of his hope.  Through sunshine and storm, through hurricane
+and tempest, through sleet and rain, with a leaky ship, with a crew in
+mutiny, it perseveres; in fact, nothing but death can subdue it, and it
+dies still struggling.
+
+The man of grit carries in his very presence a power which controls and
+commands.  He is spared the necessity of declaring himself, for his
+grit speaks in his every act.  It does not come by fits and starts, it
+is a part of his very life.  It inspires a sublime audacity and a
+heroic courage.  Many of the failures of life are due to the want of
+grit or business nerve.  It is unfortunate for a young man to start out
+in business life with a weak, yielding disposition, with no resolution
+or backbone to mark his own course and stick to it, with no ability to
+say "No" with an emphasis, obliging this man by investing in hopeless
+speculation, and rather than offend a friend, indorsing a questionable
+note.
+
+A little boy was asked how he learned to skate.  "Oh, by getting up
+every time I fell down," he replied.
+
+Whipple tells a story of Massena which illustrates the masterful
+purpose that plucks victory out of the jaws of defeat.  "After the
+defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his
+beaten army depended on the character of Massena, to whom the Emperor
+dispatched a messenger, telling him to keep his position for two hours
+longer at Aspern.  This order, couched in the form of a request,
+required almost an impossibility; but Napoleon knew the indomitable
+tenacity of the man to whom he gave it.  The messenger found Massena
+seated on a heap of rubbish, his eyes bloodshot, his frame weakened by
+his unparalleled exertions during a contest of forty hours, and his
+whole appearance indicating a physical state better befitting the
+hospital than the field.  But that steadfast soul seemed altogether
+unaffected by bodily prostration; half dead as he was with fatigue, he
+rose painfully and said, 'Tell the Emperor that I will hold out for two
+hours.'  And he kept his word."
+
+"Often defeated in battle," said Macaulay of Alexander the Great, "he
+was always successful in war."  He might have said the same of
+Washington, and, with appropriate changes, of all who win great
+triumphs of any kind.
+
+In the battle of Marengo, the Austrians considered the day won.  The
+French army was inferior in numbers, and had given way.  The Austrian
+army extended its wings on the right and on the left, to follow up the
+French.  Then, though the French themselves thought the battle lost,
+and the Austrians were confident it was won, Napoleon gave the command
+to charge; and, the trumpet's blast being given, the Old Guard charged
+down into the weakened centre of the enemy, cut it in two, rolled the
+two wings up on either side, and the battle was won for France.
+
+"Never despair," says Burke, "but if you do, work on in despair."
+
+Once when Marshal Ney was going into battle, looking down at his knees
+which were smiting together, he said, "You may well shake; you would
+shake worse yet if you knew where I am going to take you."
+
+It is victory after victory with the soldier, lesson after lesson with
+the scholar, blow after blow with the laborer, crop after crop with the
+farmer, picture after picture with the painter, and mile after mile
+with the traveler, that secures what all so much desire--SUCCESS.
+
+A promising Harvard student was stricken with paralysis of both legs.
+Physicians said there was no hope for him.  The lad determined to
+continue his college studies.  The examiners heard him at his bedside,
+and in four years he took his degree.  He resolved to make a critical
+study of Dante, to do which he had to learn Italian and German.  He
+persevered in spite of repeated attacks of illness and partial loss of
+sight.  He was competing for the university prize.  Think of the
+paralytic lad, helpless in bed, competing for a prize, fighting death
+inch by inch.  What a lesson!  Before his book was published or the
+prize awarded, the brave student died, but the book was successful.  He
+meant that his life should not be a burden or a failure, and he was not
+only graduated from the best college in America, but competed
+successfully for the university prize, and made a valuable contribution
+to literature.
+
+Professor L. T. Townsend, the famous author of "Credo," is another
+triumph of grit over environment.  He had a hard struggle as a boy, but
+succeeded in working his way through Amherst College, living on
+forty-five cents a week.
+
+Orange Judd was a remarkable example of success through grit.  He
+earned corn by working for farmers, carried it on his back to mill,
+brought back the meal to his room, cooked it himself, milked cows for
+his pint of milk per day, and lived on mush and milk for months
+together.  He worked his way through Wesleyan University, and took a
+three years' post-graduate course at Yale.
+
+Congressman William W. Crapo, while working his way through college,
+being too poor to buy a dictionary, actually copied one, walking from
+his home in the village of Dartmouth, Mass., to New Bedford to
+replenish his store of words and definitions from the town library.
+
+Oh, the triumphs of this indomitable spirit of the conqueror!  This it
+was that enabled Franklin to dine on a small loaf in the
+printing-office with a book in his hand.  It helped Locke to live on
+bread and water in a Dutch garret.  It enabled Gideon Lee to go
+barefoot in the snow, half starved and thinly clad.  It sustained
+Lincoln and Garfield on their hard journeys from the log cabin to the
+White House.
+
+President Chadbourne put grit in place of his lost lung, and worked
+thirty-five years after his funeral had been planned.
+
+Lord Cavanagh put grit in the place of arms and legs, and went to
+Parliament in spite of his deformity.
+
+Henry Fawcett put grit in place of eyesight, and became the greatest
+Postmaster-General England ever had.
+
+Prescott also put grit in place of eyesight, and became one of
+America's greatest historians.  Francis Parkman put grit in place of
+health and eyesight, and became the greatest historian of America in
+his line.  Thousands of men have put grit in place of health, eyes,
+ears, hands, legs, and yet have achieved marvelous success.  Indeed,
+most of the great things of the world have been accomplished by grit
+and pluck.  You cannot keep a man down who has these qualities.  He
+will make stepping-stones out of his stumbling-blocks, and lift himself
+to success.
+
+At fifty, Barnum was a ruined man, owing thousands more than he
+possessed, yet he resolutely resumed business once more, fairly
+wringing success from adverse fortune, and paying his notes at the same
+time.  Again and again he was ruined, but phoenix-like, he rose
+repeatedly from the ashes of his misfortune each time more determined
+than before.
+
+It was the last three days of the first voyage of Columbus that told.
+All his years of struggle and study would have availed nothing if he
+had yielded to the mutiny.  It was all in those three days.  But what
+days!
+
+"It is all very well," said Charles J. Fox, "to tell me that a young
+man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech.  He may go
+on, or he may be satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young
+man who has not succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on, and I
+will back that young man to do better than most of those who have
+succeeded at the first trial."
+
+Cobden broke down completely the first time he appeared on a platform
+in Manchester, and the chairman apologized for him.  But he did not
+give up speaking till every poor man in England had a larger, better,
+and cheaper loaf.
+
+See young Disraeli, sprung from a hated and persecuted race; without
+opportunity, pushing his way up through the middle classes, up through
+the upper classes, until he stands self-poised upon the topmost round
+of political and social power.  Scoffed, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed
+from the House of Commons, he simply says, "The time will come when you
+will hear me."  The time did come, and the boy with no chance swayed
+the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.
+
+One of the most remarkable examples in history is Disraeli, forcing his
+leadership upon that very party whose prejudices were deepest against
+his race, and which had an utter contempt for self-made men and
+interlopers.  Imagine England's surprise when she awoke to find this
+insignificant Hebrew actually Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was
+easily master of all the tortures supplied by the armory of rhetoric;
+he could exhaust the resources of the bitterest invective; he could
+sting Gladstone out of his self-control; he was absolute master of
+himself and his situation.  You can see that this young man intends to
+make his way in the world.  A determined audacity is in his very face.
+He is a gay fop.  Handsome, with the hated Hebrew blood in his veins,
+after three defeats in parliamentary elections he was not the least
+daunted, for he knew his day would come, as it did.  Lord Melbourne,
+the great Prime Minister, when this gay young fop was introduced to
+him, asked him what he wished to be.  "Prime Minister of England," was
+his audacious reply.
+
+One of the greatest preachers of modern times, Lacordaire, failed again
+and again.  Everybody said he would never make a preacher, but he was
+determined to succeed, and in two years from his humiliating failures
+he was preaching in Notre Dame to immense congregations.
+
+The boy Thorwaldsen, whose father died in the poor-house, and whose
+education was so scanty that he had to write his letters over many
+times before they could be posted, by his indomitable perseverance,
+tenacity, and grit, fascinated the world with the genius which neither
+his discouraging father, poverty, nor hardship could suppress.
+
+William H. Seward was given a thousand dollars by his father to go to
+college with; this was all he was to have.  The son returned at the end
+of the freshman year with extravagant habits and no money.  His father
+refused to give him more, and told him he could not stay at home.  When
+the youth found the props all taken out from under him, and that he
+must now sink or swim, he left home moneyless, returned to college,
+graduated at the head of his class, studied law, was elected Governor
+of New York, and became Lincoln's great Secretary of State during the
+Civil War.
+
+Louisa M. Alcott wrote the conclusion to "An Old-Fashioned Girl" with
+her left hand in a sling, one foot up, head aching, and no voice.  She
+proudly writes in her diary, "Twenty years ago I resolved to make the
+family independent if I could.  At forty, that is done.  Debts all
+paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable.  It
+has cost me my health, perhaps."  She earned two hundred thousand
+dollars by her pen.
+
+Mrs. Frank Leslie often refers to the time she lived in her carpetless
+attic while striving to pay her husband's obligations.  She has fought
+her way successfully through nine lawsuits, and has paid the entire
+debt.  She manages her ten publications entirely herself, signs all
+checks and money-orders, makes all contracts, looks over all proofs,
+and approves the make-up of everything before it goes to press.  She
+has developed great business ability, which no one dreamed she
+possessed.
+
+Garfield said, "If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the
+best possible substitute for it."  The triumph of industry and grit
+over low birth and iron fortune in America, this land of opportunity,
+ought to be sufficient to put to shame all grumblers over their hard
+fortune and those who attempt to excuse aimless, shiftless, successless
+men because they have no chance.
+
+The fear of ridicule and the dread of humiliation often hinder one from
+taking decisive steps when it is plainly a duty, so that courage is a
+very important element of decision.  In a New England academy a pupil
+who was engaged to assist the teacher was unable to solve a problem in
+algebra.  The class was approaching the problem, and he was mortified
+because, after many trials, he was obliged to take it to the teacher
+for solution.  The teacher returned it unsolved.  What could he do?  He
+would not confess to the class that he could not solve it, so, after
+many futile attempts, he went to a distant town to seek the assistance
+of a friend who, he believed, could do the work.  But, alas! his friend
+had gone away, and would not be back for a week.  On his way back he
+said to himself, "What a fool! am I unable to perform a problem in
+algebra, and shall I go back to my class and confess my ignorance?  I
+can solve it and I will."  He shut himself in his room, determined not
+to sleep until he had mastered the problem, and finally he won success.
+Underneath the solution he wrote, "Obtained Monday evening, September
+2, at half past eleven o'clock, after more than a dozen trials that
+have consumed more than twenty hours of time."
+
+During a winter in the war of 1812, General Jackson's troops,
+unprovided for and starving, became mutinous and were going home.  But
+the general set the example of living on acorns; then rode before the
+rebellious line and threatened with death the first mutineer that
+should try to leave.
+
+The race is not always to the swift, the battle is not always to the
+strong.  Horses are sometimes weighted or hampered in the race, and
+this is taken into account in the result.  So in the race of life the
+distance alone does not determine the prize.  We must take into
+consideration the hindrances, the weights we have carried, the
+disadvantages of education, of breeding, of training, of surroundings,
+of circumstances.  How many young men are weighted down with debt, with
+poverty, with the support of invalid parents or brothers and sisters,
+or friends?  How many are fettered with ignorance, hampered by
+inhospitable surroundings, with the opposition of parents who do not
+understand them?  How many a round boy is hindered in the race by being
+forced into a square hole?  How many are delayed in their course
+because nobody believes in them, because nobody encourages them,
+because they get no sympathy and are forever tortured for not doing
+that against which every fibre of their being protests, and every drop
+of their blood rebels?  How many have to feel their way to the goal,
+through the blindness of ignorance and lack of experience?  How many go
+bungling along from the lack of early discipline and drill in the
+vocation they have chosen?  How many have to hobble along on crutches
+because they were never taught to help themselves, but to lean upon a
+father's wealth or a mother's indulgence?  How many are weakened for
+the journey of life by self-indulgence, by dissipation, by
+"life-sappers;" how many are crippled by disease, by a weak
+constitution, by impaired eyesight or hearing?
+
+When the prizes of life shall be awarded by the Supreme Judge, who
+knows our weaknesses and frailties, the distance we have run, the
+weights we have carried, the handicaps, will all be taken into account.
+Not the distance we have run, but the obstacles we have overcome, the
+disadvantages under which we have made the race, will decide the
+prizes.  The poor wretch who has plodded along against unknown
+temptations, the poor woman who has buried her sorrows in her silent
+heart and sewed her weary way through life, those who have suffered
+abuse in silence, and who have been unrecognized or despised by their
+fellow-runners, will often receive the greater prize.
+
+  "The wise and active conquer difficulties,
+  By daring to attempt them: sloth and folly
+  Shiver and sink at sight of toil and hazard,
+  And make the impossibility they fear."
+
+  Tumble me down, and I will sit
+  Upon my ruins, smiling yet:
+  Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be
+  Patient in my necessity:
+  Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
+  Me as a fear'd infection:
+  Yet scare-crow like I'll walk, as one
+  Neglecting thy derision.
+        ROBERT HERRICK.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE GRANDEST THING IN THE WORLD.
+
+"One ruddy drop of manly blood the surging sea outweighs."
+
+"Manhood overtops all titles."
+
+The truest test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of
+cities, nor the crops; no, but the kind of man the country turns
+out.--EMERSON.
+
+Hew the block off, and get out the man.--POPE.
+
+Eternity alone will reveal to the human race its debt of gratitude to the
+peerless and immortal name of Washington.--JAMES A. GARFIELD.
+
+  Better not be at all
+  Than not be noble.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+  Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
+  In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
+  Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
+        LOWELL.
+
+  Virtue alone out-builds the pyramids:
+  Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall.
+        YOUNG.
+
+  Were one so tall to touch the pole,
+    Or grasp creation in his span,
+  He must be measured by his soul,
+    The mind's the measure of the man.
+        WATTS.
+
+  We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
+    In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
+  We should count time by heart-throbs.  He most lives
+    Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
+        BAILEY.
+
+  "Good name in man or woman
+  Is the immediate jewel of their souls."
+
+But this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to
+exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in my grave.--EMERSON.
+
+
+A Moor was walking in his garden when a Spanish cavalier suddenly fell at
+his feet, pleading for concealment from pursuers who sought his life in
+revenge for the killing of a Moorish gentleman.  The Moor promised aid,
+and locked his visitor in a summer-house until night should afford
+opportunity for his escape.  Not long after the dead body of his son was
+brought home, and from the description given he knew the Spaniard was the
+murderer.  He concealed his horror, however, and at midnight unlocked the
+summer-house, saying, "Christian, the youth whom you have murdered was my
+only son.  Your crime deserves the severest punishment.  But I have
+solemnly pledged my word not to betray you, and I disdain to violate a
+rash engagement even with a cruel enemy."  Then, saddling one of his
+fleetest mules, he said, "Flee while the darkness of night conceals you.
+Your hands are polluted with blood; but God is just; and I humbly thank
+Him that my faith is unspotted, and that I have resigned judgment to Him."
+
+[Illustration: John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)]
+
+Character never dies.  As Longfellow says:--
+
+  "Were a star quenched on high,
+    For ages would its light,
+  Still traveling downward from the sky,
+    Shine on our mortal sight.
+
+  "So when a great man dies,
+    For years beyond our ken,
+  The light he leaves behind him lies
+    Upon the paths of men."
+
+
+The character of Socrates was mightier than the hemlock, and banished the
+fear and sting of death.
+
+Who can estimate the power of a well-lived life?  _Character is power_.
+Hang this motto in every school in the land, in every home, in every
+youth's room.  Mothers, engrave it on every child's heart.
+
+You cannot destroy one single atom of a Garrison, even though he were
+hanged.  The mighty force of martyrs to truth lives; the candle burns
+more brilliantly than before it was snuffed.  "No varnish or veneer of
+scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic or rhetoric, can ever make
+you a positive force in the world;" but your character can.
+
+When the statue of George Peabody, erected in one of the thoroughfares of
+London, was unveiled, the sculptor Story was asked to speak.  Twice he
+touched the statue with his hand, and said, "That is my speech.  That is
+my speech."  What could be more eloquent?  Character needs no
+recommendation.  It pleads its own cause.
+
+"Show me," said Omar the Caliph to Amru the warrior, "the sword with
+which you have fought so many battles and slain so many infidels."  "Ah!"
+replied Amru, "the sword without the arm of the master is no sharper nor
+heavier than the sword of Farezdak the poet."  So one hundred and fifty
+pounds of flesh and blood without character is of no great value.
+
+Napoleon was so much impressed with the courage and resources of Marshal
+Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I
+would give them all for Ney."
+
+In Agra, India, stands the Taj Mahal, the acme of Oriental architecture,
+said to be the most beautiful building in the world.  It was planned as a
+mausoleum for the favorite wife of Shah Jehan.  When the latter was
+deposed by his son Aurungzebe, his daughter Jahanara chose to share his
+captivity and poverty rather than the guilty glory of her brother.  On
+her tomb in Delhi were cut her dying words: "Let no rich coverlet adorn
+my grave; this grass is the best covering for the tomb of the poor in
+spirit, the humble, the transitory Jahanara, the disciple of the holy men
+of Christ, the daughter of the Emperor Shah Jehan."  Travelers who visit
+the magnificent Taj linger long by the grass-green sarcophagus in Delhi,
+but give only passing notice to the beautiful Jamma Masjid, a mausoleum
+afterwards erected in her honor.
+
+Some writer has well said that David of the throne we cannot always
+recall with pleasure, but David of the Psalms we never forget.  The
+strong, sweet faith of the latter streams like sunlight through even the
+closed windows of the soul, long after the wearied eye has turned with
+disgust from all the gilded pomp and pride of the former.
+
+Robertson says that when you have got to the lowest depths of your heart,
+you will find there not the mere desire of happiness, but a craving as
+natural to us as the desire for food,--the craving for nobler, higher
+life.
+
+"Private Benjamin Owen, ---- Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, was found
+asleep at his post while on picket duty last night.  The court-martial
+has sentenced him to be shot in twenty-four hours, as the offense
+occurred at a critical time."  "I thought when I gave Bennie to his
+country," said farmer Owen as he read the above telegram with dimming
+eyes, "that no other father in all this broad laud made so precious a
+gift.  He only slept a minute,--just one little minute,--at his post, I
+know that was all, for Bennie never dozed over a duty.  How prompt and
+trustworthy he was!  He was as tall as I, and only eighteen! and now they
+shoot him because he was found asleep when doing sentinel duty!"  Just
+then Bennie's little sister Blossom answered a tap at the door, and
+returned with a letter.  "It is from him," was all she said.
+
+
+DEAR FATHER,--For sleeping on sentinel duty I am to be shot.  At first,
+it seemed awful to me; but I have thought about it so much now that it
+has no terror.  They say that they will not bind me, nor blind me; but
+that I may meet my death like a man.  I thought, father, that it might
+have been on the battlefield, for my country, and that, when I fell, it
+would be fighting gloriously; but to be shot down like a dog for nearly
+betraying it,--to die for neglect of duty!  Oh, father, I wonder the very
+thought does not kill me!  But I shall not disgrace you.  I am going to
+write you all about it; and when I am gone, you may tell my comrades; I
+cannot now.
+
+You know I promised Jemmie Carr's mother I would look after her boy; and,
+when he fell sick, I did all I could for him.  He was not strong when he
+was ordered back into the ranks, and the day before that night I carried
+all his baggage, besides my own, on our march.  Toward night we went in
+on double-quick, and the baggage began to feel very heavy.  Everybody was
+tired; and as for Jemmie, if I had not lent him an arm now and then, he
+would have dropped by the way.  I was all tired out when we came into
+camp; and then it was Jemmie's turn to be sentry, and I could take his
+place; but I was too tired, father.  I could not have kept awake if a gun
+had been pointed at my head; but I did not know it until,--well, until it
+was too late.
+
+They tell me to-day that I have a short reprieve,--given to me by
+circumstances,--"time to write to you," our good colonel says.  Forgive
+him, father, he only does his duty; he would gladly save me if he could;
+and do not lay my death up against Jemmie.  The poor boy is
+broken-hearted, and does nothing but beg and entreat them to let him die
+in my stead.  I can't bear to think of mother and Blossom.  Comfort them,
+father!  Tell them I die as a brave boy should, and that, when the war is
+over, they will not be ashamed of me, as they must be now.  God help me:
+it is very hard to bear!  Good-by, father.  To-night, in the early
+twilight, I shall see the cows all coming home from pasture, and precious
+little Blossom standing on the back stoop, waiting for me,--but I shall
+never, never come!  God bless you all!
+
+
+"God be thanked!" said Mr. Owen reverently; "I knew Bennie was not the
+boy to sleep carelessly."
+
+Late that night a little figure glided out of the house and down the
+path.  Two hours later the conductor of the southward mail lifted her
+into a car at Mill Depot.  Next morning she was in New York, and the next
+she was admitted to the White House at Washington.  "Well, my child,"
+said the President in pleasant, cheerful tones, "what do you want so
+bright and early this morning?"  "Bennie's life, please, sir," faltered
+Blossom.  "Bennie?  Who is Bennie?" asked Mr. Lincoln.  "My brother, sir.
+They are going to shoot him for sleeping at his post," said the little
+girl.  "I remember," said the President; "it was a fatal sleep.  You see,
+child, it was a time of special danger.  Thousands of lives might have
+been lost through his culpable negligence."  "So my father said; but poor
+Bennie was so tired, sir, and Jemmie so weak.  He did the work of two,
+sir, and it was Jemmie's night, not his; but Jemmie was too tired, and
+Bennie never thought about himself,--that he was tired, too."  "What is
+that you say, child?  Come here; I do not understand."  He read Bennie's
+letter to his father, which Blossom held out, wrote a few lines, rang his
+bell, and said to the messenger who appeared, "Send this dispatch at
+once."  Then, turning to Blossom, he continued: "Go home, my child, and
+tell that father of yours, who could approve his country's sentence, even
+when it took the life of a child like that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks
+the life far too precious to be lost.  Go back, or--wait until to-morrow;
+Bennie will need a change after he has so bravely faced death, he shall
+go with you."  "God bless you, sir," said Blossom.  _Not all the queens
+are crowned._
+
+Two days later, when the young soldier came with his sister to thank the
+President, Mr. Lincoln fastened the strap of a lieutenant upon his
+shoulder, saying, "The soldier that could carry a sick comrade's baggage,
+and die for the act without complaining, deserves well of his country."
+
+When telegrams poured in announcing terrible carnage upon battlefields in
+our late war, and when President Lincoln's heart-strings were nearly
+broken over the cruel treatment of our prisoners at Andersonville, Belle
+Isle, and Libby Prison, he never once departed from his famous motto,
+"With malice toward none, with charity for all."  When it was reported
+that among those returned at Baltimore from Southern prisons, not one in
+ten could stand alone from hunger and neglect, and many were so eaten and
+covered by vermin as to resemble those pitted by smallpox, and so
+emaciated that they were living skeletons, not even these reports could
+move the great President to retaliate in kind upon the Southern prisoners.
+
+Among the slain on the battlefield at Fredericksburg was the body of a
+youth upon which was found next the heart a photograph of Lincoln.  Upon
+the back of it were these words: "God bless President Lincoln."  The
+youth had been sentenced to death for sleeping at his post, but had been
+pardoned by the President.
+
+David Dudley Field said he considered Lincoln the greatest man of his
+day.  Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others were great, each in one way, but
+Lincoln was great in many ways.  There seemed to be hidden springs of
+greatness in this man that would gush forth in the most unexpected way.
+The men about him were at a loss to name the order of his genius.  Horace
+Greeley was almost as many-sided, but was a wonderful combination of
+goodness and weakness, while Lincoln seemed strong in every way.  After
+Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "The promise
+must now be kept; I shall never recall one word."
+
+Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, bears the following testimony to the
+influence for good which Gladstone, when a school-fellow at Eton,
+exercised upon him.  "I was a thoroughly idle boy; but I was saved from
+worse things by getting to know Gladstone."  At Oxford we are told the
+effect of his example was so strong that men who followed him there ten
+years later declare "that undergraduates drank less in the forties
+because Gladstone had been so courageously abstemious in the thirties."
+
+The Rev. John Newton said, "I see in this world two heaps of human
+happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one
+heap and add it to the other, I carry a point; if as I go home a child
+has dropped a half-penny, and by giving it another I can wipe away its
+tears, I feel I have done something."
+
+A holy hermit, who had lived for six years in a cave of the Thebaid,
+fasting, praying, and performing severe penances, spending his whole life
+in trying to make himself of some account with God, that he might be sure
+of a seat in Paradise, prayed to be shown some saint greater than
+himself, in order that he might pattern after him to reach still greater
+heights of holiness.  The same night an angel came to him and said, "If
+thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanctity, strive to imitate a
+certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."  The
+hermit, much chagrined, sought the minstrel and asked him how he had
+managed to make himself so acceptable to God.  The minstrel hung down his
+head and replied, "Do not mock me, holy father; I have performed no good
+works, and I am not worthy to pray.  I only go from door to door to amuse
+people with my viol and my flute."  The hermit insisted that he must have
+done some good deeds.  The minstrel replied, "Nay, I know of nothing good
+that I have done."  "But how hast thou become a beggar?  Hast thou spent
+thy substance in riotous living?"  "Nay, not so," replied the minstrel.
+"I met a poor woman running hither and thither, distracted, because her
+husband and children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt.  I took
+her home and protected her from certain sons of Belial, for she was very
+beautiful.  I gave her all I possessed to redeem her family and returned
+her to her husband and children.  Is there any man who would not have
+done the same?"   The hermit shed tears, and said in all his life he had
+not done as much as the poor minstrel.
+
+"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor
+than silver or gold."
+
+A gentleman, traveling through West Virginia, went to a house, and
+procured food for himself and companion and their horses.  He wanted to
+make payment, but the woman was ashamed to take pay for a mere act of
+kindness.  He pressed the money upon her.  Finally she said, "If you
+don't think I'm mean, I'll take one quarter of a dollar from you, so as
+to look at it now and then, for there has been no money in this house for
+a year."
+
+Do not take the world's estimate of success.  The real height of the
+Washington Monument is not measured between the capstone and the earth,
+but includes the fifty feet of solid masonry below.  Many of the most
+successful lives are like the rivers of India which run under ground,
+unseen and unheard by the millions who tread above them.  But have these
+rivers therefore no influence?  Ask the rich harvest fields if they feel
+the flowing water beneath.  The greatest worth is never measured.  It is
+only the nearest stars whose distances we compute.  That life whose
+influence can be measured by the world's tape-line of dollars and corn is
+not worth the measuring.
+
+All the forces in nature that are the most powerful are the quietest.  We
+speak of the rolling thunder as powerful; but gravitation, which makes no
+noise, yet keeps orbs in their orbits, and the whole system in harmony,
+binding every atom in each planet to the great centre of all attraction,
+is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful.  We say the
+bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into
+splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half
+so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that
+we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable speed, strikes and
+yet is not felt, but exercises an influence so great that the earth is
+clothed with verdure through its influence, and all nature beautified and
+blessed by its ceaseless action.  The things that make no noise, make no
+pretension, may be really the strongest.  The most conclusive logic that
+a preacher uses in the pulpit will never exercise the influence that the
+consistent piety of character will exercise over all the earth.
+
+The old Sicilian story relates how Pythias, condemned to death through
+the hasty anger of Dionysius of Syracuse, asked that he might go to his
+native Greece, and arrange his affairs, promising to return before the
+time appointed for his execution.  The tyrant laughed his request to
+scorn, saying that when he was once safe out of Sicily no one would
+answer for his reappearance.  At this juncture, Damon, a friend of the
+doomed man, offered to become surety for him, and to die in his stead if
+he did not come back in time.  Dionysius was surprised, but accepted the
+proposition.  When the fatal day came, Pythias had not reached Syracuse,
+but Damon remained firm in his faith that his friend would not fail him.
+At the very last hour Pythias appeared and announced himself ready to
+die.  But such touching loyalty moved even the iron heart of Dionysius;
+accordingly he ordered both to be spared, and asked to be allowed to make
+a third partner in such a noble friendship.  It is a grander thing to be
+nobly remembered than to be nobly born.
+
+When Attila, flushed with conquest, appeared with his barbarian horde
+before the gates of Rome in 452, Pope Leo alone of all the people dared
+go forth and try to turn his wrath aside.  A single magistrate followed
+him.  The Huns were awed by the fearless majesty of the unarmed old man,
+and led him before their chief, whose respect was so great that he agreed
+not to enter the city, provided a tribute should be paid to him.
+
+Blackie thinks there is no kind of a sermon so effective as the example
+of a great man, where we see the thing done before us,--actually
+done,--the thing of which we were not even dreaming.
+
+It was said that when Washington led the American forces as commanding
+officer, it "doubled the strength of the army."
+
+When General Lee was in conversation with one of his officers in regard
+to a movement of his army, a plain farmer's boy overheard the general's
+remark that he had decided to march upon Gettysburg instead of
+Harrisburg.  The boy telegraphed this fact to Governor Curtin.  A special
+engine was sent for the boy.  "I would give my right hand," said the
+governor, "to know if this boy tells the truth."  A corporal replied,
+"Governor, I know that boy; it is impossible for him to lie; there is not
+a drop of false blood in his veins."  In fifteen minutes the Union troops
+were marching to Gettysburg, where they gained a victory.  Character is
+power.  The great thing is to be a man, to have a high purpose, a noble
+aim, to be dead in earnest, to yearn for the good and the true.
+
+"Your lordships," said Wellington in Parliament, "must all feel the high
+and honorable character of the late Sir Robert Peel.  I was long
+connected with him in public life.  We were both in the councils of our
+sovereign together, and I had long the honor to enjoy his private
+friendship.  In all the course of my acquaintance with him, I never knew
+a man in whose truth and justice I had greater confidence, or in whom I
+saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service.  In the whole
+course of my communication with him, I never knew an instance in which he
+did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the
+whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated
+anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact."
+
+"The Secretary stood alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt.  "Modern
+degeneracy had not reached him.  Original and unaccommodating, the
+features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity.  His august
+mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so
+impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be
+relieved from his superiority.  No state chicanery, no narrow system of
+vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but,
+overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his
+ambition, fame.  A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, so
+authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the
+name of Pitt through all the classes of venality.  Corruption imagined,
+indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of
+the inconsistency of his policy, and much of the ruin of his victories;
+but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answered
+and refuted her.  Upon the whole, there was in this man something that
+could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+eloquence to summon mankind to united exertion, or to break the bonds of
+slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded
+authority; something that could establish or overwhelm an empire, and
+strike a blow in the world that would resound through the universe."
+
+Pitt was Paymaster-General for George II.  When a subsidy was voted a
+foreign office, it was customary for the office to claim one half per
+cent. for honorarium.  Pitt astonished the King of Sardinia by sending
+him the sum without any deduction, and further astonished him by refusing
+a present as a compliment to his integrity.  He was a poor man.
+
+Washington would take no pay as commander-in-chief of the Continental
+armies.  He would keep a strict account of his expenses; and these, he
+doubted not, would be discharged.
+
+Remember, the main business of life is not to do, but to become; an
+action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.
+
+In 1837, after George Peabody moved to London, there came a commercial
+crisis in the United States.  Many banks suspended specie payments.  Many
+mercantile houses went to the wall, and thousands more were in great
+distress.  Edward Everett said, "The great sympathetic nerve of the
+commercial world, credit, as far as the United States were concerned, was
+for the time paralyzed."  Probably not a half dozen men in Europe would
+have been listened to for a moment in the Bank of England upon the
+subject of American securities, but George Peabody was one of them.  His
+name was already a tower of strength in the commercial world.  In those
+dark days his integrity stood four-square in every business panic.
+Peabody retrieved the credit of the State of Maryland, and, it might
+almost be said, of the United States.  His character was the magic wand
+which in many a case changed almost worthless paper into gold.  Merchants
+on both sides of the Atlantic procured large advances from him, even
+before the goods consigned to him had been sold.
+
+Thackeray says, "Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's
+faces which is honored wherever presented.  You cannot help trusting such
+men; their very presence gives confidence.  There is a 'promise to pay'
+in their very faces which gives confidence, and you prefer it to another
+man's indorsement."  _Character is credit._
+
+With most people, as with most nations, "things are worth what they will
+sell for," and the dollar is mightier than the sword.  As good as gold
+has become a proverb--as though it were the highest standard of
+comparison.
+
+Themistocles, having conceived the design of transferring the government
+of Greece from the hands of the Lacedaemonians into those of the
+Athenians, kept his thoughts continually fixed on this great project.
+Being at no time very nice or scrupulous in the choice of his measures,
+he thought anything which could tend to the accomplishment of the end he
+had in view just and lawful.  Accordingly in an assembly of the people
+one day, he intimated that he had a very important design to propose; but
+he could not communicate it to the public at large, because the greatest
+secrecy was necessary to its success, and he therefore desired that they
+would appoint a person to whom he might explain himself on the subject.
+Aristides was unanimously selected by the assembly, which deferred
+entirely to his opinion.  Themistocles, taking him aside, told him that
+the design he had conceived was to burn the fleet belonging to the rest
+of the Grecian states, which then lay in a neighboring port, when Athens
+would assuredly become mistress of all Greece.  Aristides returned to the
+assembly, and declared to them that nothing could be more advantageous to
+the commonwealth than the project of Themistocles, but that, at the same
+time, nothing in the world could be more unfair.  The assembly
+unanimously declared that, since such was the case, Themistocles should
+wholly abandon his project.
+
+A tragedy by Aeschylus was once represented before the Athenians, in
+which it was said of one of the characters, "that he cared not more to be
+just than to appear so."  At these words all eyes were instantly turned
+upon Aristides as the man who, of all the Greeks, most merited that
+distinguished reputation.  Ever after he received, by universal consent,
+the surname of the Just,--a title, says Plutarch, truly royal, or rather
+truly divine.  This remarkable distinction roused envy, and envy
+prevailed so far as to procure his banishment for years, upon the unjust
+suspicion that his influence with the people was dangerous to their
+freedom.  When the sentence was passed by his countrymen, Aristides
+himself was present in the midst of them, and a stranger who stood near,
+and could not write, applied to him to write for him on his shell-ballot.
+"What name?" asked the philosopher.  "Aristides," replied the stranger.
+
+"Do you know him, then?" said Aristides, "or has he in any way injured
+you?"  "Neither," said the other, "but it is for this very thing I would
+he were condemned.  I can go nowhere but I hear of Aristides the Just."
+Aristides inquired no further, but took the shell, and wrote his name on
+it as desired.  The absence of Aristides soon dissipated the
+apprehensions which his countrymen had so idly indulged.  He was in a
+short time recalled, and for many years after took a leading part in the
+affairs of the republic, without showing the least resentment against his
+enemies, or seeking any other gratification than that of serving his
+countrymen with fidelity and honor.  The virtues of Aristides did not
+pass without reward.  He had two daughters, who were educated at the
+expense of the state, and to whom portions were allotted from the public
+treasury.
+
+The strongest proof, however, of the justice and integrity of Aristides
+is, that notwithstanding he had possessed the highest employments in the
+republic, and had the absolute disposal of its treasures, yet he died so
+poor as not to leave money enough to defray the expenses of his funeral.
+
+Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong;
+they, and not the police, guarantee the execution of the laws.  Their
+influence is the bulwark of good government.
+
+It was said of the first Emperor Alexander of Russia, that his personal
+character was equivalent to a constitution.  Of Montaigne, it was said
+that his high reputation for integrity was a better protection for him
+than a regiment of horse would have been, he being the only man among the
+French gentry who, during the wars of the Fronde, kept his castle gates
+unbarred.  There are men, fortunately for the world, who would rather be
+right than be President.
+
+Fisher Ames, while in Congress, said of Roger Sherman, of Connecticut:
+"If I am absent during a discussion of a subject, and consequently know
+not on which side to vote, when I return I always look at Roger Sherman,
+for I am sure if I vote with him, I shall vote right."
+
+Character gravitates upward, as with a celestial gravitation, while mere
+genius, without character, gravitates downward.  How often we see in
+school or college young men, who are apparently dull and even stupid,
+rise gradually and surely above others who are without character, merely
+because the former have an upward tendency in their lives, a reaching-up
+principle, which gradually but surely unfolds, and elevates them to
+positions of honor and trust.  There is something which everybody admires
+in an aspiring soul, one whose tendency is upward and onward, in spite of
+hindrances and in defiance of obstacles.
+
+We may try to stifle the voice of the mysterious angel within, but it
+always says "yes" to right actions and "no" to wrong ones.  No matter
+whether we heed it or not, no power can change its decision one iota.
+Through health, through disease, through prosperity and adversity, this
+faithful servant stands behind us in the shadow of ourselves, never
+intruding, but weighing every act we perform, every word we utter,
+pronouncing the verdict "right" or "wrong."
+
+Francis Horner, of England, was a man of whom Sydney Smith said, that
+"the ten commandments were stamped upon his forehead."  The valuable and
+peculiar light in which Horner's history is calculated to inspire every
+right-minded youth is this: he died at the age of thirty-eight, possessed
+of greater influence than any other private man, and admired, beloved,
+trusted, and deplored by all except the heartless and the base.  No
+greater homage was ever paid in Parliament to any deceased member.  How
+was this attained?  By rank?  He was the son of an Edinburgh merchant.
+By wealth?  Neither he nor any of his relatives ever had a superfluous
+sixpence.  By office?  He held but one, and that for only a few years, of
+no influence, and with very little pay.  By talents?  His were not
+splendid, and he had no genius.  Cautious and slow, his only ambition was
+to be right.  By eloquence?  He spoke in calm, good taste, without any of
+the oratory that either terrifies or seduces.  By any fascination of
+manner?  His was only correct and agreeable.  By what was it, then?
+Merely by sense, industry, good principles and a good heart, qualities
+which no well constituted mind need ever despair of attaining.  It was
+the force of his character that raised him; and this character was not
+impressed on him by nature, but formed, out of no peculiarly fine
+elements, by himself.  There were many in the House of Commons of far
+greater ability and eloquence.  But no one surpassed him in the
+combination of an adequate portion of these with moral worth.  Horner was
+born to show what moderate powers, unaided by anything whatever except
+culture and goodness, may achieve, even when these powers are displayed
+amidst the competition and jealousies of public life.
+
+"When it was reported in Paris that the great Napoleon was dead, I passed
+the Palais Royal," says a French writer, "where a public crier called,
+'Here's your account of the death of Bonaparte.'  This cry which once
+would have appalled all Europe fell perfectly flat.  I entered," he adds,
+"several cafes, and found the same indifference,--coldness everywhere; no
+one seemed interested or troubled.  This man, who had conquered Europe
+and awed the world, had inspired neither the love nor the admiration of
+even his own countrymen.  He had impressed the world with his
+marvelousness, and had inspired astonishment but not love."
+
+Emerson says that Napoleon did all that in him lay to live and thrive
+without moral principle.  It was the nature of things, the eternal law of
+man and of the world, which balked and ruined him; and the result, in a
+million attempts of this kind, will be the same.  His was an experiment,
+under the most favorable conditions, to test the powers of intellect
+without conscience.  Never elsewhere was such a leader so endowed, and so
+weaponed; never has another leader found such aids and followers.  And
+what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense
+armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men,
+of this demoralized Europe?  He left France smaller, poorer, feebler than
+he found her.
+
+A hundred years hence what difference will it make whether you were rich
+or poor, a peer or a peasant?  But what difference may it not make
+whether you did what was right or what was wrong?
+
+"The 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said George William Curtis, "was sold,
+through Dr. Johnson's mediation, for sixty pounds; and ten years after,
+the author died.  With what love do we hang over its pages!  What springs
+of feeling it has opened!  Goldsmith's books are influences and friends
+forever, yet the five thousandth copy was never announced, and Oliver
+Goldsmith, M. D., often wanted a dinner!  Horace Walpole, the coxcomb of
+literature, smiled at him contemptuously from his gilded carriage.
+Goldsmith struggled cheerfully with his adverse fate, and died.  But then
+sad mourners, whom he had aided in their affliction, gathered around his
+bed, and a lady of distinction, whom he had only dared to admire at a
+distance, came and cut a lock of his hair for remembrance.  When I see
+Goldsmith, thus carrying his heart in his hand like a palm branch, I look
+on him as a successful man, whom adversity could not bring down from the
+level of his lofty nature."
+
+Dr. Maudsley tells us that the aims which chiefly predominate--riches,
+position, power, applause of men--are such as inevitably breed and foster
+many bad passions in the eager competition to attain them.  Hence, in
+fact, come disappointed ambition, jealousy, grief from loss of fortune,
+all the torments of wounded self-love, and a thousand other mental
+sufferings,--the commonly enumerated moral causes of insanity.  They are
+griefs of a kind to which a rightly developed nature should not fall a
+prey.  There need be no envy nor jealousy, if a man were to consider that
+it mattered not whether he did a great thing or some one else did it,
+Nature's only concern being that it should be done; no grief from loss of
+fortune, if he were to estimate at its true value that which fortune can
+bring him, and that which fortune can never bring him; no wounded
+self-love, if he had learned well the eternal lesson of
+life,--self-renunciation.
+
+Soon after his establishment in Philadelphia Franklin was offered a piece
+for publication in his newspaper.  Being very busy, he begged the
+gentleman would leave it for consideration.  The next day the author
+called and asked his opinion of it.  "Well, sir," replied Franklin, "I am
+sorry to say I think it highly scurrilous and defamatory.  But being at a
+loss on account of my poverty whether to reject it or not, I thought I
+would put it to this issue: At night, when my work was done, I bought a
+two-penny loaf, on which I supped heartily, and then, wrapping myself in
+my great coat, slept very soundly on the floor till morning, when another
+loaf and mug of water afforded a pleasant breakfast.  Now, sir, since I
+can live very comfortably in this manner, why should I prostitute my
+press to personal hatred or party passion for a more luxurious living?"
+
+One cannot read this anecdote of our American sage without thinking of
+Socrates' reply to King Archelaus, who had pressed him to give up
+preaching in the dirty streets of Athens, and come and live with him in
+his splendid courts: "Meal, please your Majesty, is a half-penny a peck
+at Athens, and water I get for nothing!"
+
+During Alexander's march into Africa he found a people dwelling in peace,
+who knew neither war nor conquest.  While he was interviewing the chief
+two of his subjects brought a case before him for judgment.  The dispute
+was this: the one had bought of the other a piece of ground, which, after
+the purchase, was found to contain a treasure, for which he felt bound to
+pay.  The other refused to receive anything, stating that when he sold
+the ground he sold it with all the advantages apparent or concealed which
+it might be found to afford.  The king said, "One of you has a daughter
+and the other a son; let them be married and the treasure given to them
+as a dowry."  Alexander was surprised, and said, "If this case had been
+in our country it would have been dismissed, and the king would have kept
+the treasure."  The chief said, "Does the sun shine on your country, and
+the rain fall, and the grass grow?"  Alexander replied, "Certainly."  The
+chief then asked, "Are there any cattle?"  "Certainly," was the reply.
+The chief replied, "Then it is for these innocent cattle that the Great
+Being permits the rain to fall and the grass to grow."
+
+A good character is a precious thing, above rubies, gold, crowns, or
+kingdoms, and the work of making it is the noblest labor on earth.
+
+Professor Blackie of the University of Edinburgh said to a class of young
+men: "Money is not needful; power is not needful; liberty is not needful;
+even health is not the one thing needful; but character alone is that
+which can truly save us, and if we are not saved in this sense, we
+certainly must be damned."  It has been said that "when poverty is your
+inheritance, virtue must be your capital."
+
+During the American Revolution, while General Reed was President of
+Congress, the British Commissioners offered him a bribe of ten thousand
+guineas to desert the cause of his country.  His reply was, "Gentlemen, I
+am poor, very poor; but your king is not rich enough to buy me."
+
+"When Le Pere Bourdaloue preached at Rouen," said Pere Arrius, "the
+tradesmen forsook their shops, lawyers their clients, physicians their
+sick, and tavern-keepers their bars; but when I preached the following
+year I set all things to rights,--every man minded his own business."
+
+"I fear John Knox's prayers more than an army of ten thousand men," said
+Mary, Queen of Scotland.
+
+When Pope Paul IV. heard of the death of Calvin he exclaimed with a sigh,
+"Ah, the strength of that proud heretic lay in--riches?  No.  Honors?
+No.  But nothing could move him from his course.  Holy Virgin!  With two
+such servants, our church would soon be mistress of both worlds."
+
+Garibaldi's power over his men amounted to fascination.  Soldiers and
+officers were ready to die for him.  His will power seemed to enslave
+them.  In Rome he called for forty volunteers to go where half of them
+would be sure to be killed and the others probably wounded.  The whole
+battalion rushed forward; and they had to draw lots, so eager were all to
+obey.
+
+What power of magic lies in a great name!  There was not a throne in
+Europe that could stand against Washington's character, and in comparison
+with it the millions of the Croesuses would look ridiculous.  What are
+the works of avarice compared with the names of Lincoln, Grant, or
+Garfield?  A few names have ever been the leaven which has preserved many
+a nation from premature decay.
+
+  "But strew his ashes to the wind
+    Whose sword or voice has served mankind--
+  And is he dead, whose glorious mind
+    Lifts thine on high?--
+  To live in hearts we leave behind
+    Is not to die."
+
+
+Mr. Gladstone gave in Parliament, when announcing the death of Princess
+Alice, a touching story of sick-room ministration.  The Princess' little
+boy was ill with diphtheria, the physician had cautioned her not to
+inhale the poisoned breath; the child was tossing in the delirium of
+fever.  The mother took the little one in her lap and stroked his fevered
+brow; the boy threw his arms around her neck, and whispered, "Kiss me,
+mamma;" the mother's instinct was stronger than the physician's caution;
+she pressed her lips to the child's, but lost her life.
+
+At a large dinner-party given by Lord Stratford after the Crimean War, it
+was proposed that every one should write on a slip of paper the name
+which appeared most likely to descend to posterity with renown.  When the
+papers were opened every one of them contained the name of Florence
+Nightingale.
+
+Leckey says that the first hospital ever established was opened by that
+noble Christian woman, Fabiola, in the fourth century.  The two foremost
+names in modern philanthropy are those of John Howard and Florence
+Nightingale.  Not a general of the Crimean War on either side can be
+named by one person in ten.  The one name that rises instantly, when that
+carnival of pestilence and blood is suggested, is that of a young woman
+just recovering from a serious illness, Florence Nightingale.  A soldier
+said, "Before she came there was such cussin' and swearin'; and after
+that it was as holy as a church."  She robbed war of half its terrors.
+Since her time the hospital systems of all the nations during war have
+been changed.  No soldier was braver and no patriot truer than Clara
+Barton, and wherever that noble company of Protestant women known as the
+Red Cross Society,--the cross, I suppose, pointing to Calvary, and the
+red to the blood of the Redeemer,--wherever those consecrated workers
+seek to alleviate the condition of those who suffer from plagues,
+cholera, fevers, flood, famine, there this tireless angel moves on her
+pathway of blessing.  And of all heroes, what nobler ones than these,
+whose names shine from the pages of our missionary history?  I never read
+of Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Snow, Miss Brittain, Miss West, without feeling that
+the heroic age of our race has just begun, the age which opens to woman
+the privilege of following her benevolent inspirations wheresoever she
+will, without thinking that our Christianity needs no other evidence.
+
+"Duty is the cement without which all power, goodness, intellect, truth,
+happiness, and love itself can have no permanence, but all the fabric of
+existence crumbles away from under us and leaves us at last sitting in
+the midst of a ruin, astonished at our own desolation."  A constant,
+abiding sense of duty is the last reason of culture.
+
+  "I slept and dreamed that life is beauty;
+  I woke and found that life is duty."
+
+
+We have no more right to refuse to perform a duty than to refuse to pay a
+debt.  Moral insolvency is certain to him who neglects and disregards his
+duty to his fellow-men.  Nor can we hire another to perform our duty.
+The mere accident of having money does not release you from your duty to
+the world.  Nay, it increases it, for it enables you to do a larger and
+nobler duty.
+
+If your money is not clean, if there is a dirty dollar in your millions,
+you have not succeeded.  If there is the blood of the poor and
+unfortunate, of orphans and widows, on your bank account, you have not
+succeeded.  If your wealth has made others poorer, your life is a
+failure.  If you have gained it in an occupation that kills, that
+shortens the lives of others, that poisons their blood, or engenders
+disease, if you have taken a day from a human life, if you have gained
+your money by that which has debauched other lives, you have failed.
+
+Remember that a question will be asked you some time which you cannot
+evade, the right answer to which will fix your destiny forever: "How did
+you get that fortune?"  Are other men's lives in it; are others' hope and
+happiness buried in it; are others' comforts sacrificed to it; are
+others' rights buried in it; are others' opportunities smothered in it;
+others' chances strangled by it; has their growth been stunted by it;
+their characters stained by it; have others a smaller loaf, a meaner
+home?  If so, you have failed; all your millions cannot save you from the
+curse, "thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting."
+
+When Walter Scott's publisher and printer failed and $600,000 of debt
+stared them in the face, friends came forward and offered to raise money
+enough to allow him to arrange with his creditors.  "No," said he
+proudly, "this right hand shall work it all off; if we lose everything
+else, we will at least keep our honor unblemished."  What a grand picture
+of manliness, of integrity in this noble man, working like a dray-horse
+to cancel that great debt, throwing off at white heat the "Life of
+Napoleon," "Woodstock," "The Tales of a Grandfather," articles for the
+"Quarterly," and so on, all written in the midst of great sorrow, pain,
+and ruin.  "I could not have slept soundly," he writes, "as I now can
+under the comfortable impression of receiving the thanks of my creditors,
+and the conscious feeling of discharging my duty as a man of honesty.  I
+see before me a long, tedious, and dark path, but it leads to stainless
+reputation.  If I die in the harness, as is very likely, I shall die with
+honor."
+
+One of the last things he uttered was, "I have been, perhaps, the most
+voluminous author of my day, and it is a comfort to me to think that I
+have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles,
+and that I have written nothing which, on my deathbed, I would wish
+blotted out."
+
+Although Agassiz refused to lecture even for a large sum of money, yet he
+left a greater legacy to the world, and left even more money to Harvard
+University ($300,000) than he would have left if he had taken the time to
+lecture for money.
+
+Faraday had to choose between a fortune of nearly a million and a life of
+almost certain poverty if he pursued science.  He chose poverty and
+science, and earned a name never to be erased from the book of fame.
+
+Beecher says that we are all building a soul-house for eternity; yet with
+what differing architecture and what various care!
+
+What if a man should see his neighbor getting workmen and building
+materials together, and should say to him, "What are you building?" and
+he should answer, "I don't exactly know.  I am waiting to see what will
+come of it."  And so walls are reared, and room is added to room, while
+the man looks idly on, and all the bystanders exclaim, "What a fool he
+is!"  Yet this is the way many men are building their characters for
+eternity, adding room to room, without plan or aim, and thoughtlessly
+waiting to see what the effect will be.  Such builders will never dwell
+in "the house of God, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
+
+Some people build as cathedrals are built, the part nearest the ground
+finished; but that part which soars towards heaven, the turrets and the
+spires, forever incomplete.
+
+Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise--the head and heart are
+stuffed with goods.  Like those houses in the lower streets of cities
+which were once family dwellings, but are now used for commercial
+purposes, there are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by
+taste, and love, and joy, and worship; but they are all deserted now, and
+the rooms are filled with material things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+WEALTH IN ECONOMY.
+
+Economy is half the battle of life.--SPURGEON.
+
+Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and ease, and the
+beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health.--DR. JOHNSON.
+
+Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's
+self?
+
+As much wisdom can be expended on a private economy as on an
+empire.--EMERSON.
+
+Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and
+little by little will multiply.--GOETHE.
+
+No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of
+what you have.--LATIN PROVERB.
+
+Beware of little extravagances: a small leak will sink a big
+ship.--FRANKLIN.
+
+Better go to bed supperless than rise with debts.--GERMAN PROVERB.
+
+Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to
+get out of.--H. W. SHAW.
+
+Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen
+pence a day; but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not
+suffice.--MACAULAY.
+
+Economy, the poor man's mint.--TUPPER.
+
+I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only
+lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is incurable.--SHAKESPEARE.
+
+Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate
+away on the chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision
+against the workhouse.--BULWER.
+
+  Not for to hide it in a hedge,
+    Nor for a train attendant,
+  But for the glorious privilege
+    Of being independent.
+        BURNS.
+
+
+"We shan't get much here," whispered a lady to her companion, as John
+Murray blew out one of the two candles by whose light he had been writing
+when they asked him to contribute to some benevolent object.  He listened
+to their story and gave one hundred dollars.  "Mr. Murray, I am very
+agreeably surprised," said the lady quoted; "I did not expect to get a
+cent from you."  The old Quaker asked the reason for her opinion; and,
+when told, said, "That, ladies, is the reason I am able to let you have
+the hundred dollars.  It is by practicing economy that I save up money
+with which to do charitable actions.  One candle is enough to talk by."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]
+
+"The Moses of Colonial Finance."
+
+"Poverty is a condition which no man should accept, unless it is forced
+upon him as an inexorable necessity or as the alternative of dishonor."
+
+"Comfort and independence abide with those who can postpone their
+desires."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Emerson relates the following anecdote: "An opulent merchant in Boston
+was called on by a friend in behalf of a charity.  At that time he was
+admonishing his clerk for using whole wafers instead of halves; his
+friend thought the circumstance unpropitious; but to his surprise, on
+listening to the appeal, the merchant subscribed five hundred dollars.
+The applicant expressed his astonishment that any person who was so
+particular about half a wafer should present five hundred dollars to a
+charity; but the merchant said, "It is by saving half wafers, and
+attending to such little things, that I have now something to give."
+
+"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the
+shipowner.  "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one, by
+dint of exertion."
+
+Four years from the time Marshall Field left the rocky New England farm
+to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm
+of Coaley, Farwell & Co.  The only reason the modest young man gave, to
+explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor influence,
+was that he saved his money.
+
+If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents
+every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he
+will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old.
+Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in
+fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars.  Even a
+saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give
+him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years
+of life.  "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
+
+Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world
+with gifts even if he is poor.  In fact, the poor and the middle classes
+give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor.
+Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.
+
+But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy.  The
+miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it.  A
+miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter
+does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice.
+Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup,
+but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is
+to become of that?  It will be a sad waste."  And so the rich Paris
+banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.
+
+A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a
+broken latch on a farmyard gate.  Every one going through would shut the
+gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every
+breeze.  One day a pig ran out into the woods.  Every one on the farm
+went to help get him back.  A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the
+pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two
+weeks.  When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at
+the fire, was all badly scorched.  The dairymaid in her excitement left
+the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt.  The gardener
+lost several hours of valuable time.  Yet a new latch would not have cost
+five cents.
+
+Guy, the London bookseller, and afterward the founder of the great
+hospital, was a great miser, living in the back part of his shop, eating
+upon an old bench, and using his counter for a table, with a newspaper
+for a cloth.  He did not marry.  One day he was visited by "Vulture"
+Hopkins, another well-known miser.  "What is your business?" asked Guy,
+lighting a candle.  "To discuss your methods of saving money," was the
+reply, alluding to the niggardly economy for which Guy was famous.  On
+learning Hopkins's business he blew out the light, saying, "We can do
+that in the dark."  "Sir, you are my master in the art," said the
+"Vulture;" "I need ask no further.  I see where your secret lies."
+
+Yet that kind of economy which verges on the niggardly is better than the
+extravagance that laughs at it.  Either, when carried to excess, is not
+only apt to cause misery, but to ruin the character.
+
+"Lay by something for a rainy day," said a gentleman to an Irishman in
+his service.  Not long afterwards he asked Patrick how much he had added
+to his store.  "Faith, nothing at all," was the reply; "I did as you bid
+me, but it rained very hard yesterday, and it all went--in drink."
+
+  "Wealth, a monster gorged
+  'Mid starving populations."
+
+
+But nowhere and at no period were these contrasts more startling than in
+Imperial Rome.  There a whole population might be trembling lest they
+should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn-ship, while the
+upper classes were squandering fortunes at a single banquet, drinking out
+of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on
+the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales.  As a
+consequence, disease was rife, men were short-lived.  At this time the
+dress of Roman ladies displayed an unheard-of splendor.  The elder Pliny
+tells us that he himself saw Lollia Paulina dressed for a betrothal feast
+in a robe entirely covered with pearls and emeralds, which had cost
+40,000,000 sesterces, and which was known to be less costly than some of
+her other dresses.  Gluttony, caprice, extravagance, ostentation,
+impurity, rioted in the heart of a society which knew of no other means
+by which to break the monotony of its weariness or alleviate the anguish
+of its despair.
+
+The expense ridiculously bestowed on the Roman feasts passes all belief.
+Suetonius mentions a supper given to Vitellius by his brother, in which,
+among other articles, there were two thousand of the choicest fishes,
+seven thousand of the most delicate birds, and one dish, from its size
+and capacity, named the aegis or shield of Minerva.  It was filled
+chiefly with the liver of the scari, a delicate species of fish, the
+brains of pheasants and peacocks, and the tongues of parrots, considered
+desirable chiefly because of their great cost.
+
+"I hope that there will not be another sale," exclaimed Horace Walpole,
+"for I have not an inch of room nor a farthing left."  A woman once
+bought an old door-plate with "Thompson" on it because she thought it
+might come in handy some time.  The habit of buying what you don't need
+because it is cheap encourages extravagance.  "Many have been ruined by
+buying good pennyworths."
+
+"Where there is no prudence," said Dr. Johnson, "there is no virtue."
+
+The eccentric John Randolph once sprang from his seat in the House of
+Representatives, and exclaimed in his piercing voice, "Mr. Speaker, I
+have found it."  And then, in the stillness which followed this strange
+outburst, he added, "I have found the Philosopher's Stone: it is _Pay as
+you go_."
+
+Many a young man seems to think that when he sees his name on a sign he
+is on the highway to fortune, and he begins to live on a scale as though
+there was no possible chance of failure; as though he were already beyond
+the danger point.  Unfortunately Congress can pass no law that will
+remedy the vice of living beyond one's means.
+
+"The prosperity of fools shall destroy them."  "However easy it may be to
+make money," said Barnum, "it is the most difficult thing in the world to
+keep it."  Money often makes the mare--run away with you.
+
+Very few men know how to use money properly.  They can earn it, lavish
+it, hoard it, waste it, but to deal with it _wisely_, as a means to an
+end, is an education difficult of acquirement.
+
+After a large stained-glass window had been constructed an artist picked
+up the discarded fragments and made one of the most exquisite windows in
+Europe for another cathedral.  So one boy will pick up a splendid
+education out of the odds and ends of time which others carelessly throw
+away, or gain a fortune by saving what others waste.
+
+It has become a part of the new political economy to argue that a debt on
+a church or a house or a firm is a desirable thing to develop character.
+When the young man starts out in life with the old-fashioned idea strong
+in his mind that debt is bondage and a disgrace, that a mortgage is to be
+shunned like the cholera, and that to owe a dollar that you cannot pay,
+unless overtaken by misfortune, is nothing more or less than stealing,
+then he is bound in so much at least to succeed, and save his old age
+from being a burden upon his friends or the state.
+
+To do your best you must own every bit of yourself.  If you are in debt,
+part of you belongs to your creditors.  Nothing but actual sin is so
+paralyzing to a young man's energies as debt.
+
+The "loose change" which many young men throw away carelessly, or worse,
+would often form the basis of a fortune and independence.  The earnings
+of the people of the United States, rich and poor, old and young, male
+and female, amount to an average of less than fifty cents a day.  But it
+is by economizing such savings that one must get his start in business.
+The man without a penny is practically helpless, from a business point of
+view, except so far as he can immediately utilize his powers of body and
+mind.  Besides, when a man or woman is driven to the wall, the chance of
+goodness surviving self-respect and the loss of public esteem is
+frightfully diminished.
+
+"Money goes as it comes."  "A child and a fool imagine that twenty years
+and twenty shillings can never be spent."
+
+Live between extravagance and meanness.  Don't save money and starve your
+mind.  "The very secret and essence of thrift consists in getting things
+into higher values.  Spend upward, that is, for the higher faculties.
+Spend for the mind rather than for the body, for culture rather than for
+amusement.  Some young men are too stingy to buy the daily papers, and
+are very ignorant and narrow."  "There is that withholdeth more than is
+meet, but it tendeth to poverty."  "Don't squeeze out of your life and
+comfort and family what you save."
+
+Liberal, not lavish, is Nature's hand.  Even God, it is said, cannot
+afford to be extravagant.  When He increased the loaves and fishes, He
+commanded to gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.
+
+"Nature uses a grinding economy," says Emerson, "working up all that is
+wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of sand
+for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.  She flung
+us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair or a paring of a nail but
+instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates it to her general
+stock."  Last summer's flowers and foliage decayed in autumn only to
+enrich the earth this year for other forms of beauty.  Nature will not
+even wait for our friends to see us, unless we die at home.  The moment
+the breath has left the body she begins to take us to pieces, that the
+parts may be used again for other creations.  Mark the following
+contrast:--
+
+  1772.                              1822.
+  Man, to the plow;                  Man, tally-ho;
+  Wife, to the cow;                  Wife, piano;
+  Girl, to the sow;                  Miss, silk and satin;
+  Boy, to the mow;                   Boy, Greek and Latin;
+  And your rents will be netted.     And you'll all be gazetted.
+        _Hone's Works._                      _The Times._
+
+
+More than a lifetime has elapsed since the above was published, but
+instead of returning to the style of 1772, our farmers have out-Heroded
+Herod in the direction of the fashion, of 1822, and many a farmhouse,
+like the home of Artemas [Transcriber's note: Artemus?] Ward, may be
+known by the cupola and the mortgage with which it is decorated.
+
+It is by the mysterious power of economy, it has been said, that the loaf
+is multiplied, that using does not waste, that little becomes much, that
+scattered fragments grow to unity, and that out of nothing or next to
+nothing comes the miracle of something.  It is not merely saving, still
+less, parsimony.  It is foresight and arrangement, insight and
+combination, causing inert things to labor, useless things to serve our
+necessities, perishing things to renew their vigor, and all things to
+exert themselves for human comfort.
+
+English working men and women work very hard, seldom take a holiday, and
+though they get nearly double the wages of the same classes in France,
+yet save very little.  The millions earned by them slip out of their
+hands almost as soon as obtained to satisfy the pleasures of the moment.
+In France every housekeeper is taught the art of making much out of
+little.  "I am simply astonished," writes an American lady stopping in
+France, "at the number of good wholesome dishes which my friend here
+makes for her table from things, which at home, I always throw away.
+Dainty little dishes from scraps of cold meat, from hard crusts of bread,
+delicately prepared and seasoned, from almost everything and nothing.
+And yet there is no feeling of stinginess or want."
+
+"I wish I could write all across the sky, in letters of gold," says Rev.
+William Marsh, "the one word, savings-bank."
+
+Boston savings-banks have $130,000,000 on deposit, mostly saved in
+driblets.  Josiah Quincy used to say that the servant girls built most of
+the palaces on Beacon Street.
+
+"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer.
+"With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at least
+have 'my crust of bread and liberty.'  But with five thousand pounds a
+year I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical master in
+servants whose wages I cannot pay; my exile may be at the fiat of the
+first long-suffering man who enters a judgment against me; for the flesh
+that lies nearest my heart some Shylock may be dusting his scales and
+whetting his knife.  Every man is needy who spends more than he has; no
+man is needy who spends less.  I may so ill manage, that with five
+thousand pounds a year I purchase the worst evils of poverty,--terror and
+shame; I may so well manage my money, that with one hundred pounds a year
+I purchase the best blessings of wealth,--safety and respect."
+
+Edmund Burke, speaking on Economic Reform, quoted from Cicero: "Magnum
+vectigal est parsimonia," accenting the second word on the first
+syllable.  Lord North whispered a correction, when Burke turned the
+mistake to advantage.  "The noble lord hints that I have erred in the
+quantity of a principal word in my quotation; I rejoice at it, sir,
+because it gives me an opportunity of repeating the inestimable
+adage,--'Magnum vectigal est parsimonia.'"  The sentiment, meaning
+"Thrift is a good income," is well worthy of emphatic repetition by us
+all.
+
+Washington examined the minutest expenditures of his family, even when
+President of the United States.  He understood that without economy none
+can be rich, and with it none need be poor.
+
+"I make a point of paying my own bills," said Wellington.
+
+John Jacob Astor said that the first thousand dollars cost him more
+effort than all of his millions.  Boys who are careless with their dimes
+and quarters, just because they have so few, never get this first
+thousand, and without it no fortune is possible.
+
+To find out uses for the persons or things which are now wasted in life
+is to be the glorious work of the men of the next generation, and that
+which will contribute most to their enrichment.
+
+Economizing "in spots" or by freaks is no economy at all.  It must be
+done by management.
+
+Learn early in life to say "I can't afford it."  It is an indication of
+power and courage and manliness.  Dr. Franklin said, "It is not our own
+eyes, but other people's, that ruin us."  "Fashion wears out more apparel
+than the man," says Shakespeare.
+
+"Of what a hideous progeny of ill is debt the father," said Douglas
+Jerrold.  "What meanness, what invasions of self-respect, what cares,
+what double-dealing!  How in due season it will carve the frank, open
+face into wrinkles; how like a knife it will stab the honest heart.  And
+then its transformations,--how it has been known to change a goodly face
+into a mask of brass; how with the evil custom of debt has the true man
+become a callous trickster!  A freedom from debt, and what nourishing
+sweetness may be found in cold water; what toothsomeness in a dry crust;
+what ambrosial nourishment in a hard egg!  Be sure of it, he who dines
+out of debt, though his meal be a biscuit and an onion, dines in 'The
+Apollo.'  And then, for raiment, what warmth in a threadbare coat, if the
+tailor's receipt be in your pocket!  What Tyrian purple in the faded
+waistcoat, the vest not owed for; how glossy the well-worn hat, if it
+covers not the aching head of a debtor!  Next, the home sweets, the
+outdoor recreation of the free man.  The street door falls not a knell in
+his heart, the foot on the staircase, though he lives on the third pair,
+sends no spasm through his anatomy; at the rap of his door he can crow
+'come in,' and his pulse still beats healthfully.  See him abroad!  How
+he returns look for look with any passenger.  Poverty is a bitter
+draught, yet may, and sometimes can with advantage, be gulped down.
+Though the drinker makes wry faces, there may, after all, be a wholesome
+goodness in the cup.  But debt, however courteously it may be offered, is
+the Cup of Siren; and the wine, spiced and delicious though it be, is
+poison.  My son, if poor, see Hyson in the running spring; see thy mouth
+water at a last week's roll; think a threadbare coat the only wear; and
+acknowledge a whitewashed garret the fittest housing-place for a
+gentleman; do this, and flee debt.  So shall thy heart be at rest, and
+the sheriff confounded."
+
+"Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men to the extent of that
+sixpence," says Carlyle; "commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to
+teach him, kings to mount guard over him,--to the extent of that
+sixpence."
+
+If a man owes you a dollar, he is almost sure to owe you a grudge, too.
+If you owe another money, you will be apt to regard him with uncharitable
+eyes.  Why not economize before getting into debt instead of pinching
+afterwards?
+
+Communities which live wholly from hand to mouth never make much progress
+in the useful arts.  Savings mean power.  _Comfort and independence abide
+with those who can postpone their desires._
+
+"Hunger, rags, cold, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are
+disagreeable," says Horace Greeley, "but debt is infinitely worse than
+them all."
+
+Many a ruined man dates his downfall from the day when he began borrowing
+money.  Debt demoralized Daniel Webster, and Theodore Hook, and Sheridan,
+and Fox, and Pitt.  Mirabeau's life was made wretched by duns.
+
+"Annual income," says Micawber, "twenty pounds; annual expenditure,
+nineteen six, result--happiness.  Annual income, twenty pounds; annual
+expenditure, twenty pounds ought and six, result--misery."
+
+"We are ruined," says Colton, "not by what we really want, but by what we
+think we do.  Therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they
+be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys
+what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy."
+
+The honorable course is to give every man his due.  It is better to
+starve than not to do this.  It is better to do a small business on a
+cash basis than a large one on credit.  _Owe no man anything_, wrote St.
+Paul.  It is a good motto to place in every purse, in every
+counting-room, in every church, in every home.
+
+Economy is of itself a great revenue.--CICERO.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RICH WITHOUT MONEY.
+
+Let others plead for pensions; I can be rich without money, by
+endeavoring to be superior to everything poor.  I would have my
+services to my country unstained by any interested motive.--LORD
+COLLINGWOOD.
+
+  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
+  Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
+        GOLDSMITH.
+
+Pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; to be
+without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; sunlight
+is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who choose.--HELEN
+HUNT.
+
+I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that
+he is rich in my presence.  I ought to make him feel that I can do
+without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort,
+neither by pride,--and although I be utterly penniless, and receiving
+bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.--EMERSON.
+
+To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of
+riches.--CICERO.
+
+There is no riches above a sound body and no joy above the joy of the
+heart.--ECCLESIASTES.
+
+  Where, thy true treasure?  Gold says, "Not in me;"
+  And "Not in me," the Diamond.  Gold is poor;
+  India's insolvent: seek it in thyself.
+        YOUNG.
+
+He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth
+of nature.--SOCRATES.
+
+A great heart in a little house is of all things here below that which
+has ever touched me most.--LACORDAIRE.
+
+  My crown is in my heart, not on my head,
+  Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
+  Nor to be seen: my crown is called content;
+  A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.
+        SHAKESPEAKE.
+
+
+Many a man is rich without money.  Thousands of men with nothing in
+their pockets, and thousands without even a pocket, are rich.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]
+
+"The Sage of Concord."
+
+"I revere the person who is riches: so I cannot think of him as alone,
+or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+A man born with a good, sound constitution, a good stomach, a good
+heart and good limbs, and a pretty good headpiece, is rich.
+
+Good bones are better than gold, tough muscles than silver, and nerves
+that carry energy to every function are better than houses and land.
+
+"Heart-life, soul-life, hope, joy, and love, are true riches," said
+Beecher.
+
+Why should I scramble and struggle to get possession of a little
+portion of this earth?  This is my world now; why should I envy others
+its mere legal possession?  It belongs to him who can see it, enjoy it.
+I need not envy the so-called owners of estates in Boston and New York.
+They are merely taking care of my property and keeping it in excellent
+condition for me.  For a few pennies for railroad fare whenever I wish
+I can see and possess the best of it all.  It has cost me no effort, it
+gives me no care; yet the green grass, the shrubbery, and the statues
+on the lawns, the finer sculptures and the paintings within, are always
+ready for me whenever I feel a desire to look upon them.  I do not wish
+to carry them home with me, for I could not give them half the care
+they now receive; besides, it would take too much of my valuable time,
+and I should be worrying continually lest they be spoiled or stolen.  I
+have much of the wealth of the world now.  It is all prepared for me
+without any pains on my part.  All around me are working hard to get
+things that will please me, and competing to see who can give them the
+cheapest.  The little I pay for the use of libraries, railroads,
+galleries, parks, is less than it would cost to care for the least of
+all I use.  Life and landscape are mine, the stars and flowers, the sea
+and air, the birds and trees.  What more do I want?  All the ages have
+been working for me; all mankind are my servants.  I am only required
+to feed and clothe myself, an easy task in this land of opportunity.
+
+A millionaire pays thousands of pounds for a gallery of paintings, and
+some poor boy or girl comes in, with open mind and poetic fancy, and
+carries away a treasure of beauty which the owner never saw.  A
+collector bought at public auction in London, for one hundred and
+fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a
+schoolboy can read and absorb the riches of "Hamlet."
+
+Why should I waste my abilities pursuing this will-o'-the-wisp
+"Enough," which is ever a little more than one has, and which none of
+the panting millions ever yet overtook in his mad chase?  Is there no
+desirable thing left in this world but gold, luxury, and ease?
+
+"Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough
+to cover."  "A man may as soon fill a chest with grace, or a vessel
+with virtue," says Phillips Brooks, "as a heart with wealth."
+
+Shall we seek happiness through the sense of taste or of touch?  Shall
+we idolize our stomachs and our backs?  Have we no higher missions, no
+nobler destinies?  Shall we "disgrace the fair day by a pusillanimous
+preference of our bread to our freedom"?
+
+In the three great "Banquets" of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch the food
+is not even mentioned.
+
+What does your money say to you: what message does it bring to you?
+Does it say to you, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die"?
+Does it bring a message of comfort, of education, of culture, of
+travel, of books, of an opportunity to help your fellow-man, or is the
+message "More land, more thousands and millions"?  What message does it
+bring you?  Clothes for the naked, bread for the starving, schools for
+the ignorant, hospitals for the sick, asylums for the orphans, or of
+more for yourself and none for others?  Is it a message of generosity
+or of meanness, breadth or narrowness?  Does it speak to you of
+character?  Does it mean a broader manhood, a larger aim, a nobler
+ambition, or does it cry "More, more, more"?
+
+Are you an animal loaded with ingots, or a man filled with a purpose?
+He is rich whose mind is rich, whose thought enriches the intellect of
+the world.  It is a sad sight to see a soul which thirsts not for truth
+or beauty or the good.
+
+A sailor on a sinking vessel in the Caribbean Sea eagerly filled his
+pockets with Spanish dollars from a barrel on board while his
+companions, about to leave in the only boat, begged him to seek safety
+with them.  But he could not leave the bright metal which he had so
+longed for and idolized, and was prevented from reaching shore by his
+very riches, when the vessel went down.
+
+"Who is the richest of men," asked Socrates?  "He who is content with
+the least, for contentment is nature's riches."
+
+In More's "Utopia" gold was despised.  Criminals were forced to wear
+heavy chains of it, and to have rings of it in their ears; it was put
+to the vilest uses to keep up the scorn of it.  Bad characters were
+compelled to wear gold head-bands.  Diamonds and pearls were used to
+decorate infants, so that the youth would discard and despise them.
+
+"Ah, if the rich were as rich as the poor fancy riches!" exclaims
+Emerson.
+
+Many a rich man has died in the poorhouse.
+
+In excavating Pompeii a skeleton was found with the fingers clenched
+round a quantity of gold.  A man of business in the town of Hull,
+England, when dying, pulled a bag of money from under his pillow, which
+he held between his clenched fingers with a grasp so firm as scarcely
+to relax under the agonies of death.
+
+  Oh! blind and wanting wit to choose,
+  Who house the chaff and burn the grain;
+  Who hug the wealth ye cannot use,
+  And lack the riches all may gain.
+        WILLIAM WATSON.
+
+
+Poverty is the want of much, avarice the want of everything.
+
+A poor man was met by a stranger while scoffing at the wealthy for not
+enjoying themselves.  The stranger gave him a purse, in which he was
+always to find a ducat.  As fast as he took one out another was to drop
+in, but he was not to begin to spend his fortune until he had thrown
+away the purse.  He takes ducat after ducat out, but continually
+procrastinates and puts off the hour of enjoyment until he has got "a
+little more," and dies at last counting his millions.
+
+A beggar was once met by Fortune, who promised to fill his wallet with
+gold, as much as he might please, on condition that whatever touched
+the ground should turn at once to dust.  The beggar opens his wallet,
+asks for more and yet more, until the bag bursts.  The gold falls to
+the ground, and all is lost.
+
+When the steamer Central America was about to sink, the stewardess,
+having collected all the gold she could from the staterooms, and tied
+it in her apron, jumped for the last boat leaving the steamer.  She
+missed her aim and fell into the water, the gold carrying her down head
+first.
+
+In the year 1843 a rich miser lived in Padua, who was so mean and
+sordid that he would never give a cent to any person or object, and he
+was so afraid of the banks that he would not deposit with them, but
+would sit up nights with sword and pistol by him to guard his idol
+hoard.  When his health gave way from anxiety and watching he built an
+underground treasure-chamber, so arranged that if any burglar ever
+entered, he would step upon a spring which would precipitate him into a
+subterranean river, where he could neither escape nor be heard.  One
+night the miser went to his chest to see that all was right, when his
+foot touched the spring of the trap, and he was hurled into the deep,
+hidden stream.
+
+"One would think," said Boswell, "that the proprietor of all this
+(Keddlestone, the seat of Lord Scarsfield) must be happy."  "Nay, sir,"
+said Johnson, "all this excludes but one evil, poverty."
+
+John Duncan, the illegitimate child of a Scottish weaver, was ignorant,
+near-sighted, bent, a miserable apology for a human being, and at last
+a pauper.  If he went upon the street he would sometimes be stoned by
+other boys.  The farmer, for whom he watched cattle, was cruel to him,
+and after a rainy day would send him cold and wet to sleep on a
+miserable bed in a dark outhouse.  Here he would empty the water from
+his shoes, and wring out his wet clothes and sleep as best he might.
+But the boy had a desire to learn to read, and when, a little later, he
+was put to weaving, he persuaded a schoolgirl, twelve years old, to
+teach him.  He was sixteen when he learned the alphabet, after which
+his progress was quite rapid.  He was very fond of plants, and worked
+overtime for several months to earn five shillings to buy a book on
+botany.  He became a good botanist, and such was his interest in the
+study that at the age of eighty he walked twelve miles to obtain a new
+specimen.  A man whom he met became interested at finding such a
+well-stored mind in such a miserable body, poorly clad, and published
+an account of his career.  Many readers sent him money, but he saved
+it, and left it in his will to found eight scholarships and offer
+prizes for the encouragement of the study of natural science by the
+poor.  His small but valuable library was left for a similar use.
+
+Franklin said money never made a man happy yet; there is nothing in its
+nature to produce happiness.  The more a man has, the more he wants.
+Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.  A great bank account can
+never make a man rich.  It is the mind that makes the body rich.  No
+man is rich, however much money or land he may possess, who has a poor
+heart.  If that is poor, he is poor indeed, though he own and rule
+kingdoms.  He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to
+what he has.
+
+Who would not choose to be a millionaire of deeds with a Lincoln, a
+Grant, a Florence Nightingale, a Childs; a millionaire of ideas with
+Emerson, with Lowell, with Shakespeare, with Wordsworth; a millionaire
+of statesmanship with a Gladstone, a Bright, a Sumner, a Washington?
+
+Some men are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial
+temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a
+shipload of ordinary men.  Others are rich in disposition, family, and
+friends.  There are some men so amiable that everybody loves them; some
+so cheerful that they carry an atmosphere of jollity about them.  Some
+are rich in integrity and character.
+
+One of the first great lessons of life is to learn the true estimate of
+values.  As the youth starts out in his career, all sorts of wares will
+be imposed upon him, and all kinds of temptations will be used to
+induce him to buy.  His success will depend very largely upon his
+ability to estimate properly, not the apparent but the real value of
+everything presented to him.  Vulgar Wealth will flaunt her banner
+before his eyes, and claim supremacy over everything else.  A thousand
+different schemes will be thrust into his face with their claims for
+superiority.  Every occupation and vocation will present its charms in
+turn, and offer its inducements.  The youth who would succeed must not
+allow himself to be deceived by appearances, but must place the
+emphasis of life where it belongs.
+
+No man, it is said, can read the works of John Ruskin without learning
+that his sources of pleasure are well-nigh infinite.  There is not a
+flower, nor a cloud, nor a tree, nor a mountain, nor a star; not a bird
+that fans the air, nor a creature that walks the earth; not a glimpse
+of sea or sky or meadow-greenery; not a work of worthy art in the
+domains of painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture; not a thought
+of God as the Great Spirit presiding over and informing all things,
+that is not to him a source of the sweetest pleasure.  The whole world
+of matter and of spirit and the long record of human art are open to
+him as the never-failing fountains of his delight.  In these pure
+realms he seeks his daily food and has his daily life.
+
+There is now and then a man who sees beauty and true riches everywhere,
+and "worships the splendor of God which he sees bursting through each
+chink and cranny."
+
+Phillips Brooks, Thoreau, Garrison, Emerson, Beecher, Agassiz, were
+rich without money.  They saw the splendor in the flower, the glory in
+the grass, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything.  They knew that the man who owns the landscape is seldom
+the one who pays the taxes on it.  They sucked in power and wealth at
+first hands from the meadows, fields, and flowers, birds, brooks,
+mountains, and forest, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers.  Every
+natural object seemed to bring them a special message from the great
+Author of the beautiful.  To these rare souls every natural object was
+touched with power and beauty; and their thirsty souls drank it in as a
+traveler on a desert drinks in the god-sent water of the oasis.  To
+extract power and real wealth from men and things seemed to be their
+mission, and to pour it out again in refreshing showers upon a thirsty
+humanity.  They believed that man's most important food does not enter
+by the mouth.  They knew that man could not live by estates, dollars,
+and bread alone, and that if he could he would only be an animal.  They
+believed that the higher life demands a higher food.  They believed in
+man's unlimited power of expansion, and that this growth demands a more
+highly organized food product than that which merely sustains animal
+life.  They saw a finer nutriment in the landscape, in the meadows,
+than could be ground into flour, and which escaped the loaf.  They felt
+a sentiment in natural objects which pointed upward, ever upward to the
+Author, and which was capable of feeding and expanding the higher life
+until it should grow into a finer sympathy and fellowship with the
+Author of the beautiful.  They believed that the Creation thunders the
+ten commandments, and that all Nature is tugging at the terms of every
+contract to make it just.  They could feel this finer sentiment, this
+soul lifter, this man inspirer, in the growing grain, in the waving
+corn, in the golden harvest.  They saw it reflected in every brook, in
+every star, in every flower, in every dewdrop.  They believed that
+Nature together with human nature were man's great schoolmasters, that
+if rightly used they would carve his rough life into beauty and touch
+his rude manner with grace.
+
+"More servants wait on man than he'll take notice of."  But if he would
+enjoy Nature he must come to it from a higher level than the yardstick.
+He must bring a spirit as grand and sublime as that by which the thing
+itself exists.
+
+We all live on far lower levels than we need to do.  We linger in the
+misty and oppressive valleys, when we might be climbing the sunlit
+hills.  God puts into our hands the Book of Life, bright on every page
+with open secrets, and we suffer it to drop out of our hands unread.
+Emerson says, "We have come into a world which is a living poem.
+Everything is as I am."  Nature provides for us a perpetual festival;
+she is bright to the bright, comforting to those who will accept
+comfort.  We cannot conceive how a universe could possibly be created
+which could devise more efficient methods or greater opportunities for
+the delight, the happiness, and the real wealth of human beings than
+the one we live in.
+
+The human body is packed full of marvelous devices, of wonderful
+contrivances, of infinite possibilities for the happiness and riches of
+the individual.  No physiologist nor scientist has ever yet been able
+to point out a single improvement, even in the minutest detail, in the
+structure of the human body.  No inventor has ever yet been able to
+suggest an improvement in this human mechanism.  No chemist has ever
+been able to suggest a superior combination in any one of the elements
+which make up the human structure.  One of the first things to do in
+life is to learn the natural wealth of our surroundings, instead of
+bemoaning our lot, for, no matter where we are placed, there is
+infinitely more about us than we can ever understand, than we can ever
+exhaust the meaning of.
+
+"Thank Heaven there are still some Matthew Arnolds who prefer the
+heavenly sweetness of light to the Eden of riches."  Arnold left only a
+few thousand dollars, but yet was he not one of the richest of men?
+What the world wants is young men who will amass golden thoughts,
+golden wisdom, golden deeds, not mere golden dollars; young men who
+prefer to have thought-capital, character-capital, to cash-capital.  He
+who estimates his money the highest values himself the least.  "I
+revere the person," says Emerson, "who is riches; so that I cannot
+think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy."
+
+Raphael was rich without money.  All doors opened to him, and he was
+more than welcome everywhere.  His sweet spirit radiated sunshine
+wherever he went.
+
+Henry Wilson was rich without money.  So scrupulous had he been not to
+make his exalted position a means of worldly gain, that when this
+Natick cobbler, the sworn friend of the oppressed, whose one question
+as to measures or acts was ever "Is it right; will it do good?" came to
+be inaugurated as Vice-President of the country, he was obliged to
+borrow of his fellow-senator, Charles Sumner, one hundred dollars to
+meet the necessary expenses of the occasion.
+
+Mozart, the great composer of the "Requiem," left barely enough money
+to bury him, but he has made the world richer.
+
+A rich mind and noble spirit will cast a radiance of beauty over the
+humblest home, which the upholsterer and decorator can never approach.
+Who would not prefer to be a millionaire of character, of contentment,
+rather than possess nothing but the vulgar coins of a Croesus?  Whoever
+uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future
+generations will erect his monument.
+
+Are we tender, loving, self-denying, and honest, trying to fashion our
+frail life after that of the model man of Nazareth?  Then, though our
+pockets are often empty, we have an inheritance which is as
+overwhelmingly precious as it is eternally incorruptible.
+
+An Asiatic traveler tells us that one day he found the bodies of two
+men laid upon the desert sand beside the carcass of a camel.  They had
+evidently died from thirst, and yet around the waist of each was a
+large store of jewels of different kinds, which they had doubtless been
+crossing the desert to sell in the markets of Persia.
+
+The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is
+poorer than he.  He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he who
+is covetous is poor though he have millions.  There are riches of
+intellect, and no man with an intellectual taste can be called poor.
+He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by
+changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in
+fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
+He is rich as well as brave who can face poverty and misfortune with
+cheerfulness and courage.
+
+We can so educate the will power that it will focus the thoughts upon
+the bright side of things, and upon objects which elevate the soul,
+thus forming a habit of happiness and goodness which will make us rich.
+The habit of making the best of everything and of always looking on the
+bright side of everything is a fortune in itself.
+
+He is rich who values a good name above gold.  Among the ancient Greeks
+and Romans honor was more sought after than wealth.  Rome was imperial
+Rome no more when the imperial purple became an article of traffic.
+
+This is the evil of trade, as well as of partisan politics.  As Emerson
+remarks, it would put everything into market,--talent, beauty, virtue,
+and man himself.
+
+Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave.  His purchaser
+released him, and gave him charge of his household and of the education
+of his children.  He despised wealth and affectation, and lived in a
+tub.  "Do you want anything?" asked Alexander the Great, forcibly
+impressed by the abounding cheerfulness of the philosopher under such
+circumstances.  "Yes," replied Diogenes, "I want you to stand out of my
+sunshine and not to take from me what you cannot give me."  "Were I not
+Alexander," exclaimed the great conqueror, "I would be Diogenes."
+
+Brave and honest men do not work for gold.  They work for love, for
+honor, for character.  When Socrates suffered death rather than abandon
+his views of right morality, when Las Casas endeavored to mitigate the
+tortures of the poor Indians, they had no thought of money or country.
+They worked for the elevation of all that thought, and for the relief
+of all that suffered.
+
+"I don't want such things," said Epictetus to the rich Roman orator who
+was making light of his contempt for money-wealth; "and besides," said
+the stoic, "you are poorer than I am, after all.  You have silver
+vessels, but earthenware reasons, principles, appetites.  My mind to me
+a kingdom is, and it furnishes me with abundant and happy occupation in
+lieu of your restless idleness.  All your possessions seem small to
+you; mine seem great to me.  Your desire is insatiate, mine is
+satisfied."
+
+"Do you know, sir," said a devotee of Mammon to John Bright, "that I am
+worth a million sterling?"  "Yes," said the irritated but calm-spirited
+respondent, "I do; and I know that it is all you are worth."
+
+A bankrupt merchant, returning home one night, said to his noble wife,
+"My dear, I am ruined; everything we have is in the hands of the
+sheriff."  After a few moments of silence the wife looked into his face
+and asked, "Will the sheriff sell you?"  "Oh, no."  "Will the sheriff
+sell me?"  "Oh, no."  "Then do not say we have lost everything.  All
+that is most valuable remains to us,--manhood, womanhood, childhood.
+We have lost but the results of our skill and industry.  We can make
+another fortune if our hearts and hands are left us."
+
+What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating
+with a consciousness of untold riches of head and heart?
+
+Paul was never so great as when he occupied a prison cell; and Jesus
+Christ reached the height of his success when, smitten, spat upon,
+tormented, and crucified, He cried in agony, and yet with triumphant
+satisfaction, "It is finished."
+
+"Character before wealth," was the motto of Amos Lawrence, who had
+inscribed on his pocket-book, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall
+gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
+
+If you make a fortune let every dollar of it be clean.  You do not want
+to see in it drunkards reel, orphans weep, widows moan.  Your riches
+must not make others poorer and more wretched.
+
+Alexander the Great wandered to the gates of Paradise, and knocked for
+entrance.  "Who knocks?" demanded the guardian angel.  "Alexander."
+"Who is Alexander?"  "Alexander,--the Alexander,--Alexander the
+Great,--the conqueror of the world."  "We know him not," replied the
+angel; "this is the Lord's gate; only the righteous enter here."
+
+Don't start out in life with a false standard; a truly great man makes
+official position and money and houses and estates look so tawdry, so
+mean and poor, that we feel like sinking out of sight with our cheap
+laurels and gold.  _Millions look trifling beside character_.
+
+A friend of Professor Agassiz, an eminent practical man, once expressed
+his wonder that a man of such abilities should remain contented with
+such a moderate income as he received.  "I have enough," was Agassiz's
+reply.  "I have no time to waste in making money.  Life is not
+sufficiently long to enable a man to get rich and do his duty to his
+fellow-men at the same time."
+
+How were the thousands of business men who lost every dollar they had
+in the Chicago fire enabled to go into business at once, some into
+wholesale business, without money?  Their record was their bank
+account.  The commercial agencies said they were square men; that they
+had always paid one hundred cents on a dollar; that they had paid
+promptly, and that they were industrious and dealt honorably with all
+men.  This record was as good as a bank account.  _They drew on their
+character_.  Character was the coin which enabled penniless men to buy
+thousands of dollars' worth of goods.  Their integrity did not burn up
+with their stores.  The best part of them was beyond the reach of fire
+and could not be burned.
+
+What are the toil-sweated productions of wealth piled up in vast
+profusion around a Girard, or a Rothschild, when weighed against the
+stores of wisdom, the treasures of knowledge, and the strength, beauty,
+and glory with which victorious virtue has enriched and adorned a great
+multitude of minds during the march of a hundred generations?
+
+"Lord, how many things are in the world of which Diogenes hath no
+need!" exclaimed the stoic, as he wandered among the miscellaneous
+articles at a country fair.
+
+"There are treasures laid up in the heart--treasures of charity, piety,
+temperance, and soberness.  These treasures a man takes with him beyond
+death when he leaves this world."  (Buddhist Scriptures.)
+
+Is it any wonder that our children start out with wrong ideals of life,
+with wrong ideas of what constitutes success?  The child is "urged to
+get on," to "rise in the world," to "make money."  The youth is
+constantly told that nothing succeeds like success.  False standards
+are everywhere set up for him, and then the boy is blamed if he makes a
+failure.
+
+It is all very well to urge youth on to success, but the great mass of
+mankind can never reach or even approximate the goal constantly
+preached to them, nor can we all be rich.  One of the great lessons to
+teach in this century of sharp competition and the survival of the
+fittest is how to be rich without money, and to learn how to do without
+success, according to the popular standard.
+
+Gold cannot make the miser rich, nor can the want of it make the beggar
+poor.
+
+In the poem, "The Changed Cross," a weary woman is represented as
+dreaming that she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of
+divers shapes and sizes.  The most beautiful one was set in jewels of
+gold.  It was so tiny and exquisite that she changed her own plain
+cross for it, thinking she was fortunate in finding one so much lighter
+and lovelier.  But soon her back began to ache under the glittering
+burden, and she changed it for another cross very beautiful and
+entwined with flowers.  But she soon found that underneath the flowers
+were piercing thorns which tore her flesh.  At last she came to a very
+plain cross without jewels, without carving, and with only the word,
+"Love," inscribed upon it.  She took this one up and it proved the
+easiest and best of all.  She was amazed, however, to find that it was
+her old cross which she had discarded.  It is easy to see the jewels
+and the flowers in other people's crosses, but the thorns and heavy
+weight are known only to the bearers.  How easy other people's burdens
+seem to us compared with our own.  We do not appreciate the secret
+burdens which almost crush the heart, nor the years of weary waiting
+for delayed success--the aching hearts longing for sympathy, the hidden
+poverty, the suppressed emotion in other lives.
+
+William Pitt, the great Commoner, considered money as dirt beneath his
+feet compared with the public interest and public esteem.  His hands
+were clean.
+
+The object for which we strive tells the story of our lives.  Men and
+women should be judged by the happiness they create in those around
+them.  Noble deeds always enrich, but millions of mere money may
+impoverish.  _Character is perpetual wealth_, and by the side of him
+who possesses it the millionaire who has it not seems a pauper.
+Compared with it, what are houses and lands, stocks and bonds?  "It is
+better that great souls should live in small habitations than that
+abject slaves should burrow in great houses."  Plain living, rich
+thought, and grand effort are real riches.
+
+Invest in yourself, and you will never be poor.  Floods cannot carry
+your wealth away, fire cannot burn it, rust cannot consume it.
+
+"If a man empties his purse into his head," says Franklin, "no man can
+take it from him.  An investment in knowledge always pays the best
+interest."
+
+"There is a cunning juggle in riches.  I observe," says Emerson, "that
+they take somewhat for everything they give.  I look bigger, but I am
+less, I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but less
+courage; more books, but less wit."
+
+  Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
+  'T is only noble to be good.
+  Kind hearts are more than coronets,
+  And simple faith than Norman blood.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE.
+
+  To each man's life there comes a time supreme;
+    One day, one night, one morning, or one noon,
+    One freighted hour, one moment opportune,
+  One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam,
+  One space when fate goes tiding with the stream,
+    One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon,
+    And ready for the passing instant's boon
+  To tip in favor the uncertain beam.
+  Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait,
+    Knows also how to watch and work and stand
+    On Life's broad deck alert, and at the prow
+  To seize the passing moment, big with fate,
+    From opportunity's extended hand,
+    When the great clock of destiny strikes Now!
+        MARY A. TOWNSEND.
+
+  Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
+  In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.
+        LOWELL.
+
+What is opportunity to a man who can't use it?  An unfecundated egg,
+which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.--GEORGE ELIOT.
+
+  A thousand years a poor man watched
+    Before the gate of Paradise:
+  But while one little nap he snatched,
+    It oped and shut.  Ah! was he wise?
+        W. B. ALGER.
+
+Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
+do what lies clearly at hand.--CARLYLE.
+
+  A man's best things are nearest him,
+  Lie close about his feet.
+        R. M. MILNES.
+
+The secret of success in life is for a man _to be ready for his
+opportunity_ when it comes.--DISRAELI.
+
+
+"There are no longer any good chances for young men," complained a law
+student to Daniel Webster.  "There is always room at the top," replied
+the great lawyer.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON]
+
+"The world is all gates, all opportunities to him who can use them.'
+
+  "'T is never offered twice, seize then the hour
+  When fortune smiles and duty points the way."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+No chance, no opportunities, in a land where many poor boys become rich
+men, where newsboys go to Congress, and where those born in the lowest
+stations attain the highest positions?  The world is all gates, all
+opportunities to him who will use them.  But, like Bunyan's Pilgrim in
+the dungeon of Giant Despair's castle, who had the key of deliverance
+all the time with him but had forgotten it, we fail to rely wholly upon
+the ability to advance all that is good for us which has been given to
+the weakest as well as the strongest.  We depend too much upon outside
+assistance.
+
+  "We look too high
+  For things close by."
+
+
+A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
+supposed that it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak.  Years
+afterward she washed the steps of the Peabody Institute, pondering how
+to get money to buy food.  She cut up an old, worn-out, ragged cloak to
+make a hood, when lo! in the lining of the cloak she discovered the
+diamond bracelet.  During all her poverty she was worth $3500, but did
+not know it.
+
+Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities, if we could
+only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
+than diamond bracelets.  In our large Eastern cities it has been found
+that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
+fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
+wants.  It is a sorry day for a young man who cannot see any
+opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
+Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
+gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
+with on the voyage.  After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
+had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
+diamonds.  They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
+from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by others
+and sold to the government.
+
+The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for $42 by the
+owner to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
+he could get rich.  Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a
+farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and
+rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
+business.  He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
+measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time.  He
+sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
+miles away.  Only a short time after the man who bought his farm
+discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
+previously ignorantly tried to drain off.
+
+Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
+Persian by the name of Ali Hafed.  He lived in a cottage on the river
+bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
+stretching away to the sea.  He had a wife and children, an extensive
+farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
+of forest.  He had a plenty of money and everything that heart could
+wish.  He was contented and happy.  One evening a priest of Buddha
+visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
+world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
+earth's surface into diamonds.  The old priest told that a drop of
+sunlight the size of his thumb was worth more than large mines of
+copper, silver, or gold; that with one of them he could buy many farms
+like his; that with a handful he could buy a province, and with a mine
+of diamonds he could purchase a kingdom.  Ali Hafed listened, and was
+no longer a rich man.  He had been touched with discontent, and with
+that all wealth vanishes.  Early the next morning he woke the priest
+who had been the cause of his unhappiness, and anxiously asked him
+where he could find a mine of diamonds.  "What do you want of
+diamonds?" asked the astonished priest.  "I want to be rich and place
+my children on thrones."  "All you have to do is to go and search until
+you find them," said the priest.  "But where shall I go?" asked the
+poor farmer.  "Go anywhere, north, south, east, or west."  "How shall I
+know when I have found the place?"  "When you find a river running over
+white sands between high mountain ranges, in those white sands you will
+find diamonds," answered the priest.
+
+The discontented man sold the farm for what he could get, left his
+family with a neighbor, took the money he had at interest, and went to
+search for the coveted treasure.  Over the mountains of Arabia, through
+Palestine and Egypt, he wandered for years, but found no diamonds.
+When his money was all gone and starvation stared him in the face,
+ashamed of his folly and of his rags, poor Ali Hafed threw himself into
+the tide and was drowned.  The man who bought his farm was a contented
+man, who made the most of his surroundings, and did not believe in
+going away from home to hunt for diamonds or success.  While his camel
+was drinking in the garden one day, he noticed a flash of light from
+the white sands of the brook.  He picked up a pebble, and pleased with
+its brilliant hues took it into the house, put it on the shelf near the
+fireplace, and forgot all about it.  The old priest of Buddha who had
+filled Ali Hafed with the fatal discontent called one day upon the new
+owner of the farm.  He had no sooner entered the room than his eye
+caught that flash of light from the stone.  "Here's a diamond! here's a
+diamond!" the old priest shouted in great excitement.  "Has Ali Hafed
+returned?" said the priest.  "No," said the farmer, "nor is that a
+diamond.  That is but a stone."  They went into the garden and stirred
+up the white sand with their fingers, and behold, other diamonds more
+beautiful than the first gleamed out of it.  So the famous diamond beds
+of Golconda were discovered.  Had Ali Hafed been content to remain at
+home, had he dug in his own garden, instead of going abroad in search
+for wealth, and reaping poverty, hardships, starvation, and death, he
+would have been one of the richest men in the world, for the entire
+farm abounded in the richest of gems.
+
+You have your own special place and work.  Find it, fill it.  Scarcely
+a boy or girl will read these lines but has much better opportunity to
+win success than Garfield, Wilson, Franklin, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher
+Stowe, Frances Willard, and thousands of others.  But to succeed you
+must be prepared to seize and improve the opportunity when it comes.
+Remember that four things come not back: the spoken word, the sped
+arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
+
+It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that the more opportunities
+are utilized, the more new ones are thereby created.  New openings are
+as easy to fill as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
+so easy as formerly to obtain distinction in the old lines, because the
+standard has advanced so much and competition has so greatly increased.
+"The world is no longer clay," said Emerson, "but rather iron in the
+hands of its workers, and men have got to hammer out a place for
+themselves by steady and rugged blows."
+
+Thousands of men have made fortunes out of trifles which others pass
+by.  As the bee gets honey from the same flower from which the spider
+gets poison, so some men will get a fortune out of the commonest and
+meanest things, as scraps of leather, cotton waste, slag, iron filings,
+from which others get only poverty and failure.  There is scarcely a
+thing which contributes to the welfare and comfort of humanity, not an
+article of household furniture, a kitchen utensil, an article of
+clothing or of food, that is not capable of an improvement in which
+there may be a fortune.
+
+Opportunities?  They are all around us.  Edison found them in a baggage
+car.  Forces of nature plead to be used in the service of man, as
+lightning for ages tried to attract his attention to the great force of
+electricity, which would do his drudgery and leave him to develop the
+God-given powers within him.  There is power lying latent everywhere
+waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
+
+First find out what the world needs and then supply that want.  An
+invention to make smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very
+ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity.  The patent
+office at Washington is full of wonderful devices of ingenious
+mechanism, but not one in hundreds is of use to the inventor or to the
+world.  And yet how many families have been impoverished, and have
+struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
+working on useless inventions.  A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
+eighty-seven cents when his capital was one dollar and a half in buying
+buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for.  After that he made
+it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want, and so
+prospered.
+
+It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
+manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles which
+made their fortunes.  One of the greatest hindrances to advancement in
+life is the lack of observation and of the inclination to take pains.
+An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
+not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
+metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather;" he was so
+poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut the grass in front of his
+hired tenement.  Now he is a very rich man.
+
+An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
+improvement in shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
+rich.  A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
+his invalid wife.  He had never realized what it was to wash before.
+Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing-machine,
+and made a fortune.  A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
+said to himself, there must be some way of filling teeth which will
+prevent their aching.  So he invented the principle of gold filling for
+teeth.
+
+The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
+Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
+The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin.  John Harrison,
+the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
+loft of an old barn.  Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
+were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
+McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a gristmill.  The first
+model dry dock was made in an attic.  Clark, the founder of Clark
+University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
+wagons in a horse shed.  Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
+with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft.  Edison
+began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
+a newsboy.
+
+As soon as the weather would permit, the Jamestown colonists began to
+stroll about the country digging for gold.  In a bank of sand some
+glittering particles were found, and the whole settlement was in a
+state of excitement.  Fourteen weeks of the precious springtime, which
+ought to have been given to plowing and planting, were consumed in this
+stupid nonsense.  Even the Indians ridiculed the madness of the men
+who, for imaginary grains of gold, were wasting their chances for a
+crop of corn.
+
+Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
+rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskillful workman had
+cut, hacked, spoiled, and thrown away.  No doubt many artists had
+noticed the fine quality of the marble, and regretted that it should
+have been spoiled.  But Michael Angelo still saw an angel in the ruin,
+and with his chisel and mallet he called out from it one of the finest
+pieces of statuary in Italy, the young David.
+
+The lonely island of Nantucket would not be considered a very favorable
+place to win success and fame.  But Maria Mitchell, on seventy-five
+dollars a year, as librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum, found time and
+opportunity to become a celebrated astronomer.  Lucretia Mott, one of
+America's foremost philanthropists and reformers, who made herself felt
+over a whole continent, gained much of her reputation as a preacher on
+Nantucket Island.
+
+"Why does not America have fine sculptors?" asked a romping girl, of
+Watertown, Mass., in 1842.  Her father, a physician, answered that he
+supposed "an American could be a stone-cutter, but that is a very
+different thing from being a sculptor."  "I think," said the plucky
+maiden, "that if no other American tries it I will."  She began her
+studies in Boston, and walked seven miles to and fro daily between her
+home and the city.  The medical schools in Boston would not admit her
+to study anatomy, so she had to go to St. Louis.  Subsequently she went
+to Rome, and there, during a long residence, and afterward, modeled and
+carved very beautiful statuary which made the name of Harriet G. Hosmer
+famous.  Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you
+are now wasting, dreaming of some far-off success, may be crowded with
+grand possibilities.
+
+Patrick Henry was called a lazy boy, a good-for-nothing farmer, and he
+failed as a merchant.  He was always dreaming of some far-off
+greatness, and never thought he could be a hero among the corn and
+tobacco and saddlebags of Virginia.  He studied law six weeks, when he
+put out his shingle.  People thought he would fail, but in his first
+case he showed that he had a wonderful power of oratory.  It then first
+dawned upon him that he could be a hero in Virginia.  From the time the
+Stamp Act was passed and Henry was elected to the Virginia House of
+Burgesses, and he had introduced his famous resolution against the
+unjust taxation of the American colonies, he rose steadily until he
+became one of the brilliant orators of America.  In one of his first
+speeches upon this resolution he uttered these words, which were
+prophetic of his power and courage: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the
+First his Cromwell, and George the Third--may profit by their example.
+If this be treason, make the most of it."
+
+The great natural philosopher, Faraday, who was the son of a
+blacksmith, wrote, when a young man, to Humphry Davy, asking for
+employment at the Royal Institution.  Davy consulted a friend on the
+matter.  "Here is a letter from a young man named Faraday, he has been
+attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal
+Institution--what can I do?"  "Do? put him to washing bottles; if he is
+good for anything he will do it directly; if he refuses he is good for
+nothing."  But the boy who could experiment in the attic of an
+apothecary shop with an old pan and glass vials during every moment he
+could snatch from his work saw an opportunity in washing bottles, which
+led to a professorship at the Royal Academy at Woolwich.  Tyndall said
+of this boy with no chance, "He is the greatest experimental
+philosopher the world has ever seen."  He became the wonder of his age
+in science.
+
+There is a legend of an artist who long sought for a piece of
+sandal-wood, out of which to carve a Madonna.  He was about to give up
+in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream
+he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was
+destined for the fire.  He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece from a
+log of common firewood.  Many of us lose great opportunities in life by
+waiting to find sandal-wood for our carvings, when they really lie
+hidden in the common logs that we burn.  One man goes through life
+without seeing chances for doing anything great, while another close
+beside him snatches from the same circumstances and privileges
+opportunities for achieving grand results.
+
+Anna Dickinson began life as a school-teacher.  Adelaide Neilson was a
+child's nurse.  Charlotte Cushman's parents were poor.  The renowned
+Jeanne d'Arc fed swine.  Christine Nilsson was a poor Swedish peasant,
+and ran barefoot in childhood.  Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor,
+overcame the prejudice against her sex and color, and pursued her
+profession in Italy.  Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, was the daughter
+of a poor man who taught school at two dollars per week.  These are but
+a few of the many who have struggled with fate and risen to distinction
+through their own personal efforts.
+
+Opportunities?  They are everywhere.  "America is another name for
+opportunities.  Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine
+Providence in behalf of the human race."  Never before were there such
+grand openings, such chances, such opportunities.  Especially is this
+true for girls and young women.  A new era is dawning for them.
+Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only
+a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter.
+
+When I hear of a young woman entering the medical profession, or
+beginning the study of law, or entering school with a view to teaching,
+I feel like congratulating her for thus asserting her individuality.
+
+We cannot all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
+Faraday, Edison, and Thompson.  We cannot all of us paint immortal
+pictures like an Angelo or a Raphael.  But we can all of us make our
+lives sublime, by _seizing common occasions and making them great_.
+What chance had the young girl, Grace Darling, to distinguish herself,
+living on those barren lighthouse rocks alone with her aged parents?
+But while her brothers and sisters, who moved to the cities to win
+wealth and fame, are not known to the world, she became more famous
+than a princess.  This poor girl did not need to go to London to see
+the nobility; they came to the lighthouse to see her.  Right at home
+this young girl had won fame which the regal heirs might envy, and a
+name which will never perish from the earth.  She did not wander away
+into dreamy distance for fame and fortune, but did her best where duty
+had placed her.
+
+If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants.  You will
+find that millions have the same wants.  The safest business is always
+connected with man's prime necessities.  He must have clothing and a
+dwelling; he must eat.  He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
+pleasure, luxuries, education, and culture.  Any man who can supply a
+great want of humanity, improve any methods which men use, supply any
+demand of comfort, or contribute in any way to their well-being, can
+make a fortune.
+
+"We cannot doubt," said Edward Everett, "that truths now unknown are in
+reserve to reward the patience and the labors of future lovers of
+truth, which will go as far beyond the brilliant discoveries of the
+last generation as these do beyond all that was known to the ancient
+world."
+
+          The golden opportunity
+  Is never offered twice; seize then the hour
+  When fortune smiles and duty points the way;
+  Nor shrink aside to 'scape the spectre fear,
+  Nor pause, though pleasure beckon from her bower;
+  But bravely bear thee onward to the goal.
+        ANON.
+
+  For the distant still thou yearnest,
+    And behold the good so near;
+  If to use the good thou learnest,
+    Thou wilt surely find it here.
+        GOETHE.
+
+  Do not, then, stand idly waiting
+    For some greater work to do;
+  Fortune is a lazy goddess--
+    She will never come to you.
+  Go and toil in any vineyard,
+    Do not fear to do or dare;
+  If you want a field of labor,
+    You can find it anywhere.
+        ELLEN H. GATES.
+
+  Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,
+    For the far-off, unattained and dim,
+  While the beautiful, all around thee lying
+    Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
+        HARRIET WINSLOW.
+
+  Work for the good that is nighest;
+    Dream not of greatness afar:
+  That glory is ever the highest
+    Which shines upon men as they are.
+        W. MORLEY PUNSHON.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS.
+
+Little strokes fell great oaks.--FRANKLIN.
+
+  Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
+  Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
+  And trifles, life.
+        YOUNG.
+
+  "Scorn not the slightest word or deed,
+    Nor deem it void of power;
+  There's fruit in each wind-wafted seed,
+    That waits its natal hour."
+
+It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in
+trifles.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.
+
+He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and
+little.--ECCLESIASTICUS.
+
+Often from our weakness our strongest principles of conduct are born;
+and from the acorn, which a breeze has wafted, springs the oak which
+defies the storm.--BULWER.
+
+The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.--EMERSON.
+
+Men are led by trifles.--NAPOLEON I.
+
+  "A pebble on the streamlet scant
+    Has turned the course of many a river;
+  A dewdrop on the baby plant
+    Has warped the giant oak forever."
+
+The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing.--SCOTCH
+PROVERB.
+
+"The bad thing about a little sin is that it won't stay little."
+
+  "A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,
+  And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;
+  A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,
+  And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way."
+
+
+"Arletta's pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of
+William the Conqueror," says Palgrave's "History of Normandy and
+England."  "Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of
+Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman
+dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: AGASSIZ]
+
+Small things become great when a great soul sees them.  Trifles light
+as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize
+the world.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the
+ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved
+forever.  We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man
+never saw, walked to the river's edge to find their food.
+
+The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when
+nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.
+
+It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic
+luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of
+the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless
+mental growth.  A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress
+of the human race more than ten centuries.
+
+Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute
+silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.
+
+The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an
+educated man to shame.  Returning home, an Indian discovered that his
+venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen.  After
+careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods.
+Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old,
+white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog.  The man
+told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the
+Indian had not even seen the one he described.  He asked the Indian how
+he could give such a minute description of the man whom he had never
+seen.  "I knew the thief was a little man," said the Indian, "because
+he rolled up a stone to stand on in order to reach the venison; I knew
+he was an old man by his short steps; I knew he was a white man by his
+turning out his toes in walking, which an Indian never does; I knew he
+had a short gun by the mark it left on the tree where he had stood it
+up; I knew the dog was small by his tracks and short steps, and that he
+had a bob-tail by the mark it left in the dust where he sat."
+
+Two drops of rain, falling side by side, were separated a few inches by
+a gentle breeze.  Striking on opposite sides of the roof of a
+court-house in Wisconsin, one rolled southward through the Rock River
+and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico; while the other entered
+successively the Fox River, Green Bay, Lake Michigan, the Straits of
+Mackinaw, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River,
+Lake Erie, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and
+finally reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  How slight the influence of
+the breeze, yet such was the formation of the continent that a trifling
+cause was multiplied almost beyond the power of figures to express its
+momentous effect upon the destinies of these companion raindrops.  Who
+can calculate the future of the smallest trifle when a mud crack swells
+to an Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold?  Who
+does not know that the act of a moment may cause a life's regret?  A
+trigger may be pulled in an instant, but the soul returns never.
+
+A spark falling upon some combustibles led to the invention of
+gunpowder.  Irritable tempers have marred the reputation of many a
+great man, as in the case of Edmund Burke and of Thomas Carlyle.  A few
+bits of seaweed and driftwood, floating on the waves, enabled Columbus
+to stay a mutiny of his sailors which threatened to prevent the
+discovery of a new world.  There are moments in history which balance
+years of ordinary life.  Dana could interest a class for hours on a
+grain of sand; and from a single bone, such as no one had ever seen
+before, Agassiz could deduce the entire structure and habits of an
+animal so accurately that subsequent discoveries of complete skeletons
+have not changed one of his conclusions.
+
+A cricket once saved a military expedition from destruction.  The
+commanding officer and hundreds of his men were going to South America
+on a great ship, and, through the carelessness of the watch, they would
+have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket
+which a soldier had brought on board.  When the little insect scented
+the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned
+them of their danger.
+
+"Strange that a little thing like that should cause a man so much
+pain!" exclaimed a giant, as he rolled in his hand and examined with
+eager curiosity the acorn which his friend the dwarf had obligingly
+taken from the huge eye into which it had fallen just as the colossus
+was on the point of shooting a bird perched in the branches of an oak.
+
+Sometimes a conversation, or a sentence in a letter, or a paragraph in
+an article, will help us to reproduce the whole character of the
+author; as a single bone, a fish scale, a fin, or a tooth, will enable
+the scientist and anatomist to reproduce the fish or the animal,
+although extinct for ages.
+
+By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.  A little boy
+in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a
+dike.  He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the
+water was not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a
+dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of
+passers-by.  His name is still held in grateful remembrance in Holland.
+
+The beetling chalk cliffs of England were built by rhizopods, too small
+to be clearly seen without the aid of a magnifying-glass.
+
+What was so unlikely as that throwing an empty wine-flask in the fire
+should furnish the first notion of a locomotive, or that the sickness
+of an Italian chemist's wife and her absurd craving for reptiles for
+food should begin the electric telegraph?
+
+Madame Galvani noticed the contraction of the muscles of a skinned frog
+which was accidentally touched at the moment her husband took a spark
+from an electrical machine.  She gave the hint which led to the
+discovery of galvanic electricity, now so useful in the arts and in
+transmitting vocal or written language.
+
+M. Louis Pasteur was usher in the Lyceum.  Thursdays he took the boys
+to walk.  A student took his microscope to examine insects, and allowed
+Pasteur to look through it.  This was the starting of the boy on the
+microscopic career which has made men wonder.  He was almost wild with
+enthusiasm at the new world which the microscope revealed.
+
+A stamp act to raise 60,000 pounds produced the American Revolution, a
+war that cost 100,000,000 pounds.  What mighty contests rise from
+trivial things!
+
+Congress met near a livery stable to discuss the Declaration of
+Independence.  The members, in knee breeches and silk stockings, were
+so annoyed by flies, which they could not keep away with their
+handkerchiefs, that it has been said they cut short the debate, and
+hastened to affix their signatures to the greatest document in history.
+
+"The fate of a nation," says Gladstone, "has often depended upon the
+good or bad digestion of a fine dinner."
+
+A young man once went to India to seek his fortune, but, finding no
+opening, he went to his room, loaded his pistol, put the muzzle to his
+head, and pulled the trigger.  But it did not go off.  He went to the
+window to point it in another direction and try it again, resolved that
+if the weapon went off he would regard it as a Providence that he was
+spared.  He pulled the trigger and it went off the first time.
+Trembling with excitement he resolved to hold his life sacred, to make
+the most of it, and never again to cheapen it.  This young man became
+General Robert Clive, who, with but a handful of European soldiers,
+secured to the East India Company and afterwards to Great Britain a
+great and rich country with two hundred millions of people.
+
+The cackling of a goose aroused the sentinels and saved Rome from the
+Gauls, and the pain from a thistle warned a Scottish army of the
+approach of the Danes.  "Had Acre fallen," said Napoleon, "I should
+have changed the face of the world."
+
+Henry Ward Beecher came within one vote of being elected superintendent
+of a railway.  If he had had that vote America would probably have lost
+its greatest preacher.  What a little thing fixes destiny!
+
+In the earliest days of cotton spinning, the small fibres would stick
+to the bobbins, and make it necessary to stop and clear the machinery.
+Although this loss of time reduced the earnings of the operatives, the
+father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full
+pay, as his machine never stopped.  "How is this, Dick?" asked Mr. Peel
+one day; "the on-looker tells me your bobbins are always clean."  "Ay,
+that they be," replied Dick Ferguson.  "How do you manage it, Dick?"
+"Why, you see, Meester Peel," said the workman, "it is sort o' secret!
+If I tow'd ye, yo'd be as wise as I am."  "That's so," said Mr. Peel,
+smiling; "but I'd give you something to know.  Could you make all the
+looms work as smoothly as yours?"  "Ivery one of 'em, meester," replied
+Dick.  "Well, what shall I give you for your secret?" asked Mr. Peel,
+and Dick replied, "Gi' me a quart of ale every day as I'm in the mills,
+and I'll tell thee all about it."  "Agreed," said Mr. Peel, and Dick
+whispered very cautiously in his ear, "Chalk your bobbins!"  That was
+the whole secret, and Mr. Peel soon shot ahead of all his competitors,
+for he made machines that would chalk their own bobbins.  Dick was
+handsomely rewarded with money instead of beer.  His little idea has
+saved the world millions of dollars.
+
+Trifles light as air often suggest to the thinking mind ideas which
+have revolutionized the world.
+
+A poor English boy was compelled by his employer to deposit something
+on board a ship about to start for Algiers, in accordance with the
+merchant's custom of interesting employees by making them put something
+at risk in his business and so share in the gain or loss of each common
+venture.  The boy had only a cat, which he had bought for a penny to
+catch mice in the garret where he slept.  In tears, he carried her on
+board the vessel.  On arriving at Algiers, the captain learned that the
+Dey was greatly annoyed by rats, and loaned him the cat.  The rats
+disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the
+captain would not sell until a very high price was offered.  With the
+purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of
+Tabby.  When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to
+find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the
+bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods.  The
+London merchant took the boy into partnership; the latter became very
+wealthy, and in the course of business loaned money to the Dey who had
+bought the cat.  As Lord Mayor of London, our cat merchant was
+knighted, and became the second man in the city,--Sir Richard
+Whittington.
+
+When John Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, went to the
+South Sea Islands, he took with him a single banana-tree from an
+English nobleman's conservatory; and now, from that single banana-tree,
+bananas are to be found throughout whole groups of islands.  Before the
+negro slaves in the West Indies were emancipated a regiment of British
+soldiers was stationed near one of the plantations.  A soldier offered
+to teach a slave to read on condition that he would teach a second, and
+that second a third, and so on.  This the slave faithfully carried out,
+though severely flogged by the master of the plantation.  Being sent to
+another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at
+length liberty was proclaimed throughout the island, and the Bible
+Society offered a New Testament to every negro who could read, the
+number taught through this slave's instrumentality was found to be no
+less than six hundred.
+
+A famous ruby was offered to the English government.  The report of the
+crown jeweler was that it was the finest he had ever seen or heard of,
+but that one of the "facets" was slightly fractured.  That invisible
+fracture reduced its value thousands of dollars, and it was rejected
+from the regalia of England.
+
+It was a little thing for the janitor to leave a lamp swinging in the
+cathedral at Pisa, but in that steady swaying motion the boy Galileo
+saw the pendulum, and conceived the idea of thus measuring time.
+
+"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," said Edison, "when
+the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of
+my fingers held just behind it.  That set me to thinking.  If I could
+record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface
+afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.  I determined
+to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants
+the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered.  That's
+the whole story.  The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a
+finger."
+
+It was a little thing for a cow to kick over a lantern left in a
+shanty, but it laid Chicago in ashes, and rendered homeless a hundred
+thousand people.
+
+You turned a cold shoulder but once, you made but one stinging remark,
+yet it lost you a friend forever.
+
+Some little weakness, some self-indulgence, a quick temper, want of
+decision, are little things, you say, when placed beside great
+abilities, but they have wrecked many a career.  The Parliament of
+Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative
+governments all over the world have come from King John signing the
+Magna Charta.
+
+Bentham says, "The turn of a sentence has decided many a friendship,
+and, for aught we know, the fate of many a kingdom."
+
+The sight of a stranded cuttlefish led Cuvier to an investigation which
+made him one of the greatest natural historians in the world.  The web
+of a spider suggested to Captain Brown the idea of a suspension bridge.
+A man, looking for a lost horse, picked up a stone in the Idaho
+mountains which led to the discovery of a rich gold mine.
+
+An officer apologized to General O. M. Mitchel, the astronomer, for a
+brief delay, saying he was only a few moments late.  "I have been in
+the habit of calculating the value of the thousandth part of a second,"
+was Mitchel's reply.
+
+A missing marriage certificate kept the hod-carrier of Hugh Miller from
+establishing his claim to the Earldom of Crawford.  The masons would
+call out, "John, Yearl of Crawford, bring us anither hod o' lime."
+
+Not long ago the great steamship Umbria was stopped in mid-Atlantic by
+a flaw in her engine shaft.
+
+The absence of a comma in a bill which passed through Congress several
+years ago cost our government a million dollars.  A single misspelled
+word prevented a deserving young man from obtaining a situation as
+instructor in a New England college.  A cinder on the eyeball will
+conquer a Napoleon.  Some little weakness, as lack of courtesy, want of
+decision, a bad temper, may nullify the labor of years.
+
+"I cannot see that you have made any progress since my last visit,"
+said a gentleman to Michael Angelo.  "But," said the sculptor, "I have
+retouched this part, polished that, softened that feature, brought out
+that muscle, given some expression to this lip, more energy to that
+limb, etc."  "But they are trifles!" exclaimed the visitor.  "It may be
+so," replied the great artist, "but trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle."
+
+That infinite patience which made Michael Angelo spend a week in
+bringing out a muscle in a statue with more vital fidelity to truth, or
+Gerhard Dow a day in giving the right effect to a dewdrop on a cabbage
+leaf, makes all the difference between success and failure.
+
+By scattering it upon a sloping field of grain so as to form, in
+letters of great size, "Effects of Gypsum," Franklin brought this
+fertilizer into general use in America.  By means of a kite he
+established principles in the science of electricity of such broad
+significance that they underlie nearly all the modern applications of
+that science, with probably boundless possibilities of development in
+the future.
+
+More than four hundred and fifty years have passed since Laurens Coster
+amused his children by cutting their names in the bark of trees, in the
+land of windmills, and the monks have laid aside forever their old
+trade of copying books.  From that day monarchies have crumbled, and
+Liberty, lifting up her head for the first time among the nations of
+the earth, has ever since kept pace with the march of her sister,
+Knowledge, up through the centuries.  Yet how simple was the thought
+which has borne such a rich harvest of benefit to mankind.
+
+As he carved the names of his prattling children it occurred to him
+that if the letters were made in separate blocks, and wet with ink,
+they would make clear printed impressions better and more rapidly than
+would the pen.  So he made blocks, tied them together with strings, and
+printed a pamphlet with the aid of a hired man, John Gutenberg.  People
+bought the pamphlets at a slight reduction from the price charged by
+the monks, supposing that the work was done in the old way.  Coster
+died soon afterward, but young Gutenberg kept the secret, and
+experimented with metals until he had invented the metal type.  In an
+obscure chamber in Strasburg he printed his first book.
+
+At about this time a traveler called upon Charles VII. of France, who
+was so afraid somebody would poison him that he dared eat but little,
+and made his servants taste of every dish of food before he ate any.
+He looked with suspicion upon the stranger; but when the latter offered
+a beautiful copy of the Bible for only seven hundred and fifty crowns,
+the monarch bought it at once.  Charles showed his Bible to the
+archbishop, telling him that it was the finest copy in the world,
+without a blot or mistake, and that it must have taken the copyist a
+lifetime to write it.  "Why!" exclaimed the archbishop in surprise, "I
+bought one exactly like it a few days ago."  It was soon learned that
+other rich people in Paris had bought similar copies.  The king traced
+the book to John Faust, of Strasburg, who had furnished Gutenberg money
+to experiment with.  The people said that Faust must have sold himself
+to the devil, and he only escaped burning at the stake by divulging the
+secret.
+
+William Caxton, a London merchant who went to Holland to purchase
+cloth, bought a few books and some type, and established a
+printing-office in Westminster Chapel, where he issued, in 1474, "The
+Game of Chess," the first book printed in England.
+
+The cry of the infant Moses attracted the attention of Pharaoh's
+daughter, and gave the Jews a lawgiver.  A bird alighting on the bough
+of a tree at the mouth of the cave where Mahomet lay hid turned aside
+his pursuers, and gave a prophet to many nations.  A flight of birds
+probably prevented Columbus from discovering this continent, for when
+he was growing anxious, Martin Alonzo Pinzon persuaded him to follow a
+flight of parrots toward the southwest; for to the Spanish seamen of
+that day it was good luck to follow in the wake of a flock of birds
+when on a voyage of discovery.  But for his change of course Columbus
+would have reached the coast of Florida.  "Never," wrote Humboldt, "had
+the flight of birds more important consequences."
+
+The children of a spectacle-maker placed two or more pairs of the
+spectacles before each other in play, and told their father that
+distant objects looked larger.  From this hint came the telescope.
+
+"Of what use is it?" people asked with a sneer, when Franklin told of
+his discovery that lightning and electricity are identical.  "What is
+the use of a child?" replied Franklin; "it may become a man."
+
+"He who waits to do a great deal of good at once," said Dr. Johnson,
+"will never do any."  Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee
+no good.
+
+Every day is a little life; and our whole life but a day repeated.
+Those that dare lose a day are dangerously prodigal, those that dare
+misspend it, desperate.  What is the happiness of your life made up of?
+Little courtesies, little kindnesses, pleasant words, genial smiles, a
+friendly letter, good wishes, and good deeds.  One in a million--once
+in a lifetime--may do a heroic action.  The atomic theory is the true
+one.  Many think common fractions vulgar, but they are the components
+of millions.
+
+He is a great man who sees great things where others see little things,
+who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Ruskin sees a poem in the
+rose or the lily, while the hod-carrier would perhaps not go a rod out
+of his way to see a sunset which Ruskin would feed upon for a year.
+
+Napoleon was a master of trifles.  To details which his inferior
+officers thought too microscopic for their notice he gave the most
+exhaustive attention.  Nothing was too small for his attention.  He
+must know all about the provisions, the horse fodder, the biscuits, the
+camp kettles, the shoes.  When the bugle sounded for the march to
+battle, every officer had his orders as to the exact route which he
+should follow, the exact day he was to arrive at a certain station, and
+the exact hour he was to leave, and they were all to reach the point of
+destination at a precise moment.  It is said that nothing could be more
+perfectly planned than his memorable march which led to the victory of
+Austerlitz, and which sealed the fate of Europe for many years.  He
+would often charge his absent officers to send him perfectly accurate
+returns, even to the smallest detail.  "When they are sent to me, I
+give up every occupation in order to read them in detail, and to
+observe the difference between one monthly return and another.  No
+young girl enjoys her novel as much as I do these returns."  The
+captain who conveyed Napoleon to Elba was astonished with his
+familiarity with all the minute details connected with the ship.
+Napoleon left nothing to chance, nothing to contingency, so far as he
+could possibly avoid it.  Everything was planned to a nicety before he
+attempted to execute it.
+
+Wellington too was "great in little things."  He knew no such things as
+trifles.  While other generals trusted to subordinates, he gave his
+personal attention to the minutest detail.  The history of many a
+failure could be written in three words, "Lack of detail."  How many a
+lawyer has failed from the lack of details in deeds and important
+papers, the lack of little words which seemed like surplusage, and
+which involved his clients in litigation, and often great losses!  How
+many wills are contested from the carelessness of lawyers in the
+omission or shading of words, or ambiguous use of language!
+
+Physicians often fail to make a reputation through their habitual
+blundering, carelessness in writing prescriptions, failure to give
+minute instruction.  The world is full of blunderers; business men fail
+from a disregard of trifles; they go to the bank to pay a note the day
+after it has gone to protest; they do not pay their bills promptly; do
+not answer their letters promptly or file them away accurately; their
+books do not quite balance; they do not know exactly how they stand,
+they have a contempt for details.
+
+"My rule of conduct has been that whatever is worth doing at all is
+worth doing well," said Nicolas Poussin, the great French painter.
+When asked the reason why he had become so eminent in a land of famous
+artists he replied, "Because I have neglected nothing."
+
+Not even Helen of Troy, it is said, was beautiful enough to spare the
+tip of her nose; and if Cleopatra's had been an inch shorter Mark
+Antony would never have become infatuated with her wonderful charms,
+and the blemish would have changed the history of the world.  Anne
+Boleyn's fascinating smile split the great Church of Rome in twain, and
+gave a nation an altered destiny.  Napoleon, who feared not to attack
+the proudest monarchs in their capitols, shrank from the political
+influence of one independent woman in private life, Madame de Stael.
+Had not Scott sprained his foot his life would probably have taken a
+different direction.
+
+Cromwell was about to sail for America when a law was passed
+prohibiting emigration.  At that time he was a profligate, having
+squandered all his property.  But when he found that he could not leave
+England he reformed his life.  Had he not been detained who can tell
+what the history of Great Britain would have been?
+
+When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that
+could be of little use to him, he answered, "It is in these useless and
+superfluous things that I am rich and happy."
+
+It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon's day.  Mites
+play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and
+furs, and mice in our pantries.  More than half our diseases are
+produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.
+
+Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice.
+There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the
+peace, the happiness, of a home.
+
+"We call the large majority of human lives obscure," says Bulwer,
+"presumptuous that we are!  How know we what lives a single thought
+retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?"
+
+The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe.
+From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each
+trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a
+Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the
+science of botany.  A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools
+by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat, and a prism, a lens, and a
+sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light
+and the origin of colors.  An eminent foreign savant called on Dr.
+Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in
+which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the
+doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray
+on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small
+balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory."  A burnt
+stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper.  A
+single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the
+sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving
+famine from Ireland again and again.
+
+It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and
+the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as
+Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people.  A cloud may hide
+the sun which it cannot extinguish.
+
+"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth."  "A look of
+vexation or a word coldly spoken, or a little help thoughtlessly
+withheld, may produce long issues of regret."
+
+It was but a little dispute, a little flash of temper, the trigger was
+pulled in an instant, but the soul returned never.
+
+A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from
+Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its
+action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished
+forever.
+
+  "For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
+  For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
+  For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,"
+
+says Poor Richard, "for want of a horse-shoe nail."
+
+A single remark dropped by an unknown person in the street led to the
+successful story of "The Bread-winners."  A hymn chanted by the
+barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter at Rome led to the famous
+"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
+
+"Do little things now," says a Persian proverb; "so shall big things
+come to thee by and by asking to be done."  God will take care of the
+great things if we do not neglect the little ones.
+
+"Words are things," says Byron, "and a small drop of ink, falling like
+dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps
+millions think."
+
+"I give these books for the founding of a college in this colony;" such
+were the words of ten ministers who in the year 1700 assembled at the
+village of Branford a few miles east of New Haven.  Each of the worthy
+fathers deposited a few books upon the table around which they were
+sitting; such was the founding of Yale College.
+
+"He that has a spirit of detail," says Webster, "will do better in life
+than many who figured beyond him in the university."
+
+The pyramid of knowledge is made up of little grains of information,
+little observations picked up from everywhere.
+
+For a thousand years Asia monopolized the secret of silk culture, and
+at Rome the product was sold for its weight in gold.  During the sixth
+century, at the request of Justinian, two Persian monks brought a few
+eggs from China to Europe in a hollow cane.  The eggs were hatched by
+means of heat, and Asia no longer held the monopoly of the silk
+business.
+
+In comparison with Ferdinand, preparing to lead forth his magnificent
+army in Europe's supreme contest with the Moors, how insignificant
+seemed the visionary expedition of Columbus, about to start in three
+small shallops across the unknown ocean.  But grand as was the triumph
+of Ferdinand, it now seems hardly worthy of mention in comparison with
+the wonderful achievement of the poor Genoese navigator.
+
+Only one hundred and ninety-two Athenians perished in the battle of
+Marathon, but Europe was saved from a host which is said to have drunk
+rivers dry, and to have shaken the solid earth as they marched.
+
+Great men are noted for their attention to trifles.  Goethe once asked
+a monarch to excuse him, during an interview, while he went to an
+adjoining room to jot down a stray thought.  Hogarth would make
+sketches of rare faces and characteristics upon his finger-nails upon
+the streets.  Indeed, to a truly great mind there are no little things.
+"The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you
+may see objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great
+axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances," said Bacon.
+Trifles light as air suggest to the keen observer the solution of
+mighty problems.  Bits of glass arranged to amuse children led to the
+discovery of the kaleidoscope.  Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize
+rubber by forgetting, until it became red hot, a skillet containing a
+compound which he had before considered worthless.  Confined in the
+house by typhoid fever, Helmholtz, with a little money which he had
+saved by great economy, bought a microscope which led him into the
+field of science where he became so famous.  A ship-worm boring a piece
+of wood suggested to Sir Isambard Brunei the idea of a tunnel under the
+Thames at London.  Tracks of extinct animals in the old red sandstone
+led Hugh Miller on and on until he became the greatest geologist of his
+time.  Sir Walter Scott once saw a shepherd boy plodding sturdily
+along, and asked him to ride.  This boy was George Kemp, who became so
+enthusiastic in his study of sculpture that he walked fifty miles and
+back to see a beautiful statue.  He did not forget the kindness of Sir
+Walter, and, when the latter died, threw his soul into the design of
+the magnificent monument erected in Edinburgh to the memory of the
+author of "Waverley."
+
+A poor boy applied for a situation at a bank in Paris, but was refused.
+As he left the door, he picked up a pin.  The bank president saw this,
+called the boy back, and gave him a situation from which he rose until
+he became the greatest banker of Paris,--Laffitte.
+
+It was the turning point in Theodore Parker's life when he picked up a
+stone to throw at a turtle.  Something within him said, "Don't do it,"
+and he didn't.  He went home and asked his mother what it was in him
+that said "Don't;" and she taught him the purpose of that inward
+monitor which he ever after chose as his guide.  It is said that David
+Hume became a deist by being appointed in a debating society to take
+the side of infidelity.  Voltaire could not erase from his mind the
+impression of a poem on infidelity committed at the age of five.  The
+"Arabian Nights" aroused the genius of Coleridge.  A Massachusetts
+soldier in the Civil War observed a bird hulling rice, and shot it;
+taking its bill for a model, he invented a hulling machine which has
+revolutionized the rice business.  A war between France and England,
+costing more than a hundred thousand lives, grew out of a quarrel as to
+which of two vessels should first be served with water.  The quarrel of
+two Indian boys over a grasshopper led to the "Grasshopper War."
+George IV. of England fell in a fit, and a village apothecary bled him,
+restoring him to consciousness.  The king made him his physician, a
+position of great honor and profit.
+
+Many a noble ship has stranded because of one defective timber, when
+all other parts were strong.  Guard the weak point.
+
+No object the eye ever beheld, no sound however slight caught by the
+ear, or anything once passing the turnstile of any of the senses, is
+ever let go.  The eye is a perpetual camera imprinting upon the
+sensitive mental plates, and packing away in the brain for future use
+every face, every tree, every plant, flower, hill, stream, mountain,
+every scene upon the street, in fact, everything which comes within its
+range.  There is a phonograph in our natures which catches, however
+thoughtless and transient, every syllable we utter, and registers
+forever the slightest enunciation, and renders it immortal.  These
+notes may appear a thousand years hence, reproduced in our descendants,
+in all their beautiful or terrible detail.
+
+All the ages that have been are rounded up into the small space we call
+"To-day."  Every life spans all that precedes it.  To-day is a book
+which contains everything that has transpired in the world up to the
+present moment.  The millions of the past whose ashes have mingled with
+the dust for centuries still live in their destinies through the laws
+of heredity.
+
+Nothing has ever been lost.  All the infinitesimals of the past are
+amassed into the present.
+
+The first acorn had wrapped up in it all the oak forests on the globe.
+
+"Least of all seeds, greatest of all harvests," seems to be one of the
+great laws of nature.  All life comes from microscopic beginnings.  In
+nature there is nothing small.  The microscope reveals as great a world
+below as the telescope above.  All of nature's laws govern the smallest
+atoms, and a single drop of water is a miniature ocean.
+
+The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, however large and
+strong all the others may be.  We are all inclined to be proud of our
+strong points, while we are sensitive and neglectful of our weaknesses.
+Yet it is our greatest weakness which measures our real strength.  A
+soldier who escapes the bullets of a thousand battles may die from the
+scratch of a pin, and many a ship has survived the shocks of icebergs
+and the storms of ocean only to founder in a smooth sea from holes made
+by tiny insects.  Drop by drop is instilled into the mind the poison
+which blasts many a precious life.
+
+How often do we hear people say, "Oh, it's only ten minutes, or twenty
+minutes, till dinner time; there's no use doing anything," or use other
+expressions of a like effect?  Why, it is just in these little spare
+bits of time, these odd moments, which most people throw away, that men
+who have risen have gained their education, written their books, and
+made themselves immortal.
+
+_Small things become great when a great soul sees them_.  The noble or
+heroic act of one man has sometimes elevated a nation.  Many an
+honorable career has resulted from a kind word spoken in season or the
+warm grasp of a friendly hand.
+
+  It is the little rift within the lute,
+  That by and by will make the music mute,
+  And, ever widening, slowly silence all.
+        TENNYSON.
+
+  "It was only a glad 'good-morning,'
+  As she passed along the way,
+  But it spread the morning's glory
+  Over the livelong day."
+
+  "Only a thought in passing--a smile, or encouraging word,
+  Has lifted many a burden no other gift could have stirred.
+          Only!--But then the onlys
+          Make up the mighty all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+SELF-MASTERY.
+
+          Give me that man
+  That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
+  In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.
+        SHAKESPEARE.
+
+Strength of character consists of two things,--power of will and power
+of self-restraint.  It requires two things, therefore, for its
+existence,--strong feelings and strong command over them.--F. W.
+ROBERTSON.
+
+  "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
+  These three alone lead life to sovereign power."
+
+  The bravest trophy ever man obtained
+  Is that which o'er himself himself hath gained.
+        EARL OF STIRLING.
+
+Real glory springs from the conquest of ourselves; and without that the
+conqueror is naught but the veriest slave.--THOMSON.
+
+Whatever day makes man a slave takes half his worth away.--ODYSSEY.
+
+Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast.  Lead thine own captivity
+captive, and be Caesar within thyself.--THOMAS BROWNE.
+
+He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears,
+is more than a king.--MILTON.
+
+He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty: and he that ruleth
+his spirit than he that taketh a city.--BIBLE.
+
+Self-trust is of the essence of heroism.--EMERSON.
+
+  Man who man would be
+  Must rule the empire of himself.
+        P. B. SHELLEY.
+
+
+"Ah!  Diamond, you little know the mischief you have wrought," said Sir
+Isaac Newton, returning from supper to find that his dog had upset a
+lighted taper upon the laborious calculations of years, which lay in
+ashes before him.  Then he went calmly to work to reproduce them.  The
+man who thus excelled in self-mastery surpassed all his predecessors
+and contemporaries in mastering the laws of nature.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+[Illustration: JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL]
+
+  "We rise by the things that are under our feet;
+  By what we have mastered of good or gain:
+  By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
+  And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The sun was high in the heavens when a man called at the house of
+Pericles to abuse him.  The man's anger knew no bounds.  He vented his
+spite in violent language until he paused from sheer exhaustion, and
+saw that it was quite dark without.  He turned to go home, when
+Pericles calmly called a servant, and said, "Bring a lamp and attend
+this man home."  Is any argument needed to show the superiority of
+Pericles?
+
+The gladiators who were trained to tight in the Coliseum were compelled
+to practice the most graceful postures of falling and the finest
+attitudes to assume in dying, in case they were vanquished.  They were
+obliged to eat food which would make the blood thick in order that they
+should not die quickly when wounded, thus giving the spectators
+prolonged gratification by the spectacle of their agonies.  Each had to
+take this oath: "We swear that we will suffer ourselves to be bound,
+scourged, burned, or killed by the sword, or whatever Eumolpus ordains,
+and thus, like freeborn gladiators, we religiously devote both our
+souls and our bodies to our master."  They were trained to exercise
+sublime self-control even when dying a cruel death.
+
+The American Minister at St. Petersburg was summoned one morning to
+save a young, dissolute, reckless American youth, Poe, from the
+penalties incurred in a drunken debauch.  By the Minister's aid young
+Poe returned to the United States.  Not long after this the author of
+the best story and poem competed for in the "Baltimore Visitor" was
+sent for, and behold, the youth who had taken both prizes was that same
+dissolute, reckless, penniless, orphan youth, who had been arrested in
+St. Petersburg,--pale, ragged, with no stockings, and with his
+threadbare but well brushed coat buttoned to the chin to conceal the
+lack of a shirt.  Young Poe took fresh courage and resolution, and for
+a while showed that he was superior to the appetite which was striving
+to drag him down.  But, alas, that fatal bottle! his mind was stored
+with riches, yet he died in moral poverty.  This was a soldier's
+epitaph:--
+
+  "Here lies a soldier whom all must applaud,
+  Who fought many battles at home and abroad!
+  But the hottest engagement he ever was in,
+  Was the conquest of self, in the battle of sin."
+
+
+In 1860, when a committee visited Abraham Lincoln at his home in
+Springfield, Ill., to notify him of his nomination as President, he
+ordered a pitcher of water and glasses, "that they might drink each
+other's health in the best beverage God ever gave to man."  "Let us,"
+he continued, "make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the
+temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets in
+church, and instances will be as rare in one case as the other."
+
+Burns exercised no control over his appetites, but gave them the rein:--
+
+  "Thus thoughtless follies laid him low
+  And stained his name."
+
+
+"The first and best of victories," says Plato, "is for a man to conquer
+himself; to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most
+shameful and vile."
+
+Self-control is at the root of all the virtues.  Let a man yield to his
+impulses and passions, and from that moment he gives up his moral
+freedom.
+
+"Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasurable," says Walter
+Scott, "and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever
+issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer."
+
+Stonewall Jackson, early in life, determined to conquer every weakness
+he had, physical, mental, and moral.  He held all of his powers with a
+firm hand.  To his great self-discipline and self-mastery he owed his
+success.  So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he
+could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter.  "I will not give
+in to the cold," he said.  For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he
+lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body
+because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the
+idea.  This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military
+Institute.  His doctor advised him to retire at nine o'clock; and, no
+matter where he was, or who was present, he always sought his bed on
+the minute.  He adhered rigidly through life to this stern system of
+discipline.  Such self-training, such self-conquest, gives one great
+power over others.  It is equal to genius itself.
+
+It is a good plan to form the habit of ranking our various qualities,
+marking our strongest point one hundred and all the others in
+proportion, in order to make the lowest mark more apparent, and
+enabling us to try to raise or strengthen it.  A man's industry, for
+example, may be his strongest point, one hundred, his physical courage
+may be fifty; his moral courage, seventy-five; his temper, twenty-five;
+with but ten for self-control,--which, if he has strong appetites and
+passions, will be likely to be the rock on which he will split.  He
+should strive in every way to raise it from one of the weakest
+qualities to one of the strongest.  It would take but two or three
+minutes a day to rank ourselves in such a table by noting the exercise
+of each faculty for the day.  If you have worked hard and faithfully,
+mark industry one hundred.  If you have lost your temper, and, in
+consequence, lost your self-control, and made a fool of yourself,
+indicate it by a low mark.  This will be an incentive to try to raise
+it the next day.  If you have been irritable, indicate it by a
+corresponding mark, and redeem yourself on the morrow.  If you have
+been cowardly where you should have been brave, hesitating where you
+should have shown decision, false where you should have been true,
+foolish where you should have been wise, tardy where you should have
+been prompt; if you have prevaricated where you should have told the
+exact truth; if you have taken the advantage where you should have been
+fair, have been unjust where you should have been just, impatient where
+you should have been patient, cross where you should have been
+cheerful, so indicate by your marks.  You will find this a great aid to
+character building.
+
+It is a subtle and profound remark of Hegel's that the riddle which the
+Sphinx, the Egyptian symbol of the mysteriousness of Nature, propounds
+to Oedipus is only another way of expressing the command of the Delphic
+oracle, "Know thyself."  And when the answer is given the Sphinx casts
+herself down from her rock.  When man knows himself, the mysteriousness
+of Nature and her terrors vanish.
+
+The command by the ancient oracle at Delphos is of eternal
+significance.  Add to it its natural complement--Help thyself--and the
+path to success is open to those who obey.
+
+_Guard your weak point_.  Moral contagion borrows fully half its
+strength from the weakness of its victims.  Have you a hot, passionate
+temper?  If so, a moment's outbreak, like a rat-hole in a dam, may
+flood all the work of years.  One angry word sometimes raises a storm
+that time itself cannot allay.  A single angry word has lost many a
+friend.
+
+A Quaker was asked by a merchant whom he had conquered by his patience
+how he had been able to bear the other's abuse, and replied: "Friend, I
+will tell thee.  I was naturally as hot and violent as thou art.  I
+observed that men in a passion always speak loud, and I thought if I
+could control my voice I should repress my passion.  I have therefore
+made it a rule never to let my voice rise above a certain key, and by a
+careful observance of this rule, I have, by the blessing of God,
+entirely mastered my natural tongue."  Mr. Christmas of the Bank of
+England explains that the secret of his self-control under very trying
+circumstances was due to a rule learned from the great Pitt, never to
+lose his temper during banking hours from nine to three.
+
+When Socrates found in himself any disposition to anger, he would check
+it by speaking low, in opposition to the motions of his displeasure.
+If you are conscious of being in a passion, keep your mouth shut, lest
+you increase it.  Many a person has dropped dead in a rage.  Fits of
+anger bring fits of disease.  "Whom the gods would destroy they first
+make mad."  "Keep cool," says Webster, "anger is not argument."  "Be
+calm in arguing," says George Herbert, "for fierceness makes error a
+fault, and truth discourtesy."
+
+To be angry with a weak man is to prove that you are not strong
+yourself.  "Anger," says Pythagoras, "begins with folly and ends with
+repentance."  You must measure the strength of a man by the power of
+the feelings he subdues, not by the power of those which subdue him.
+
+De Leon, a distinguished Spanish poet, after lying years in dungeons of
+the Inquisition, dreary, and alone, without light, for translating part
+of the Scriptures into his native tongue, was released and restored to
+his professorship.  A great crowd thronged to hear his first lecture,
+out of curiosity to learn what he might say about his imprisonment.
+But the great man merely resumed the lecture which had been so cruelly
+broken off five years before, just where he left it, with the words
+"Heri discebamus" (Yesterday we were teaching).  What a lesson in this
+remarkable example of self-control for those who allow their tongues to
+jabber whatever happens to be uppermost in their minds!
+
+Did you ever see a man receive a flagrant insult, and only grow a
+little pale, bite his quivering lip, and then reply quietly?  Did you
+ever see a man in anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock,
+mastering himself?  Have you not seen one bearing a hopeless daily
+trial remain silent and never tell the world what cankered his home
+peace?  That is strength.  "He who, with strong passions, remains
+chaste; he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in
+him, can be provoked, and yet restrain himself and forgive,--these are
+strong men, the spiritual heroes."
+
+"You will be remembered only as the man who broke my nose," said young
+Michael Angelo to the man Torrigiano, who struck him in anger.  What
+sublime self-control for a quick-tempered man!
+
+"You ask whether it would not be manly to resent a great injury," said
+Eardley Wilmot: "I answer that it would be manly to resent it, but it
+would be Godlike to forgive it."
+
+That man has conquered his tongue who can allow the ribald jest or
+scurrilous word to die unspoken on his lips, and maintain an indignant
+silence amid reproaches and accusations and sneers and scoffs.  "He is
+a fool who cannot be angry," says English, "but he is a wise man who
+will not."
+
+Peter the Great made a law in 1722 that a nobleman who should beat his
+slave should be regarded as insane, and a guardian appointed to look
+after his property and person.  This great monarch once struck his
+gardener, who took to his bed and died.  Peter, hearing of this,
+exclaimed with tears in his eyes, "Alas!  I have civilized my own
+subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet have I not been able to
+civilize or conquer myself."  The same monarch, when drunk, rushed upon
+Admiral Le Fort with a sword.  Le Fort, with great self-possession,
+bared his breast to receive the stroke.  This sobered Peter, and
+afterwards he asked the pardon of Le Fort.  Peter said, "I am trying to
+reform my country, and I am not yet able to reform myself."
+Self-conquest is man's last and greatest victory.
+
+A medical authority of highest repute affirms that excessive labor,
+exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of
+necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth and
+intemperance, are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none
+of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passion,--that men and women
+have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these, but that
+instances are very rare where people of irascible tempers live to
+extreme old age.
+
+It was the self-discipline of a man who had never looked upon war until
+he was forty that enabled Oliver Cromwell to create an army which never
+fought without annihilating, yet which retired into the ranks of
+industry as soon as the government was established, each soldier being
+distinguished from his neighbors only by his superior diligence,
+sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace.
+
+How sweet the serenity of habitual self-command!  When does a man feel
+more a master of himself than when he has passed through a sudden and
+severe provocation in silence or in undisturbed good humor?
+
+Whether teaching the rules of an exact morality, answering his corrupt
+judges, receiving sentence of death, or swallowing the poison, Socrates
+was still calm, quiet, undisturbed, intrepid.
+
+It is a great thing to have brains, but it is vastly greater to be able
+to command them.  The Duke of Wellington had great power over himself,
+although his natural temper was extremely irritable.  He remained at
+the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning
+of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful," although he
+knew that a desperate battle was awaiting him.  On the field of
+Waterloo he gave his orders at the most critical moments without the
+slightest excitement.
+
+Napoleon, having made his arrangements for the terrible conflict of the
+next day (Jena and Auerstadt), retired to his tent about midnight, and
+calmly sat down to draw up a plan of study and discipline for Madame
+Campan's female school.  "Keep cool, and you command everybody," says
+St. Just.
+
+  "He that would govern others first should be
+  The master of himself,"
+
+says Massinger.
+
+He who has mastered himself, who is his own Caesar, will be stronger
+than his passion, superior to circumstances, higher than his calling,
+greater than his speech.  Self-control is the generalship which turns a
+mob of raw recruits into a disciplined army.  The rough man has become
+the polished and dignified soldier, in other words, the man has got
+control of himself, and knows how to use himself.  The human race is
+under constant drill.  Our occupations, difficulties, obstacles,
+disappointments, if used aright, are the great schoolmasters which help
+us to possess ourselves.  The man who is master of himself will not be
+a slave to drudgery, but will keep in advance of his work.  He will not
+rob his family of that which is worth more than money or position; he
+will not be the slave of his occupation, not at the mercy of
+circumstances.  His methods and system will enable him to accomplish
+wonders, and yet give him leisure for self-culture.  The man who
+controls himself works to live rather than lives for work.
+
+The man of great self-control, the man who thinks a great deal and says
+little, who is self-centred, well balanced, carries a thousand times
+more weight than the man of weak will, always wavering and undecided.
+
+If a man lacks self-control he seems to lack everything.  Without it he
+can have no patience, no power to govern himself, he can have no
+self-reliance, for he will always be at the mercy of his strongest
+passion.  If he lacks self-control, the very backbone, pith, and nerve
+of character are lacking also.
+
+The discipline which is the main end in education is simply control
+acquired over one's mental faculties; without this discipline no man is
+a strong and accurate thinker.  "Prove to me," says Mrs. Oliphant,
+"that you can control yourself, and I'll say you're an educated man;
+and, without this, all other education is good for next to nothing."
+
+The wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, was a woman of a most fantastical and
+furious spirit.  At one time, having vented all the reproaches upon
+Socrates her fury could suggest, he went out and sat before the door.
+His calm and unconcerned behavior but irritated her so much the more;
+and, in the excess of her rage, she ran upstairs and emptied a vessel
+upon his head, at which he only laughed and said that "so much thunder
+must needs produce a shower."  Alcibiades his friend, talking with him
+about his wife, told him he wondered how he could bear such an
+everlasting scold in the same house with him.  He replied, "I have so
+accustomed myself to expect it, that it now offends me no more than the
+noise of carriages in the street."
+
+How many men have in their chain of character one weak link.  They may
+be weak in the link of truthfulness, politeness, trustworthiness,
+temper, chastity, temperance, courage, industry, or may have some other
+weakness which wrecks their success and thwarts a life's endeavor.  He
+who would succeed must hold all his faculties under perfect control;
+they must be disciplined, drilled, until they obey the will.
+
+Think of a young man just starting out in life to conquer the world
+being at the mercy of his own appetites and passions!  He cannot stand
+up and look the world in the face when he is the slave of what should
+be his own servants.  He cannot lead who is led.  There is nothing
+which gives certainty and direction to the life of a man who is not his
+own master.  If he has mastered all but one appetite, passion, or
+weakness, he is still a slave; it is the weakest point that measures
+the strength of character.
+
+Seneca, one of the greatest of the ancient philosophers, said that "we
+should every night call ourselves to account.  What infirmity have I
+mastered to-day? what passion opposed? what temptation resisted? what
+virtue acquired?" and then he follows with the profound truth that "our
+vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the
+shrift."  If you cannot at first control your anger, learn to control
+your tongue, which, like fire, is a good servant, but a hard master.
+
+Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks' silence.  There is many a man
+whose tongue might govern multitudes if he could only govern his
+tongue.  Anger, like too much wine, hides us from ourselves, but
+exposes us to others.
+
+General von Moltke, perhaps the greatest strategist of this century,
+had, as a foundation for his other talents, the power to "hold his
+tongue in seven languages."  A young man went to Socrates to learn
+oratory.  On being introduced, he talked so incessantly that Socrates
+asked for double fees.  "Why charge me double?" asked the young fellow.
+"Because," said the orator, "I must teach you two sciences: the one how
+to hold your tongue, the other how to speak."  The first is the more
+difficult.
+
+Half the actual trouble of life would be saved if people would remember
+that silence is golden, when they are irritated, vexed, or annoyed.
+
+To feel provoked or exasperated at a trifle, when the nerves are
+exhausted, is, perhaps, natural to us in our imperfect state.  But why
+put into the shape of speech the annoyance which, once uttered, is
+remembered; which may burn like a blistering wound, or rankle like a
+poisoned arrow?  If a child be crying or a friend capricious, or a
+servant unreasonable, be careful what you say.  Do not speak while you
+feel the impulse of anger, for you will be almost certain to say too
+much, to say more than your cooler judgment will approve, and to speak
+in a way that you will regret.  Be silent until the "sweet by and by,"
+when you will be calm, rested, and self-controlled.
+
+"Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words?  There is more hope of a
+fool than of him."
+
+"Silence," says Zimmerman, "is the safest response for all the
+contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy."
+
+In rhetoric, as Emerson truly says, this art of omission is the chief
+secret of power.  "Everything tells in favor of the man who talks but
+little.  The presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in point
+of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is that he
+is very superior indeed."  Grant was master of the science of silence.
+
+The self-controlled are self-possessed.  "Sir, the house is on fire!"
+shrieked a frightened servant, running into Dr. Lawson's study.  "Go
+and tell your mistress," said the preoccupied professor, without
+looking up from the book he was reading; "you know I have no charge of
+household matters."  A woman whose house was on fire threw a
+looking-glass out of the window, and carried a pair of andirons several
+rods to a safe place beside a stone wall.  "Presence of mind and
+courage in distress are more than armies to procure success."
+
+Xenophon tells us that at one time the Persian princes had for their
+teachers the four best men in the kingdom.  (1) The wisest man to teach
+wisdom.  (2) The bravest to teach courage.  (3) The most just to train
+the moral nature.  (4) The most temperate to teach self-control.  We
+have them all in the Bible, and in Christ our teacher, an example.  "If
+it is a small sacrifice to discontinue the use of wine," said Samuel J.
+May, "do it for the sake of others; if it is a great sacrifice, do it
+for your own sake."  How many of nature's noblemen, who might be kings
+if they could control themselves, drink away their honor, reputation,
+and money in glasses of "wet damnation," more costly than the vinegar
+in which Cleopatra dissolved her pearls.
+
+Experience shows that, quicker than almost any other physical agency,
+alcohol breaks down a man's power of self-control.  But the physical
+evils of intemperance, great as they are, are slight, compared with the
+moral injury it produces.  It is not simply that vices and crimes
+almost inevitably follow the loss of rational self-direction, which is
+the invariable accompaniment of intoxication; manhood is lowered and
+finally lost by the sensual tyranny of appetite.  The drunken man has
+given up the reins of his nature to a fool or a fiend, and he is driven
+fast to base or unutterably foolish ends.
+
+With almost palsied hand, at a temperance meeting, John B. Gough signed
+the pledge.  For six days and nights in a wretched garret, without a
+mouthful of food, with scarcely a moment's sleep, he fought the fearful
+battle with appetite.  Weak, famished, almost dying, he crawled into
+the sunlight; but he had conquered the demon, which had almost killed
+him.  Gough used to describe the struggles of a man who tried to leave
+off using tobacco.  He threw away what he had, and said that was the
+end of it; but no, it was only the beginning of it.  He would chew
+camomile, gentian, toothpicks, but it was of no use.  He bought another
+plug of tobacco and put it in his pocket.  He wanted a chew awfully,
+but he looked at it and said, "You are a weed, and I am a _man_.  I'll
+master you if I die for it;" and he did, while carrying it in his
+pocket daily.
+
+Natural appetites, if given rein, will not only grow monstrous and
+despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a
+ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and
+then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock
+his efforts to free himself from this slavery.  The victim of strong
+drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he becomes half
+beast, or half demon.  Oh, the silent, suffering tongues that whisper
+"Don't," but the will lies prostrate, and the debauch goes on.  What a
+mute confession of degradation there is in the very appearance of a
+confirmed sot.  Behold a man no longer in possession of himself; the
+flesh is master; the spiritual nature is sunk in the mire of
+sensuality, and the mental faculties are a mere mob of enfeebled powers
+under bondage to a bestial or mad tyrant.  As Challis says:--
+
+  "Once the demon enters,
+    Stands within the door;
+  Peace and hope and gladness
+    Dwell there nevermore."
+
+
+Many persons are intemperate in their feelings; they are emotionally
+prodigal.  Passion is intemperance; so is caprice.  There is an
+intemperance even in melancholy and mirth.  The temperate man is not
+mastered by his moods; he will not be driven or enticed into excess;
+his steadfast will conquers despondency, and is not unbalanced by
+transient exhilarations, for ecstasy is as fatal as despair.  Temper is
+subjected to reason and conscience.  How many people excuse themselves
+for doing wrong or foolish acts by the plea that they have a quick
+temper.  But he who is king of himself rules his temper, turning its
+very heat and passion into energy that works good instead of evil.
+Stephen Girard, when he heard of a clerk with a strong temper, was glad
+to employ him.  He believed that such persons, taught self-control,
+were the best workers.  Controlled temper is an element of strength;
+wisely regulated, it expends itself as energy in work, just as heat in
+an engine is transmuted into force that drives the wheels of industry.
+Cromwell, William the Silent, Wordsworth, Faraday, Washington, and
+Wellington were men of prodigious tempers, but they were also men whose
+self-control was nearly perfect.
+
+George Washington's faculties were so well balanced and combined that
+his constitution was tempered evenly with all the elements of activity,
+and his mind resembled a well organized commonwealth.  His passions,
+which had the intensest vigor, owed allegiance to reason; and with all
+the fiery quickness of his spirit, his impetuous and massive will was
+held in check by consummate judgment.  He had in his composition a calm
+which was a balance-wheel, and which gave him in moments of highest
+excitement the power of self-control, and enabled him to excel in
+patience, even when he had most cause for disgust.
+
+It was said by an enemy of William the Silent that an arrogant or
+indiscreet word never fell from his lips.
+
+How brilliantly could Carlyle write of heroism, courage, self-control,
+and yet fly into a rage at a rooster crowing in a neighbor's yard.
+
+A self-controlled mind is a free mind, and freedom is power.
+
+"I call that mind free," says Channing, "which jealously guards its
+intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does
+not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens
+itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as
+an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still
+more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad,
+not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt its own energies.  I call
+that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances,
+which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the
+creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own
+improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles
+which it has deliberately espoused.  I call that mind free which
+protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not
+cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher
+tribunal than man's, which respects a higher law than fashion, which
+respects itself too much to be the slave or tool of the many or the
+few.  I call that mind free which through confidence in God and in the
+power of virtue has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no
+menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults,
+and possesses itself though all else be lost.  I call that mind free
+which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat
+itself and copy the past, which does not live on its old virtues, which
+does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is
+behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and
+rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.  I call
+that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself
+from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as
+nobler than the empire of the world."
+
+  Be free--not chiefly from the iron chain
+  But from the one which passion forges--be
+  The master of thyself.  If lost, regain
+  The rule o'er chance, sense, circumstance.  Be free.
+        EPHRAIM PEABODY.
+
+
+"It is not enough to have great qualities," says La Rochefoucauld; "we
+should also have the management of them."  No man can call himself
+educated until every voluntary muscle obeys his will.
+
+Every human being is conscious of two natures.  One is ever reaching up
+after the good, the true, and the noble,--is aspiring after all that
+uplifts, elevates, and purifies.  It is the God-side of man, the image
+of the Creator, the immortal side, the spiritual side.  It is the
+gravitation of the soul faculties toward their Maker.  The other is the
+bestial side which gravitates downward.  It does not aspire, it
+grovels; it wallows in the mire of sensualism.  Like the beast, it
+knows but one law, and is led by only one motive, self-indulgence,
+self-gratification.  When neither hungry nor thirsty, or when gorged
+and sated by over-indulgence, it lies quiet and peaceful as a lamb, and
+we sometimes think it subdued.  But when its imperious passion
+accumulates, it clamors for satisfaction.  You cannot reason with it,
+for it has no reason, only an imperious instinct for gratification.
+You cannot appeal to its self-respect, for it has none.  It cares
+nothing for character, for manliness, for the spiritual.
+
+These two natures are ever at war, one pulling heavenward, the other,
+earthward.  Nor do they ever become reconciled.  Either may conquer,
+but the vanquished never submits.  The higher nature may be compelled
+to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always
+rebels and enters its protest.  It can never forget that it bears the
+image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism.
+The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed.  If
+the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to
+look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he could
+only hush the voice which haunts him and condemns him when he is bound
+in slavery, if he could only enjoy his indulgences without the mockery
+of remorse, he thinks he would be content to remain a brute.  But the
+ghost of his better self rises as he is about to partake of his
+delight, and robs him of the expected pleasure.  He has sold his better
+self for pleasure which is poison, and he cannot lose the consciousness
+of the fearful sacrifice he has made.  The banquet may be ready, but
+the hand on the wall is writing his doom.
+
+  Give me that soul, superior power,
+  That conquest over fate,
+  Which sways the weakness of the hour,
+  Rules little things as great:
+  That lulls the human waves of strife
+  With words and feelings kind,
+  And makes the trials of our life
+  The triumphs of our mind.
+        CHARLES SWAIN.
+
+  Reader, attend--whether thy soul
+    Soars fancy's flights above the pole,
+    Or darkly grubs this earthly hole,
+          In low pursuits:
+  Know prudent, cautious self-control
+          Is wisdom's root.
+        BURNS.
+
+The king is the man who can.--CARLYLE.
+
+I have only one counsel for you--Be master.--NAPOLEON.
+
+  Ah, silly man, who dream'st thy honor stands
+  In ruling others, not thyself.  Thy slaves
+  Serve thee, and thou thy slave: in iron bands
+  Thy servile spirit, pressed with wild passions, raves.
+  Wouldst thou live honored?--clip ambition's wing:
+  To reason's yoke thy furious passions bring:
+  Thrice noble is the man who of himself is king.
+        PHINEAS FLETCHER.
+
+  "Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
+  Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
+  But in ourselves are triumph and defeat."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Architects of Fate, by Orison Swett Marden
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author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 01:45:01 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 01:45:01 -0700
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tree	3b24ce2bb62fcbd1f381d50c37f8e6b8b4145555