Would your patience suffice to practice on Händel's harpsichord in secret until every key was hollowed by your fingers to resemble the bowl of a spoon? If a physician, would you inoculate yourself with a yellowfever or cholera bacillus, to test its power ? Would you take three grains of opium to test the power of a new antidote you believed you had discovered, permanganate of potash?

In politics, could you persevere to be a candidate sixteen times in vain, to be elected Governor Marcus Morton of Massachusetts in 1840 by a majority of but one vote? Could you endure the most bitter persecution for years, to rank with William Lloyd Garrison as a benefactor of an unfortunate race? After acquiring fortune, could you give up your well-earned leisure, devote years of almost hopeless drudgery, and risk all your wealth, amid the scoffs of men, in a seemingly futile attempt to bind two continents together by an electric cord, with Cyrus W. Field?

Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. Fame never comes because it is craved.

If you are built of such material as this, you will succeed; if not, in spite of all your dreams and wishes you will fail. Most people look upon poverty as bad fortune, and forget that it has ever been the priceless spur in nearly all great achievements, all down the

ages.

Jean Paul Richter, who suffered greatly from poverty, said that he would not have been rich for worlds. "How unfortunate it is for a boy to have rich parents," said James Gordon Bennett to George W. Childs. "If you and I had been born that way, we would never have done anything worth mentioning."

"I began life with a sixpence," said Girard, "and believe that a man's best capital is his industry."

How nature laughs at puny society caste, and at at tempts to confine greatness behind brown-stone fronts!

She drops an idiot on Fifth Avenue or Beacon Street, where a millionaire looked for a Webster or a Sumner, and leaves a Garfield in a log-cabin in the wilderness, where humble parents expected only a pioneer. She astonishes a poor blacksmith with a Burritt, and gives a dunce to a wealthy banker. A fool may be born in a palace, and the Saviour of the world in a stable. Truly royal men and women look out of cold and miserable attic windows, from factories and poorhouses, upon people much their inferiors, though dressed in broadcloths and satins, whose dishonesty and craft have overcome them in the battle of life.

What an army of young men enters the successcontest every year as raw recruits! Many of them are country youths flocking to the cities to buy success. Their young ambitions have been excited by some book, or fired by the story of some signal success, and they dream of becoming Astors or Girards, Stewarts or Wanamakers, Vanderbilts or Goulds, Lincolns or Garfields, until their innate energy impels them to try their own fortune in the magic metropolis. But what are you willing to pay for "success," as you call it, young man? Do you realize what that word means in a great city in the nineteenth century, where men grow gray at thirty and die of old age at forty, where the race of life has become so intense that the runners are treading on the heels of those before them; and "woe to him who stops to tie his shoestring"? Do you know that only two or three out of every hundred will ever win permanent success, and only because they have kept everlastingly at it; and that the rest will sooner or later fail and many die in poverty because they have given up the struggle?

It is said of the young men who entered business on State Street, Boston, forty years ago, that even their names are almost forgotten. Most of them were killed in the fierce struggle of competition.

Read the diary of an old man on Long Wharf, Boston, where the battle waged less fiercely: "Of all I knew in business, only five have succeeded in forty years. All the others failed or died in want." Of a thousand depositors in the Union Bank, all but six failed or died poor. "Bankruptcy," said one of the old bank directors, "is like death and almost as certain. They fall single and alone, and are thus forgotten, but there is no escape, and he is fortunate who fails young." In Pemberton Square among the lawyers, an old friend of Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster tells us there are two thousand attorneys in Boston, and only four hundred get a living by their profession, and only now and then one becomes distinguished.

In a work on business, published in eighteen hundred and fifty-two, Edwin T. Freedley gave a select list of the first-class wholesale houses in Philadelphia. On reëxamining the list twenty-three years later, he found but two out of seventeen of the importing firms he had mentioned; two out of twenty-two dry goods houses; four out of twenty-five dry goods jobbing houses; nine of the silk firms; eight out of twenty-five drug houses; one out of seventeen boot and shoe jobbers; and a total of only twenty-five out of the one hundred and seventy-seven wholesale firms he had considered the most solid in the City of Brotherly Love. The thought of this cold reality is appalling, and we almost shrink from effort when success seems so much like a lottery with very few prizes.

But he who would succeed must pay the price. He must not look for a "soft job." Into work which he feels to be a part of his very existence he must pour his whole heart and soul. He must be fired by a determination which knows no defeat, which cares not for hunger or ridicule, which spurns hardships and laughs at want and disaster. They were not men of luck and broadcloth, nor of legacy and laziness, but men inured

to hardship and deprivation, not afraid of threadbare clothes and honest poverty, men who fought their way to their own loaf, who have pushed the world up from chaos into the light of the highest civilization. They were men who, as they climbed, expanded and lifted others to a higher plane and opened wider the doors of narrow lives.

If thou canst plan a noble deed,

And never flag till it succeed,

Though in the strife thy heart should bleed;
Whatever obstacles control,

Thine hour will come, go on, true soul,

Thou 'lt win the prize, -thou 'It reach the goal.

CHARLES MACKAY.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross,

CHAPTER XVI.

CHARACTER IS POWER.

Character is power is influence; it makes friends; creates funds; draws patronage and support; and opens a sure and easy way to wealth, honor, and happiness. J. HAWES.

When all have done their utmost, surely he

Hath given the best who gives a character
Erect and constant.

LOWELL.

I'm called away by particular business, but I leave my character be hind me. -SHERIDAN.

As there is nothing in the world great but man, there is nothing truly great in man but character. - W. M. EVARTS.

The spirit of a single mind

Makes that of multitudes take one direction,

As roll the waters to the breathing wind.

BYRON.

Character must stand behind and back up everything - the sermon, the poem, the picture, the play. None of them is worth a straw without it. J. G. HOLLAND.

The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. EMERSON.

Character is the diamond that scratches every other stone. - - BARTOL.

"DAREST thou kill Caius Marius ?" said the unarmed Roman to the assassin sent to his dungeon. The Cimbrian quailed before the captive's eye, dropped his weapon, and fled.

Learning that Napoleon would soon pass alone through a long dim passage, a young man hid there to slay the ruthless invader of his country. As the emperor approached, his massive head bowed in thought, the young man raised his weapon, took careful aim, and was about to press the trigger when a slight noise betrayed his presence. Napoleon looked up, and compre hended the situation at a glance. He did not speak, but gazed intently upon the youth, a smile of haughty