chances of success. Make it, as every man must, who would accomplish anything worth the effort. Golden opportunities are nothing to laziness, but industry makes the commonest chances golden. "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Is bound in shallows and in miseries; And we must take the current when it serves, ""T is never offered twice; seize, then, the hour "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings." "I have made the most out of the stuff." CHAPTER II. BOYS WITH NO CHANCE. In the blackest soils grow the fairest flowers, and the loftiest and strongest trees spring heavenward among the rocks. —J. G. HOLLAND. Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us, but it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious Bouth wind which lulls them to lotus dreams. — OUIDA. Want is a bitter and a hateful good, And if in patience taken, mends our lives. Poverty is the sixth sense. - GERMAN PROVerb. Dryden. often a It is not every calamity that is a curse, and early adversity blessing. Surmounted difficulties not only teach, but hearten us in our future struggles. - SHARPE. There can be no doubt that the captains of industry to-day, using that term in its broadest sense, are men who began life as poor boys. — SETH Low. 'T is a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition's ladder! SHAKESPEARE. "I AM a child of the court," said a pretty little girl at a children's party in Denmark; "my father is Groom of the Chambers, which is a very high office. And those whose names end with 'sen,'" she added, “can never be anything at all. We must put our arms akimbo, and make the elbows quite pointed, so as to keep these 'sen' people at a great distance." "But my papa can buy a hundred dollars' worth of bonbons, and give them away to children," angrily exclaimed the daughter of the rich merchant Petersen "Can your papa do that?" "Yes," chimed in the daughter of an editor, "my papa can put your papa and everybody's papa into the newspaper. All sorts of people are afraid of him, my papa says, for he can do as he likes with the paper." "Oh, if I could be one of them!" thought a little boy peeping through the crack of the door, by permission of the cook for whom he had been turning the spit. But no, his parents had not even a penny to spare, and his name ended in "sen." Years afterwards, when the children of the party had become men and women, some of them went to see a splendid house, filled with all kinds of beautiful and valuable objects. There they met the owner, once the very boy who thought it so great a privilege to peep at them through a crack in the door as they played. He had become the great sculptor Thorwaldsen. This sketch is adapted from a story by a poor Danish cobbler's boy, whose name did not keep him from becoming famous, - Hans Christian Andersen. 66 we "There is no fear of my starving, father," said the deaf boy, Kitto, begging to be taken from the poorhouse and allowed to struggle for an education; are in the midst of plenty, and I know how to prevent hunger. The Hottentots subsist a long time on nothing but a little gum; they also, when hungry, tie a ligature around their bodies. Cannot I do so, too? The hedges furnish blackberries and nuts, and the fields, turnips; a hayrick will make an excellent bed." This poor deaf boy with a drunken father, who was thought capable of nothing better than making shoes as a pauper, became one of the greatest biblical scholars in the world. His first book was written in the workhouse. Creon was a Greek slave, as a writer tells the story in Kate Field's "Washington," but he was also a slave of the Genius of Art. Beauty was his god, and he worshiped it with rapt adoration. It was after the |