c on a sheet of paper. You who read this
never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy.
Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was
and is. But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will
not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his
ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has
tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used
himself?

At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway.
That didn't satisfy him. The mystery of the telegraph (and what is
more mysterious?) constantly called him. The click of the instrument
was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different
from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.

And so Thomas A. Edison, without a dollar or a friend, set himself to
work to master the telegraph and to explore the mysteries behind it.
Result: the duplex telegraph and the developments from that; the
phonograph, the incandescent electric light, and those numerous
inventions which, one after another, have confounded the bigotry and
ignorance of the world.

Edison and Bell, Bell and Edison, one a college man and the other a
laborer without the gates, unlike in preparation but similar in
character, devotion, and ability, and equal winners of honor and
reward at the hands of a just if doubting world.

Of course I might go on all day with illustrations like this. History
is brilliant with the names of those who have wrought gloriously
without a college training. These men, too, have succeeded in every
possible line of work. They are among the living, too, as well as
among those whose earthly careers have ended.

The men who never went to college have not only built great railroads,
but also have written immortal words; not only have they been great
editors, but also they have created vast industries, and piled
mountain high their golden fortunes; not only have they made
epoch-making discoveries in science, but they have set down in words
of music a poetry whose truth and sweetness makes nobler human
character and finer the life's work of all who read those sentences of
light.

Among the fathers who established this Government, the greatest never
went to college. Hamilton was not a college man. Washington, to this
day the first of Americans, never even attended school after he was
sixteen years old. Of the great founders of modern jour