onging is to be a
minister. It is the one ambition of my life. Is there anything that I
can do?'

"'Any man,' I said to him, 'with the proper determination and ambition
can study sufficiently at night to win his desire.'

"'I have tried to think so,' said he, 'but I have not been able to see
anything clearly. I want to study, and am ready to give every spare
minute to it, but I don't know how to get at it.'

"I thought a few minutes, as I looked at him. He was strong in his
desire and in his ambition to fulfil it--strong enough, physically and
mentally, for work of the body and of the mind--and he needed something
more than generalizations of sympathy.

"'Come to me one evening a week and I will begin teaching you myself,' I
said, 'and at least you will in that way make a beginning'; and I named
the evening.

"His face brightened and he eagerly said that he would come, and left
me; but in a little while he came hurrying back again. 'May I bring a
friend with me?' he said.

"I told him to bring as many as he wanted to, for more than one would be
an advantage, and when the evening came there were six friends with him.
And that first evening I began to teach them the foundations of Latin."

He stopped as if the story was over. He was looking out thoughtfully
into the waning light, and I knew that his mind was busy with those days
of the beginning of the institution he so loves, and whose continued
success means so much to him. In a little while he went on:

"That was the beginning of it, and there is little more to tell. By the
third evening the number of pupils had increased to forty; others joined
in helping me, and a room was hired; then a little house, then a second
house. From a few students and teachers we became a college. After a
while our buildings went up on Broad Street alongside the Temple Church,
and after another while we became a university. From the first our
aim"--(I noticed how quickly it had become "our" instead of "my")--"our
aim was to give education to those who were unable to get it through the
usual channels. And so that was really all there was to it."

That was typical of Russell Conwell--to tell with brevity of what he
has done, to point out the beginnings of something, and quite omit to
elaborate as to the results. And that, when you come to know him, is
precisely what he means you to understand--that it is the beginning of
anything that is important, and that if a thing is but earnest