ything which the public did not want,
and so prospered.

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
then so poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut grass in front of
his hired tenement. He became a very rich man.

An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on 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
felt sure there must be some way of filling teeth which would prevent
their aching and he invented the method 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 grist-mill. 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.

Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskilful 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.

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 s