ent in the eyes of the carpenter, who boasted of his
prize to his companions. They all came to the shop next day, and each
ordered just such a hammer. When the contractor saw the tools, he
ordered two for himself, asking that they be made a little better than
those of his men. "I can't make any better ones," said Maydole; "when
I make a thing, I make it as well as I can, no matter whom it is for."

The storekeeper soon ordered two dozen, a supply unheard of in his
previous business career. A New York dealer in tools came to the
village to sell his wares, and bought all the storekeeper had, and left
a standing order for all the blacksmith could make. David might have
grown very wealthy by making goods of the standard already attained;
but throughout his long and successful life he never ceased to study
still further to perfect his hammers in the minutest detail. They were
usually sold without any warrant of excellence, the word "Maydole"
stamped on the head being universally considered a guaranty of the best
article the world could produce.

Character is power, and is the best advertisement in the world.

"We have no secret," said the manager of an iron works employing
thousands of men. "We always try to beat our last batch of rails.
That is all the secret we've got, and we don't care who knows it."

"I don't try to see how cheap a machine I can produce, but how good a
machine," said the late John C. Whitin, of Northbridge, Mass., to a
customer who complained of the high price of some cotton machinery.
Business men soon learned what this meant; and when there was occasion
to advertise any machinery for sale, New England cotton manufacturers
were accustomed to state the number of years it had been in use and
add, as an all-sufficient guaranty of Northbridge products, "Whitin
make."

"Madam," said the sculptor H. K. Brown, as he admired a statue in
alabaster made by a youth in his teens, "this boy has something in
him." It was the figure of an Irishman who worked for the Ward family
in Brooklyn years ago, and gave with minutest fidelity not merely the
man's features and expression, but even the patches in his trousers,
the rent in his coat, and the creases in his narrow-brimmed stove-pipe
hat. Mr. Brown saw the statue at the house of a lady living at
Newburgh-on-the-Hudson. Six years later he invited her brother, J. Q.
A. Ward, to become a pupil in his studio. To-day the name of Ward is
that of the most pro