even in such characters as
Rosalind and Queen Katherine. The star actress was unable to perform,
and Miss Cushman, her understudy, took her place. That night she held
her audience with such grasp of intellect and iron will that it forgot
the absence of mere dimpled feminine grace. Although poor, friendless,
and unknown before, when the curtain fell upon her first performance at
the London theater, her reputation was made. In after years, when
physicians told her she had a terrible, incurable disease, she flinched
not a particle, but quietly said, "I have learned to live with my
trouble."

A poor colored woman in a log-cabin in the South had three boys, but
could afford only one pair of trousers for the three. She was so
anxious to give them an education that she sent them to school by
turns. The teacher, a Northern girl, noticed that each boy came to
school only one day out of three, and that all wore the same
pantaloons. The poor mother educated her boys as best she could. One
became a professor in a Southern college, another a physician, and the
third a clergyman. What a lesson for boys who plead "no chance" as an
excuse for wasted lives!

Sam Cunard, the whittling Scotch lad of Glasgow, wrought many odd
inventions with brain and jack-knife, but they brought neither honor
nor profit until he was consulted by Burns & McIvor, who wished to
increase their facilities for carrying foreign mails. The model of a
steamship which Sam whittled out for them was carefully copied for the
first vessel of the great Cunard Line, and became the standard type for
all the magnificent ships since constructed by the firm.

The new Testament and the speller were Cornelius Vanderbilt's only
books at school, but he learned to read, write, and cipher a little.
He wished to buy a boat, but had no money. To discourage him from
following the sea, his mother told him if he would plow, harrow, and
plant with corn, before the twenty-seventh day of the month, ten acres
of rough, hard, stony land, the worst on his father's farm, she would
lend him the amount he wished. Before the appointed time the work was
done, and well done. On his seventeenth birthday he bought the boat,
but on his way home it struck a sunken wreck and sank just as he
reached shallow water.

But Cornelius Vanderbilt was not the boy to give up. He at once began
again, and in three years saved three thousand dollars. He often
worked all night, and soon had far