her race and sex did not deter the colored girl,
Edmonia Lewis, from struggling upward to honor and fame as a sculptor.

Fred Douglass started in life with less than nothing, for he did not
own his own body, and he was pledged before his birth to pay his
master's debts. To reach the starting-point of the poorest white boy,
he had to climb as far as the distance which the latter must ascend if
he would become President of the United States. He saw his mother but
two or three times, and then in the night, when she would walk twelve
miles to be with him an hour, returning in time to go into the field at
dawn. He had no chance to study, for he had no teacher, and the rules
of the plantation forbade slaves to learn to read and write. But
somehow, unnoticed by his master, he managed to learn the alphabet from
scraps of paper and patent medicine almanacs, and then no limits could
be placed to his career. He put to shame thousands of white boys. He
fled from slavery at twenty-one, went North, and worked as a stevedore
in New York and New Bedford. At Nantucket he was given an opportunity
to speak at an anti-slavery meeting, and made so favorable an
impression that he was made agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of
Massachusetts. While traveling from place to place to lecture, he
would study with all his might. He was sent to Europe to lecture, and
won the friendship of several Englishmen, who gave him $750, with which
he purchased his freedom. He edited a paper in Rochester, N. Y., and
afterwards conducted the "New Era" in Washington. For several years he
was Marshal of the District of Columbia.

Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, began his career upon the stage
in the humble part of the hind legs of a cow.

P. T. Barnum rode a horse for ten cents a day.

It was a boy born in a log-cabin, without schooling, or books, or
teacher, or ordinary opportunities, who won the admiration of mankind
by his homely practical wisdom while President during our Civil War,
and who emancipated four million slaves.

Behold this long, lank, awkward youth, felling trees on the little
claim, building his homely log-cabin, without floor or windows,
teaching himself arithmetic and grammar in the evening by the light of
the fireplace. In his eagerness to know the contents of Blackstone's
Commentaries, he walked forty-four miles to procure the precious
volumes, and read one hundred pages while returning. Abraham Lincoln
inherited no o