to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny."
This caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber's
prices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered his sign to "A clean
shave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, and
from that to machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filled
with patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at last _Success_!
"Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose to
such estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the
county, and shortly afterwards George III conferred upon him the honour
of knighthood." So said the book.

Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; Sir
Cloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a cobbler's son; Stephenson was an
engine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.

Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranks
and gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came to
regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate
success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were
all brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past every
obstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the
_best of that sphere of life into which they were born_.

He had quite decided to be a self-made man. That was simple enough. The
question that troubled him was what sort of a self-made man to be! A
Newton? A Shakespeare? A Stephenson? A Turner? An Arkwright?

The wide choice worried and perplexed him. It was pitiful to his
thinking that he could, try and strive as he might, only be _one_.

He had put himself through several examinations. He had lain under a
pear tree and watched the leaves fall; he felt another man had the
monopoly of apple trees. And he had decided that the leaves fell because
they had become unfastened from the branches, and that they did not fall
straight because the wind blew them sideways. And there was an end of
the leaves.

He had studied kitchen furnishings and their ways, avoiding only the
kettle, since some one else had risen on its steam.

He had tried himself with a pencil and paper, but he had composed
nothing even reminiscent of Shakespeare. In fact, he had composed
nothing at all.

And at last he became convinced it was the circumstances of his life
that were at fault, not he himself. _If_ he had only been a cobbler's
son,