in to dine on a small loaf in the printing-office
with a book in his hand. It helped Locke to live on bread and water in a
Dutch garret. It enabled Gideon Lee to go barefoot in the snow, half
starved and thinly clad. It sustained Lincoln and Garfield on their hard
journeys from the log cabin to the White House.

The very reputation of being strong-willed, plucky, and indefatigable is
of priceless value. It often cowes enemies and dispels at the start
opposition to one's undertakings which would otherwise be formidable.

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till
it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer," said Harriet
Beecher Stowe, "never give up then, for that's just the place and time
that the tide'll turn."

"Never despair," says Burke, "but if you do, work on in despair."

Once when Marshal Ney was going into battle, looking down at his knees
which were smiting together, he said, "You may well shake; you would
shake worse yet if you knew where I am going to take you."

"Go it, William!" an old boxer was overheard saying to himself in the
midst of a fight; "at him again!--never say 'die'!"

A striking incident is related of the early experience of George Law,
who, in his day, was one of the most conspicuous financiers and
capitalists of New York City. When he was a young man he went to New
York, poor and friendless. One day he was walking along the streets,
hungry, not knowing where his next meal would come from, and passed a
new building in course of erection. Through some accident one of the hod
carriers fell from the structure and dropped dead at his feet. Young
Law, in his desperation, applied for the job to take the dead man's
place, and the place was given him. He went to work, and this was how
one of the wealthiest and shrewdest New York business men got his start.

See young Disraeli, sprung from a hated and persecuted race; without
opportunity, pushing his way up through the middle classes, up through
the upper classes, until he stands self-poised upon the topmost round of
political and social power. Scoffed, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed from
the House of Commons, he simply says, "The time will come when you will
hear me." The time did come, and the boy with no chance swayed the
sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.

If impossibilities ever exist, popularly speaking, they ought to have
been found somewhere between the birth and the death of Kitto, that d