biting a rat trap, but he did it
well and with enthusiasm. In fact he was bound to do it as well as it
could be done. Young Gould supported himself by odd jobs at surveying,
paying his way by erecting sundials for farmers at a dollar apiece,
frequently taking his pay in board. Thus he laid the foundation for the
business career in which he became so rich.

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 no limits could then 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 in 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 afterward conducted the _New
Era_ in Washington. For several years he was Marshal of the District of
Columbia. He became the first colored man in the United States, the peer
of any man in the country, and died honored by all in 1895.

"What has been done can be done again," said the boy with no chance who
became Lord Beaconsfield, England's great prime minister. "I am not a
slave, I am not a captive, and by energy I can overcome greater
obstacles." Jewish blood flowed in his veins, and everything seemed
against him, but he remembered the example of Joseph, who became prime
minister of Egypt four thousand years before, and that of Daniel, who
was prime minister to the greatest despot of the world five centuries
befo