position of a man of great influence as a United
States Senator from Rhode Island.

Galileo was sent to the university at Pisa at seventeen, with the
strict injunction not to neglect medical subjects for the alluring study
of philosophy or literature. But when he was eighteen he discovered the
great principle of the pendulum by a lamp left swinging in the
cathedral.

John Adams' father was a shoemaker; and, trying to teach his son the
art, gave him some "uppers" to cut out by a pattern which had a
three-cornered hole in it to hang it up by. The future statesman
followed the pattern, hole and all.

There is a tradition that Tennyson's first poems were published at the
instigation of his father's coachman. His grandfather gave the lad ten
shillings for writing an elegy on his grandmother. As he handed it to
him, he said; "There, that's the first money you ever earned by your
poetry, and take my word for it, it will be the last."

Murillo's mother had marked her boy for a priest, but nature had already
laid her hand upon him and marked him for her own. His mother was
shocked on returning from church one day to find that the child had
taken down the sacred family picture, "Jesus and the Lamb," and had
painted his own hat on the Saviour's head, and had changed the lamb into
a dog.

The poor boy's home was broken up, and he started out on foot and alone
to seek his fortune. All he had was courage and determination to make
something of himself. He not only became a famous artist, but a man of
great character.

"Let us people who are so uncommonly clever and learned," says
Thackeray, "have a great tenderness and pity for the folks who are not
endowed with the prodigious talents which we have. I have always had a
regard for dunces,--those of my own school days were among the
pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest
in life; whereas, many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by
the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, is no better than a feeble
prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his head before
his beard grew."

"In the winter of 1824, there set in a great flood upon the town of
Sidmouth, the tide rose to a terrible height. In the midst of this
sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach,
was seen at the door of her house, with mop and pattens, trundling her
mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the
Atlantic