when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of
New England rum. He was so eager to go to college that he started for
Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was
so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station
when he went home.

When Elias Howe, harassed by want and woe, was in London completing his
first sewing-machine, he had frequently to borrow money to live on. He
bought beans and cooked them himself. He also borrowed money to send
his wife back to America. He sold his first machine for five pounds,
although it was worth fifty, and then he pawned his letters patent to
pay his expenses home.

The boy Arkwright begins barbering in a cellar, but dies worth a
million and a half. The world treated his novelties just as it treats
everybody's novelties--made infinite objection, mustered all the
impediments, but he snapped his fingers at their objections, and lived
to become honored and wealthy.

There is scarcely a great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its
way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and
persecution. "Everywhere," says Heine, "that a great soul gives
utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha."

Nearly every great discovery or invention that has blessed mankind has
had to fight its way to recognition, even against the opposition of the
most progressive men.

Even Sir Charles Napier fiercely opposed the introduction of steam
power into the Royal Navy. In the House of Commons, he exclaimed, "Mr.
Speaker, when we enter Her Majesty's naval service and face the chances
of war, we go prepared to be hacked in pieces, to be riddled by
bullets, or to be blown to bits by shot and shell; but Mr. Speaker, we
do not go prepared to be boiled alive." He said this with tremendous
emphasis.

"Will any one explain how there can be a light without a wick?" asked a
member of Parliament, when William Murdock, toward the close of the
eighteenth century, said that coal gas would give a good light, and
could be conveyed into buildings in pipes. "Do you intend taking the
dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" was the sneering question of even
the great scientist, Humphry Davy. Walter Scott ridiculed the idea of
lighting London by "smoke," but he soon used it at Abbotsford, and Davy
achieved one of his greatest triumphs by experimenting with gas until
he had invented his safety lamp.

Titian used to crush the flowers to get th