me the companions
of kings, the guides and teachers of their kind, and exercised an
influence upon the thought of the world amounting to a species of
intellectual legislation.

Chauncey Jerome's education was limited to three months in the district
school each year until he was ten, when his father took him into his
blacksmith shop at Plymouth, Conn., to make nails. Money was a scarce
article with young Chauncey. He once chopped a load of wood for one
cent, and often chopped by moonlight for neighbors at less than a dime
a load. His father died when he was eleven, and his mother was forced
to send Chauncey out, with tears in his eyes and a little bundle of
clothes in his hand, to earn a living on a farm. His new employer kept
him at work early and late chopping down trees all day, his shoes
sometimes full of snow, for he had no boots until he was nearly
twenty-one. At fourteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a
carpenter, who gave him only board and clothes. Several times during
his apprenticeship he carried his tools thirty miles on his back to his
work at different places. After he had learned his trade he frequently
walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back. One day he
heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to
make two hundred clocks in one lot. "He'll never live long enough to
finish them," said one. "If he should," said another, "he could not
possibly sell so many. The very idea is ridiculous." Chauncey
pondered long over this rumor, for it had long been his dream to become
a great clock-maker. He tried his hand at the first opportunity, and
soon learned to make a wooden clock. When he got an order to make
twelve at twelve dollars apiece he thought his fortune was made. One
night he happened to think that a cheap clock could be made of brass as
well as of wood, and would not shrink, swell, or warp appreciably in
any climate. He acted on the idea, and became the first great
manufacturer of brass clocks. He made millions at the rate of six
hundred a day, exporting them to all parts of the globe.

"The History of the English People" was written while J. R. Green was
struggling against a mortal illness. He had collected a vast store of
materials, and had begun to write, when his disease made a sudden and
startling progress, and his physicians said they could do nothing to
arrest it. In the extremity of ruin and defeat he applied himself with
greater fi