d, and have
struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
working on useless inventions. A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
eighty-seven cents when his capital was one dollar and a half in buying
buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for. After that he made
it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want, and so
prospered.

It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles which
made their fortunes. One of the greatest hindrances to advancement in
life is the lack of observation and of the inclination to take pains.
An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather;" he was so
poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut the grass in front of his
hired tenement. Now he is a very rich man.

An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement in shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
rich. A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
his invalid wife. He had never realized what it was to wash before.
Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing-machine,
and made a fortune. A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
said to himself, there must be some way of filling teeth which will
prevent their aching. So he invented the principle of gold filling for
teeth.

The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin. John Harrison,
the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
loft of an old barn. Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a gristmill. The first
model dry dock was made in an attic. Clark, the founder of Clark
University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
wagons in a horse shed. Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft. Edison
began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
a newsboy.

As soon as the weather would permit, the Jamestown colonists began to
stroll about the