ood of a dozen
other men; if he had speculated in stocks and shares, and piled up at
last a vast fortune by doubtful transactions, all the world would have
said, in its unthinking fashion, that Mr. Edward was a wonderfully
successful man. But success in life does not consist in that only, if
in that at all. Edward lived for an aim, and that aim he amply
attained. He never neglected his home duties or his regular work; but
in his stray moments he found time to amass an amount of knowledge
which rendered him the intellectual equal of men whose opportunities
and education had been far more fortunate than his own. The pleasure
he found in his work was the real reward that science gave him. All his
life long he had that pleasure: he saw the fields grow green in spring,
the birds build nests in early summer, the insects flit before his eyes
on autumn evenings, the stoat and hare put on their snow-white coat to
his delight in winter weather. And shall we say that the riches he
thus beheld spread ever before him were any less real or less
satisfying to a soul like his than the mere worldly wealth that other
men labour and strive for? Oh no. Thomas Edward was one of those who
work for higher and better ends than outward show, and verily he had
his reward. The monument raised up to that simple and earnest working
shoemaker in the "Life of a Scotch Naturalist" is one of which any
scientific worker in the whole world might well be proud. In his old
age, he had the meed of public encouragement and public recognition,
the one thing that the world at large can add to a scientific worker's
happiness; and his name will be long remembered hereafter, when those
of more pretentious but less useful labourers are altogether forgotten.
How many men whom the world calls successful might gladly have

End of Project Gutenberg's Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen

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