nd natural steps for this ambitious boy.

Virginia with its older settlements offered small opportunities, and so we
find young Clay going West, and landing at Lexington when twenty years
old. He requested a license to practise law, but the Bar Association,
which consisted of about a dozen members, decided that no more lawyers
were needed at Lexington. Clay demanded that he should be examined as to
fitness, and the blackberry-bush Blackstones sat upon him, as a coroner
would say, with intent to give him so stiff an examination that he would
be glad to get work as a farmhand.

A dozen questions had been asked, and an attempt had been made to confuse
and browbeat the youth, when the Nestor of the Lexington Bar expectorated
at a fly ten feet away, and remarked, "Oh, the devil! there is no need of
tryin' to keep a boy like this down--he's as fit as we, or fitter!"

And so he was admitted.

From the very first he was a success; he toned up the mental qualities of
the Fayette County Bar, and made the older, easy-going members feel to see
whether their laurel wreaths were in place.

When he was thirty years of age he was chosen by the Legislature of
Kentucky as United States Senator. When his term expired he chose to go to
Congress, probably because it afforded better opportunity for oratory and
leadership. As soon as he appeared upon the floor he was chosen Speaker by
acclamation. So thoroughly American was he, that one of his very first
suggestions was to the effect that every member should clothe himself
wholly in fabrics made in the United States. Humphrey Marshall ridiculed
the proposition and called Clay a demagogue, for which he got himself
straightway challenged. Clay shot a bullet through his English-made
broadcloth coat, and then they shook hands.

When his term as Congressman expired, he again went to the Senate, and
served two years. Then he went back to the House, and through his
influence, and his alone, did we challenge Great Britain, just as he had
challenged Marshall.

England accepted the challenge, and we call it the War of Eighteen Hundred
Twelve.

Very often, indeed, do we hear the rural statesmen at Fourth of July
celebrations exclaim, "We have whipped England twice, and we can do it
again!"

We whipped England once, and it is possible we could do it again, but she
got the best of us in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve. Henry Clay
plunged the country into war to redress certain grievances, and