ho seizes his paper with haste
to see if Peary has found the North Pole has no interest in the spot.
He would not visit the place if some authority would give him a thousand
acres or present him with a dozen ice-floes. What the reader desires is
to learn how the will power in those discoverers worked out through
hair-breadth escapes, long winters, and starvation's pangs. It is a
great game, and the world is a grand stand. The man with the strongest
will attracts the admiration of the world. All the world which loves a
lover also admires a hero, and a hero is always a man of forceful will.
When we read of Louis Joliet and James Marquette in their terrible
experience tracing the Mississippi River--Indians as savage as wild
beasts, marshes, lakes, forests, mountains, burdens, illness, wounds,
exhaustion, seeming failures--all testify to their sublime strength of
purpose. Peter Lemoyne, Jonathan Carver, Captain Lewis, Lieutenant
Clark, Montgomery Pike, General Fremont, Elisha Kent Kane, Charles
Francis Hall, David Livingstone, Captain Cook, Paul Du Chaillu, and
Henry M. Stanley carved their names deep in walls of history when
differing from other men only in the cultivation of a mighty will.

Mary Lyon, the heroine of Mount Holyoke, used to quote frequently the
saying of Doctor Beecher that he once had "a machine admirably
contrived, admirably adjusted, but it had one fault; _it wouldn't go!_"
while Catherine Beecher would retort that Miss Lyon had "too much go for
so small a machine." But what a monumental triumph was the dedication of
the first building of Mount Holyoke College at South Hadley,
Massachusetts. Mrs. Deacon Porter wrote to Henry Ward Beecher: "I wish
you could have seen Miss Lyon's face as the procession moved up the
street. It was indeed the face of an angel." From that immortal hour
when that little woman, peeling potatoes as her brother's housekeeper
at Buckland, Massachusetts, suddenly determined to start a movement for
the higher education of young women, she had written, had traveled, had
begged, had given all her inheritance, had visited colleges and schools,
going incessantly, working, praying, appealing, until the material
embodiment of her martyr sacrifices was opened to women. All women in
all countries are greatly in her debt. Men feel grateful for what the
higher education of women has done for men. One cannot now walk over the
embowered campus of Mount Holyoke College without meditating on what