and flowers is just a matter of sufficient understanding,
and that Nature will give us almost anything when we know enough to
treat her intelligently, wisely and sympathetically.

The history of most great men shows that there is a disadvantage in
having too many advantages.

Who can tell what the consequences would have been had Lincoln been
born in New York and educated at Harvard? If he had been reared in the
midst of great libraries, brought up in an atmosphere of books, of only
a small fraction of which he could get even a superficial knowledge,
would he have had that insatiable hunger which prompted him to walk
twenty miles in order to borrow Blackstone's "Commentaries" and to read
one hundred pages on the way home?

[Illustration: House in which Abraham Lincoln was born]

What was there in that rude frontier forest, where this poor boy
scarcely ever saw any one who knew anything of books, to rouse his
ambition and to stimulate him to self-education? Whence came that
yearning to know the history of men and women who had made a nation; to
know the history of his country? Whence came that passion to devour
the dry statutes of Indiana, as a young girl would devour a love story?
Whence came that all-absorbing ambition to be somebody in the world; to
serve his country with no selfish ambition? Had his father been rich
and well-educated instead of a poor man who could neither read nor
write and who was generally of a shiftless and roving disposition,
there is no likelihood that Lincoln would ever have become the powerful
man he was.

Had he not felt that imperious "must" calling him, the prod of
necessity spurring him on, whence would have come the motive which led
him to struggle for self-development, self-unfoldment? If he had been
born and educated in luxury, his character would probably have been
soft and flabby in comparison with what it was.

Where in all the annals of history is there another record of one born
of such poor parentage and reared in such a wretched environment, who
ever rose to such eminence? Imagine a boy of to-day, so hungry for an
education that he would walk nine miles a day to attend a rude frontier
school in a log cabin! What would the city boys of to-day, who do not
want to walk even a few blocks to school, think of a youth who would do
what Lincoln did to overcome his handicap?

CHAPTER V

OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE

To each man's life there comes a time supreme;