hted cars, and set
them flying from town to town and nation to nation, tunneled mountains
of granite, and annihilated space with the lightning's speed. It has
whitened the waters of the world with the sails of a hundred nations,
navigated every sea and explored every land. It has reduced nature in
her thousand forms to as many sciences, taught her laws, prophesied her
future movements, measured her untrodden spaces, counted her myriad
hosts of worlds, and computed their distances, dimensions, and
velocities.

The slow penny is surer than the quick dollar. The slow trotter will
out-travel the fleet racer. Genius darts, flutters, and tires; but
perseverance wears and wins. The all-day horse wins the race. The
afternoon-man wears off the laurels. The last blow drives home the
nail.

"Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions?" asked a reporter of
Thomas A. Edison. "Do they come to you while you are lying awake
nights?"

"I never did anything worth doing by accident," was the reply, "nor did
any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the
phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth
getting I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes. I
have always kept strictly within the lines of commercially useful
inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders,
valuable simply as novelties to catch the popular fancy. _I like it_,"
continued the great inventor. "I don't know any other reason.
Anything I have begun is always on my mind, and I am not easy while
away from it until it is finished."

[Illustration: Thomas Alva Edison]

A man who thus gives himself wholly to his work is certain to
accomplish something; and if he have ability and common sense, his
success will be great.

How Bulwer wrestled with the fates to change his apparent destiny! His
first novel was a failure; his early poems were failures; and his
youthful speeches provoked the ridicule of his opponents. But he
fought his way to eminence through ridicule and defeat.

Gibbon worked twenty years on his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire." Noah Webster spent thirty-six years on his dictionary. What
a sublime patience he showed in devoting a life to the collection and
definition of words! George Bancroft spent twenty-six years on his
"History of the United States." Newton rewrote his "Chronology of
Ancient Nations" fifteen times. Titian wrote to Charles V.: "I sen