, and by energy I can overcome
greater obstacles." Jewish blood flowed in his veins and everything
seemed against him, but he remembered the example of Joseph, who became
Prime Minister of Egypt four thousand years before, and that of Daniel,
who was Prime Minister to the greatest despot of the world five
centuries before the birth of Christ. He pushed his way up through the
lower classes, up through the middle classes, up through the upper
classes, until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of
political and social power. Rebuffed, scorned, ridiculed, hissed down
in the House of Commons, he simply said, "The time will come when you
will hear me." The time did come, and the boy with no chance but a
determined will swayed the scepter of England for a quarter of a
century.

Henry Clay, the "mill-boy of the slashes," was one of seven children of
a widow too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where
he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment
to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among
self-made men. The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a
cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of American
orators and statesmen.

See Kepler struggling with poverty and hardship, his books burned in
public by order of the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and
himself exiled by public clamor. For seventeen years he works calmly
upon the demonstration of the great principles that planets revolve in
ellipses, with the sun at one focus; that a line connecting the center
of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in
equal times, and that the squares of the times of revolution of the
planets above the sun are proportioned to the cubes by their mean
distances from the sun. This boy with no chance became one of the
world's greatest astronomers.

"When I found that I was black," said Alexandre Dumas, "I resolved to
live as if I were white, and so force men to look below my skin."

How slender seemed the chance of James Sharples, the celebrated
blacksmith artist of England! He was very poor, but he often rose at
three o'clock to copy books he could not buy. He would walk eighteen
miles to Manchester and back after a hard day's work to buy a
shilling's worth of artist's materials. He would ask for the heaviest
work in the blacksmith shop, because it took a longer time to heat at
the forg