pportunities, and acquired nothing by luck. His good
fortune consisted simply of untiring perseverance and a right heart.

In another log-cabin, in the backwoods of Ohio, a poor widow is holding
a boy eighteen months old, and wondering if she will be able to keep
the wolf from her little ones. The boy grows, and in a few years we
find him chopping wood and tilling the little clearing in the forest,
to help his mother. Every spare hour is spent in studying the books he
has borrowed, but cannot buy. At sixteen he gladly accepts a chance to
drive mules on a canal towpath. Soon he applies for a chance to sweep
floors and ring the bell of an academy, to pay his way while studying
there.

His first term at Geauga Seminary cost him but seventeen dollars. When
he returned the next term he had but a sixpence in his pocket, and this
he put into the contribution box at church the next day. He engaged
board, washing, fuel, and light of a carpenter at one dollar and six
cents a week, with the privilege of working at night and on Saturdays
all the time he could spare. He had arrived on a Saturday and planed
fifty-one boards that day, for which he received one dollar and two
cents. When the term closed, he had paid all expenses and had three
dollars over. The following winter he taught school at twelve dollars
a month and "board around." In the spring he had forty-eight dollars,
and when he returned to school he boarded himself at an expense of
thirty-one cents a week.

Soon we find him in Williams College, where in two years he is
graduated with honors. He reaches the State Senate at twenty-six and
Congress at thirty-three. Twenty-seven years from the time he applied
for a chance to ring the bell at Hiram College, James A. Garfield
became President of the United States. The inspiration of such an
example is worth more to the young men of America than all the wealth
of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Goulds.

Among the world's greatest heroes and benefactors are many others whose
cradles were rocked by want in lowly cottages, and who buffeted the
billows of fate without dependence, save upon the mercy of God and
their own energies.

"The little gray cabin appears to be the birthplace of all your great
men," said an English author who had been looking over a book of
biographies of eminent Americans.

With five chances on each hand and one unwavering aim, no boy, however
poor, need despair. There is bread and