true in his very
babyhood. For he was the pet of several good old dames, one of whom
taught him to count by using cards as object-lessons He proudly said that
when he was three years of age he could pick out the "ten-spot." This
love of pasteboard was not exactly an advantage, for when he was sixteen
he went to Dublin to attend college, and carried fifty pounds and a deck
of cards in his pocket. The first day in Dublin he met a man who thought
he knew more about cards than Oliver did--and the man did: in three days
Oliver arrived back in Sweet Auburn penniless, but wonderfully glad to
get home and everybody glad to see him. "It seemed as if I 'd been away a
year," he said.

But in a few weeks he started out with no baggage but a harp, and he
played in the villages and the inns, and sometimes at the homes of the
rich. And his melodies won all hearts.

The author of "Vanity Fair" says: "You come hot and tired from the day's
battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind
vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon--only the
harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and
humble, young and old, the captains in the tent or the soldiers round the
fire, or the women and children in the villages at whose porches he stops
and sings his simple songs of love and beauty."

* * * * *

When Goldsmith arrived in London in Seventeen Hundred
Fifty-six, he was ragged, penniless, friendless and forlorn. In the
country he could always make his way, but the city to him was new and
strange. For several days he begged a crust here and there, sleeping in
the doorways at night and dreaming of the flowery wealth of gentle
Lissoy, where even the poorest had enough to eat and a warm place to
huddle when the sun went down.

He at length found work as clerk or porter in a chemist's shop, where he
remained until he got money enough to buy a velvet coat and a ruffled
shirt, and then he moved to the Bankside and hung out a surgeon's sign.
The neighbors thought the little doctor funny, and the women would call
to him out of the second-story window that it was a fine day, but when
they were ill they sent for some one else to attend them.

Goldsmith was twenty-eight, and the thought that he could make a living
with his pen had never come to him. Yet he loved books, and he would
loiter about bookshops, pricing first editions, and talking poetry to the
patrons.