bler birth, thousands of greater fortune, but he
made himself superior to them all by extraordinary fidelity and
diligence.

"The greatest master of strategy the world has ever seen was sixty-six
years at school to himself before he was ready for his task. Though born
with the century, and an army officer at nineteen, he was an old man
when, in 1866, as Prussian chief of staff, he crushed Austria at Sadowa
and drove her out of Germany. Four years later the silent, modest
soldier of seventy, ready for the still greater opportunity, smote
France, and changed the map of Europe. Glory and the field-marshal's
baton, after fifty-one years of hard work! No wonder Louis Napoleon was
beaten by such men as he. All Louis Napoleons have been, and always will
be. Opportunity always finds out frauds. It does not make men, but shows
the world what they have made of themselves."

Sir Henry Havelock joined the army of India in his twenty-eighth year,
and waited till he was sixty-two for the opportunity to show himself
fitted to command and skillful to plan. During those four and thirty
years of waiting, he was busy preparing himself for that march to
Lucknow which was to make him famous as a soldier.

Farragut,

"The viking of our western clime
Who made his mast a throne,"

began his naval career as a mere boy, and was sixty-four years old
before he had an opportunity to distinguish himself; but when the great
test of his life came, the reserve of half a century's preparation made
him master of the situation.

Alexander Hamilton said, "Men give me credit for genius. All the genius
I have lies just in this: when I have a subject in hand I study it
profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its
bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make
the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius; it is the fruit of
labor and thought." The law of labor is equally binding on genius and
mediocrity.

"Fill up the cask! fill up the cask!" said old Dr. Bellamy when asked by
a young clergyman for advice about the composition of sermons. "Fill up
the cask! and then if you tap it anywhere you will get a good stream.
But if you put in but little, it will dribble, dribble, dribble, and
you must tap, tap, tap, and then you get but a small stream, after all."

"The merchant is in a dangerous position," says Dr. W. W. Patton, "whose
means are in goods trusted out all over the country on long