travel extensively.

The two meet. The city lad is ashamed of his country brother. The plain,
threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner of the
country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of the
other. The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no chance
in life," and envies the city youth. He thinks that it is a cruel
Providence that places such a wide gulf between them. They meet again as
men, but how changed! It is as easy to distinguish the sturdy, self-made
man from the one who has been propped up all his life by wealth,
position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder to tell the
difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak and one from
the sapling of the forest. If you think there is no difference, place
each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in a hurricane at sea.

The athlete does not carry the gymnasium away with him, but he carries
the skill and muscle which give him his reputation.

The lessons you learn at school will give you strength and skill in
after life, and power, just in proportion to the accuracy, the clearness
of perception with which you learn your lessons. The school was your
gymnasium. You do not carry away the Greek and Latin text-books, the
geometry and algebra into your occupations any more than the athlete
carries the apparatus of the gymnasium, but you carry away the skill and
the power if you have been painstaking, accurate and faithful.

"It is in me, and it _shall_ come out!" And it did. For Richard
Brinsley Sheridan became the most brilliant, eloquent and amazing
statesman of his day. Yet if his first efforts had been but moderately
successful, he might have been content with mere mediocrity. It was his
defeats that nerved him to strive for eminence and win it. But it took
hard, persistent work in his case to secure it, just as it did in that
of so many others.

Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
Southey and Campbell. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or
"Orator Mum," as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by
ridicule and abuse.

Where the sky is gray and the climat