the walls of the
house. Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen. Blaise Pascal, the
French mathematician, composed at sixteen a tract on the conic sections.

Professor Agassiz was so enthusiastic in his work and so loved the
fishes, the fowl and the cattle that it is said these creatures would
die for him to give him their skeletons. His father wanted him to fit
for commercial life, but the fish haunted him day and night.

Confucius said that "he was so eager in the pursuit of knowledge that he
forgot his food;" and that, "in the joy of its attainment, he forgot his
sorrows;" and that "he did not even perceive that old age was coming
on."

"That boy tries to make himself useful," said an employer of the errand
boy, George W. Childs. It is this trying to be useful and helpful that
promotes us in life.

Once, when Mr. Harvey, an accomplished mathematician, was in a
bookseller's shop, he saw a poor lad of mean appearance enter and write
something on a slip of paper and give it to the proprietor. On inquiry
he found this was a poor deaf boy, Kitto, who afterward became one of
the most noted Biblical scholars in the world, and who wrote his first
book in the poor-house. He had come to borrow a book. When a lad he had
fallen backward from a ladder thirty-five feet upon the pavement with a
load of slates that he was carrying to the roof. The poor lad was so
thirsty for books that he would borrow from booksellers who would loan
them to him out of pity, read them and return them.

The _Youth's Companion_ says that Mr. Edison in his new biography--his
"Life and Inventions"--describes the accidental method by which he
discovered the principle of the phonograph. There is a kind of accident
that happens only to a certain kind of man.

"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," Mr. Edison says, "when
the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger.
That set me to thinking. If I could record the actions of the point,
and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why
the thing would not talk.

"I tried the experiment first on a slip of telegraph paper and found
that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the words 'Halloo! Halloo!'
into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point, and heard
a faint 'Halloo! Halloo!' in return.

"I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my
assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered. They
la