that has been developed
in the early years at home. Take up the experience of every man or
woman who has made a mark in the city for the last hundred years, and it
has been the sterling qualities of the home training that have
constituted the success of later years.

Don't think you have no chance in life because you have no capital to
begin with. Most of the rich men of to-day began poor. The chances are
you would be ruined if you had capital. You can only use to advantage
what has become a part of yourself by your earning it. It is estimated
that not one rich man's son in ten thousand dies rich. God has given
every man a capital to start with; we are born rich. He is rich who has
good health, a sound body, good muscles; he is rich who has a good head,
a good disposition, a good heart; he is rich who has two good hands,
with five chances on each. Equipped? Every man is equipped as only God
could equip him. What a fortune he possesses in the marvelous mechanism
of his body and mind. It is individual effort that has accomplished
everything worth accomplishing in this world. Money to start with is
only a crutch, which, if any misfortune knocks it from under you, would
only make your fall all the more certain.

CHAPTER III.

HOW DID HE BEGIN?

There can be no doubt that the captains of industry to-day,
using that term in its broadest sense, are men who began life
as poor boys.
--SETH LOW.

Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul
within us, but it is the north wind that lashes men into
Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them
to lotus dreams.
--OUIDA.

'Tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder
--SHAKESPEARE.

"Fifty years ago," said Hezekiah Conant, the millionaire manufacturer
and philanthropist of Pawtucket, R. I., "I persuaded my father to let me
leave my home in Dudley, Mass., and strike out for myself. So one
morning in May, 1845, the old farm horse and wagon was hitched up, and,
dressed in our Sunday clothes, father and I started for Worcester. Our
object was to get me the situation offered by an advertisement in the
Worcester County _Gazette_ as follows:

BOY WANTED.

WANTED IMMEDIATELY.--At the _Gazette_ Office, a well disposed
boy, able to do heavy rolling. Worcester, May 7.

"The financial inducements were thirty dollars the first year,
thirty-five the ne