once acted as stoker on a Mississippi steamboat. When a young man, Cyrus
Field was a clerk in a New England store. George W. Childs was an errand
boy for a bookseller at $4 a month. Andrew Carnegie began work in a
Pittsburg telegraph office at $3 a week. C. P. Huntington sold butter
and eggs for what he could get a pound or dozen. Whitelaw Reid was once
a correspondent of a newspaper in Cincinnati at $5 per week. Adam
Forepaugh was once a butcher in Philadelphia.

Sarah Bernhardt was a dressmaker's apprentice. Adelaide Neilson began
life as a child's nurse. Miss Braddon, the novelist, was a utility
actress in the provinces. Charlotte Cushman was the daughter of poor
people.

Mr. W. O. Stoddard, in his "Men of Business," tells a characteristic
story of the late Leland Stanford. When eighteen years of age his father
purchased a tract of woodland, but had not the means to clear it as he
wished. He told Leland that he could have all he could make from the
timber if he would leave the land clear of trees. A new market had just
then been created for cord wood, and Leland took some money that he had
saved, hired other choppers to help him, and sold over two thousand
cords of wood to the Mohawk and Hudson River Railroad at a net profit of
$2600. He used this sum to start him in his law studies, and thus, as
Mr. Stoddard says, chopped his way to the bar.

It is said that the career of Benjamin Franklin is full of inspiration
for any young man. When he left school for good he was only twelve years
of age. At first he did little but read. He soon found, however, that
reading, alone, would not make him an educated man, and he proceeded to
act upon this discovery at once. At school he had been unable to
understand arithmetic. Twice he had given it up as a hopeless puzzle,
and finally left school almost hopelessly ignorant upon the subject. But
the printer's boy soon found his ignorance of figures extremely
inconvenient. When he was about fourteen he took up for the _third time_
the "_Cocker's Arithmetic_," _which had baffled him at school_, and
_ciphered all through it with ease and pleasure_. He then mastered a
work upon navigation, which included the rudiments of geometry, and thus
tasted "the inexhaustible charm of mathematics." He pursued a similar
course, we are told, in acquiring the art of composition, in which, at
length, he excelled most of the men of his time. When he was but a boy
of sixteen, he wrote so well that the p