are
gathered the few who are famous. In the bottom layer are the many
failures. Between these extremes lie all the rest--from those who live
near the ragged edge of Down-and-Out-Land to those who storm the doors
of the House of Greatness.

Again, between these, and making up the large majority, are the myriads
of laborers, clerks, small business men, housekeepers--that
myriad-headed mass known as "the back bone of the world."

Yet the great distance from the lower layer to the tip-top peak is not
insurmountable. Many have covered it almost overnight.

A Favorite Fallacy

For fame is not due, as we have been led to believe, solely to years
of plodding toil. A thousand years of labor could never have produced
an Edison, a Marconi, a Curie, a Rockefeller, a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a
Bryan, a Ford, a Babe Ruth, a Carpentier, a Mary Pickford, a Caruso, a
Spencer or an Emerson.

Fame's Foundation

The reserved seat in the tip-top peak of the pyramid is procured only
by him who has _found his real vocation_.

To such a one _his_ work is not hard. No hours are long enough to tire
his body; no thought is difficult enough to weary his mind; to him there
is no day and no night, no quitting time, no Saturday afternoons and no
Sundays. He is at the business for which he was created--and all is
play.

Edison Sleeps Four Hours

Thomas A. Edison so loves his work that he sleeps an average of less
than four hours of each twenty-four. When working out one of his
experiments he forgets to eat, cares not whether it is day or night and
keeps his mind on his invention until it is finished.

Yet he has reached the age of seventy-four with every mental and
physical faculty doing one hundred per cent service--and the prize
place in the tip-top peak of the Wizards of the World is his! He started
at the very bottom layer, an orphan newsboy. He made the journey to the
pinnacle because early in life he found his vocation.

Failures Who Became Famous

Each one of the world's great successes was a failure first.

It is interesting to note the things at which some of them failed.
Darwin was a failure at the ministry, for which he was educated. Herbert
Spencer was a failure as an engineer, though he struggled years in that
profession. Abraham Lincoln was such a failure at thirty-three as a
lawyer that he refused an invitation to visit an old friend "because,"
he wrote, "I am such a failure I do not dare to take the time."

Babe