"Eloquence must have been born with you," said a friend to J. P.
Curran. "Indeed, my dear sir, it was not," replied the orator, "it was
born some three and twenty years and some months after me." Speaking
of his first attempt at a debating club, he said: "I stood up,
trembling through every fibre, but remembering that in this I was but
imitating Tully, I took courage and had actually proceeded almost as
far as 'Mr. Chairman,' when, to my astonishment and terror, I perceived
that every eye was turned on me. There were only six or seven present,
and the room could not have contained as many more; yet was it, to my
panic-stricken imagination, as if I were the central object in nature,
and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation.
I became dismayed and dumb. My friends cried, 'Hear him!' but there
was nothing to hear." He was nicknamed "Orator Mum," and well did he
deserve the title until he ventured to stare in astonishment at a
speaker who was "culminating chronology by the most preposterous
anachronisms." "I doubt not," said the annoyed speaker, "that 'Orator
Mum' possesses wonderful talents for eloquence, but I would recommend
him to show it in future by some more popular method than his silence."
Stung by the taunt, Curran rose and gave the man a "piece of his mind,"
speaking quite fluently in his anger. Encouraged by this success, he
took great pains to become a good speaker. He corrected his habit of
stuttering by reading favorite passages aloud every day slowly and
distinctly, and spoke at every opportunity.

Bunyan wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress" on the untwisted papers used to
cork the bottles of milk brought for his meals. Gifford wrote his
first copy of a mathematical work, when a cobbler's apprentice, on
small scraps of leather; and Rittenhouse, the astronomer, first
calculated eclipses on his plow handle.

A poor Irish lad, so pitted by smallpox that boys made sport of him,
earned his living by writing little ballads for street musicians.
Eight cents a day was often all he could earn. He traveled through
France and Italy, begging his way by singing and playing the flute at
the cottages of the peasantry. At twenty-eight he was penniless in
London, and lived in the beggars' quarters in Axe Lane. In his
poverty, he set up as a doctor in the suburbs of London. He wore a
second-hand coat of rusty velvet, with a patch on the left breast which
he adroitly covered with his thre