th to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of
appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the
art and assiduity in practicing it.--EDWARD EVERETT.

The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which
belongs to you, and do more work with less effort.--CHARLES KINGSLEY.

"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry
Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831. Although but
eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon
made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on
cardboard. His method was so simple that one could learn in ten
minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny. Having
ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official
papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a
perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document.
At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government
was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps
from old parchments and using them again. The chief also appreciated
the new danger of easy counterfeiting. So he offered Bessemer a
definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at
eight hundred pounds a year. Bessemer chose the office, and hastened
to tell the good news to a young woman with whom he had agreed to share
his fortune. In explaining his invention, he told how it would prevent
any one from taking a valuable stamp from a document a hundred years
old and using it a second time.

* * * * * *

[Illustration: THOMAS ALVA EDISON]

"The Wizard of Menlo Park."

"What the world wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work
and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss."

* * * * * *

"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all
stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used
without detection."

This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a
single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved
the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed,
that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British
revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden
of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year