treasures!

Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce
an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for
the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I
said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument
responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.' It was enough to drive one mad. But
I held firm, and I have succeeded."

The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and
hard work.

Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of
Massachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience
which can work and wait. His only inheritance was poverty and hard
work. But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a
determination to get on in the world. He braided straw to get money to
buy books which his soul thirsted for.

To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a
piano. Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and
fortune. Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared
with accuracy and knowledge. He could afford to work and wait, for
quality, not quantity, was his aim. Fifty years ago the piano was a
miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day.
Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the
fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the
player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve
its purity and truthfulness of tone. And he strove patiently and
persistently till he succeeded.

"Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no
idle dream, but a solemn reality," said Carlyle. "It is thy own. It
is all thou hast to comfort eternity with. Work then like a star,
unhasting, yet unresting."

Gladstone was bound to win; although he had spent many years of
preparation for his life work, in spite of the consciousness of
marvelous natural endowments which would have been deemed sufficient by
many young men, and notwithstanding he had gained the coveted prize of
a seat in Parliament, yet he decided to make himself master of the
situation; and amid all his public and private duties, he not only
spent eleven terms more in the study of the law, but he studied Greek
constantly and read every well written book or paper he could obtain,
so determined was he that his life should be rounded out to its fullest
measure, and that his mind should have br