"How speaks the present hour? _Act_." Don't wait for great
opportunities. _Seize common occasions and make them great_.

XV. THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS

There is nothing small in a world where a mud-crack swells to an
Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold.

XVI. SELF-MASTERY

Guard your weak point. Be lord over yourself.

LIST OF PORTRAITS.

CHAP.

I. Phillips Brooks . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
II. Oliver Hazard Perry
III. Walter Scott
IV. William Hickling Prescott
V. John Bunyan
VI. Richard Arkwright
VII. Victor Hugo
VIII. James A. Garfield (missing from book)
IX. Thomas Alva Edison
X. Andrew Jackson
XI. John Greenleaf Whittier (missing from book)
XII. Alexander Hamilton
XIII. Ralph Waldo Emerson
XIV. Thomas Jefferson
XV. Louis Agassiz
XVI. James Russell Lowell

ARCHITECTS OF FATE.

CHAPTER I.

WANTED--A MAN.

"Wanted; men:
Not systems fit and wise,
Not faiths with rigid eyes,
Not wealth in mountain piles,
Not power with gracious smiles,
Not even the potent pen:
Wanted; men."

Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and
know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a
man.--JEREMIAH.

All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us? We want a man!
Don't look so far for this man. You have him at hand. This man,--it
is you, it is I, it is each one of us! . . . How to constitute one's
self a man? Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
easier, if one wills it.--ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

"'Tis life, not death for which we pant!
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant:
More life and fuller, that we want."

I do not wish in attempting to paint a man to describe an air-fed,
unimpassioned, impossible ghost. My eyes and ears are revolted by any
neglect of the physical facts, the limitations of man.--EMERSON.

But nature, with a matchless hand, sends forth her nobly born,
And laughs the paltry attributes of wealth and rank to scorn;
She moulds with care a spirit rare, half human, half divine,
And cries exulting, "Who can make a gentleman like mine?"
ELIZA COOK.

"In a thousand cups of life," says Emerson, "only one is the right
mixture. The fine adjustment of the existing elements, where the
well-mixed man is born with eyes not too dull, nor too good, with fire
enough and earth enough, capable of receiv