will made his way. When his friends nominated him as a
candidate for the legislature, his enemies made fun of him. When
making his campaign speeches he wore a mixed jean coat so short that he
could not sit down on it, flax and tow-linen trousers, straw hat, and
pot-metal boots. He had nothing in the world but character and friends.

When his friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his
being a lawyer. He said he hadn't brains enough. He read law barefoot
under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the
counter in the store where he worked. He had to borrow money to buy a
suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature,
and walked to take his seat at Vandalia,--one hundred miles. While he
was in the legislature, John F. Stuart, an eminent lawyer of
Springfield, told him how Clay had even inferior chances to his, had
got all of the education he had in a log schoolhouse without windows or
doors; and finally induced Lincoln to study law.

See Thurlow Weed, defying poverty and wading through the snow two
miles, with rags for shoes, to borrow a book to read before the
sap-bush fire. See Locke, living on bread and water in a Dutch garret.
See Heyne, sleeping many a night on a barn floor with only a book for
his pillow. See Samuel Drew, tightening his apron strings "in lieu of
a dinner." See young Lord Eldon, before daylight copying Coke on
Littleton over and over again. History is full of such examples. He
who will pay the price for victory needs never fear final defeat. Why
were the Roman legionaries victorious?

"For Romans, in Rome's quarrels,
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son, nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old."

Fowell Buxton, writing to one of his sons, says: "I am sure that a
young man may be very much what he pleases."

Dr. Mathews has well said that "there is hardly a word in the whole
human vocabulary which is more cruelly abused than the word 'luck.' To
all the faults and failures of men, their positive sins and their less
culpable shortcomings, it is made to stand a godfather and sponsor. Go
talk with the bankrupt man of business, who has swamped his fortune by
wild speculation, extravagance of living, or lack of energy, and you
will find that he vindicates his wonderful self-love by confounding the
steps which he took indiscreetly with those to which he was forced by
'circumstances,' and complacently regard