nose,
a projecting chin, and large, steel-blue eyes, that were full of fire
and power. His face was sallow, his hair brown and stringy, his cheeks
lean from not too much over-feeding. His body and lees were thin and
small, but his chest was broad, and his neck short and thick. His step
was firm and steady, with nothing of the "wobbly" gait we often see in
people who are not well-proportioned. His character was undoubtedly that
of a young man who had the desire to get ahead faster than his
opportunities would permit. Solitude had made him uncommunicative and
secretive; anxiety and privation had made him self-helpful and
self-reliant; lack of sympathy had made him calculating; but doing for
others had made him kind-hearted and generous. His reading and study had
made him ambitious; his knowledge that when he knew a thing he really
knew it, made him masterful and desirous of leadership. He had few of
the vices, and sowed but a small crop of what is called the "wild oats"
of youth; he abhorred debt, and scarcely ever owed a penny, even when in
sorest straits; and, while not a bright nor a great scholar, what he had
learned he was able to store away in his brain, to be drawn upon for use
when, in later years, this knowledge could be used to advantage.

[Illustration: _Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte Aged 22 (from the
portrait by Jean Baptiste Greuse, in the Museum at
Versailles)_]

Such at twenty years of age was Napoleon Bonaparte. Such he remained
through the years of his young manhood, meeting all sorts of
discouragements, facing the hardest poverty, becoming disgusted with
many things that occurred in those changing days, when liberty was
replacing tyranny, and the lesson of free America was being read and
committed by the world.

He saw the turmoil and terrors of the French Revolution--that season of
blood, when a long-suffering people struck a blow at tyranny, murdered
their king, and tried to build on the ruins of an overturned kingdom an
impossible republic.

You will understand all this better when you come to read the history of
France, and see through how many noble but mistaken efforts that fair
European land struggled from tyranny to freedom. In these efforts
Napoleon had a share; and it was his boyhood of privation and his youth
of discouragement that made him a man of purpose, of persistence and
endeavor, raising him step by step, in the days when men needed leaders
but found none, until this one finally pr