ace, having everything that money could buy at his command, and
daily receiving instruction from the best sculptors of Venice.

But he was not in the least spoiled by this change in his fortunes. He
remained simple, earnest, and unaffected. He worked as hard to acquire
knowledge and skill in art as he had meant to work to become a dexterous
stone-cutter.

Antonio Canova's career from the day on which he moulded the butter into
a lion was steadily upward; and when he died, in 1822, he was not only
one of the most celebrated sculptors of his time, but one of the
greatest, indeed, of all time.

THE BOYHOOD OF WILLIAM CHAMBERS.

Boys and girls who can buy attractive periodicals and books at any
bookstore or news-stand, can have very little notion of the difficulty
that little folk had seventy or eighty years ago in getting something to
read. It was only about fifty years ago, indeed, that this first efforts
were made to supply cheap, instructive, and entertaining literature, and
one of the men who made those efforts was Mr. William Chambers, who, in
1882, when he was eighty-two years of age, published a little account of
his life. What he has to tell of his boyhood and youth is very
interesting.

His father was unfortunate in business, and became so poor that young
Chambers had to begin making his own way very early in life. He had
little schooling--only six pounds' (thirty dollars) worth in all, he
tells us--and, as there were no juvenile books or periodicals in those
days, and no books of any other kind, except costly ones, it was hard
for him to do much in the way of educating himself. But William Chambers
meant to learn all that he could, and that determination counted for a
good deal. There was a small circulating library in his native town, and
he began by reading all the books in it, without skipping one. Then he
got hold of a copy of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," which most boys
would regard as very dry reading. He read it carefully. When that was
done young Chambers was really pretty well educated, although he did not
know it.

About that time the boy had to go to work for his living. He became an
apprentice to a bookseller in Edinburgh. His wages were only four
shillings (about a dollar) a week, and on that small sum he had to
support himself, paying for food, lodging, clothes, and everything else,
for five years. "It was a hard but somewhat droll scrimmage with
semistarvation," he says; for, afte