o employ them two months!" Two months! Fifty-five million dollars in
gold drawn from the Bank of England which was more gold than they had to
pay! The bank was now thoroughly alarmed. Something must be done, and
the next morning notice appeared in all the papers that henceforth the
Bank of England would pay Rothschild's bills as well as its own.

From anecdotes one can often learn much of the inner life and thoughts
of people, and much can be seen of the real character of the subject of
this sketch from the above story. This Napoleon of Finance died in
1836.

_"The man who seeks one thing in life, and but one,
May hope to achieve it before life be done;
But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes,
Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows
A harvest of barren regrets."_

[Illustration: From Obscurity To Great Honor.]

JOHN ADAMS.

The subject of this narrative was a great-grandson of Henry Adams, who
emigrated from England about 1640, with a family of eight sons, being
one of the earliest settlers in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts,
where he had a grant of a small tract of forty acres of land. The father
of John Adams, a deacon of the church, was a farmer by occupation, to
which was added the business of shoemaking. He was a man of limited
means, however, was enabled by hard pinching to give his son a fairly
good education.

The old French and Indian war was then at its height; and in a
remarkable letter to a friend, which contains some curious
prognostications as to the relative population and commerce of England
and her colonies a hundred years hence, young Adams describes himself
as having turned politician. He succeeded in gaining charge of the
grammar school in Worcester, Massachusetts, but, instead of finding this
duty agreeable, he found it 'a school of affliction,' and turned his
attention to the study of law. Determined to become a first-class
lawyer, he placed himself under the especial tuition of the only lawyer
of whom Worcester, though the county seat, could boast.

He had thought seriously of the clerical profession, but, according to
his own expressions, "The frightful engines of ecclesiastical councils,
of diabolical malice, and Calvinistic good nature," the operation of
which he had witnessed in some church controversies in his native town,
terrified him out of it. Adams was a very ambitious man; already he had
longings for distinction. Could he ha