They all came

begin his life as a poor man's son. up, so far as I could trace them, without any good time at all, except as boys ought to have a good time in growing strong as a steel bar on plenty of wholesome work and what we should call hard fare; fighting their way to an education through a great deal of effort, and then, when they were ready, coming out West from the East with that half-dollar in their pocket, and that little lot of things done up in a valise that you will notice every young fellow is said to start with, who ends by making his mark or making a fortune.

So a great German writer says that riches are always harder on youth than poverty and that many a man sees now he would not for much money have had much money in his youth. "When we started the Edinburgh Review,' "Sidney Smith says, 66 we thought of putting this motto on the cover: 'We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal,' but it was so literally true that we conIcluded not to tell."

And John Bryant, of Princeton, in Illinois, told me once that when his brother, William Cullen Bryant, was a young man, he durst not have taken a five years' lease of his life; but William, he said, adopted the habits of a Spartan, omitting, of course, the stealing. He would take some brown bread and butter, with a glass of milk or water, for his breakfast, then he would do a bit of real hard work, and then go down to his office; and, with very little alteration, John thought he was

keeping up that habit down to the time we had the talk, and thought also that this had a great deal to do with both the length and the worth of his brother's most noble career. "I shall be glad if you will stay and dine with me, but when my wife is away, I just browse around," Mr. Lincoln said once to a friend when he was President of the Republic and living in the White House in Washington. "Just browse around!" How much that fine temperance in eating and drinking, and in all the habits of his life, had to do with the man's Clear Grit we can only or hardly guess. And, so, turn where you will, I think you are sure to touch this as one of the first things in Clear Grit: "to make much of myself, I must make sure of myself in my power to say No to these good servants but bad masters, my passions and appetites."

We all know, however, there must be more than this to make a man Clear Grit. The power must begin there, but it cannot end there. There are hosts of men who have this quality, so far as I have tried to touch it. They are hardy and temperate, they have pluck and courage, but not an atom of it is used for any other purpose than to serve some end of their own. And so they may become simply so many instances of the truth I have told already that there is nothing in this world so like a splendid angel as a splendid devil.

And so the next thing we want to make Clear

Grit is the power and the will to help others even more than you help yourself. When George Peabody died the Queen of England sorrowed with thousands more for that great, generous banker. But another man died about the same time in England for whom no tears were shed except by a few friends who knew him and loved him, but who did better still with his money than Peabody. This man was Faraday, the prince of chemists in his time. It came out after his death that as far back as 1832 Faraday's income was about £5,000 a year, and he could easily have made it ten or fifteen thousand, but from that time he gave up his whole income, except enough to keep himself and his family in good ease, that he might devote his whole time to the great science in which he was such a master, and in that way enrich the whole world. He died a poor man, when, I suppose, he might have been a millionaire, but then the world was richer by untold millions for what the man had done.

That is the second thing in Clear Grit. After the power to save yourself comes the power to give yourself.

There is an old city in France, where, down to the middle of the last century, the people had to depend upon the wells for their water. But one dry summer these wells gave out, and there was hardly any water to be found. In a poor hovel at that time a child lay sick of a fever, moaning for water, and the mother had none to give him.

He worried through, however, and grew to be a man. But then it was found that he was a miser, the closest and most niggardly man ever heard of in that town. He lived alone in the most miserable fashion and he was so unpopular with the folks that the boys would hoot him and pelt him as he went along the street. Then he died, and it was found that he had left an enormous fortune, every penny of which was to go for a grand system of water works, and from that fountain the water pours plentifully into every home down to this day.

There you touch the second thing in Clear Grit the power to help others, no matter what it may cost you, when the thing faces you as a clear duty. Every ounce of the power that man had, from the day he made his resolution to the day he died, went into Clear Grit, so he was a miser and a martyr together, and I think sometimes that when the poor soul went out of him, all crippled, as it must have been, by that stern struggle to save money through all those years, it was very beautiful to those who watched him from above and knew all about it. Just as when we still see, on our streets or in their homes, the men that came back to us all broken from the war for the Republic, we feel that no perfection in form or feature can ever be robed to us in such a noble beauty as the scarred faces and shorn trunks of our boys in blue.

And this brings me to the last thing I want to

touch in this exposition of Clear Grit. When a man has these two things in his life-first, the power to save himself, and then the power to give himself and he sees something to be done and knows he ought to do it, he never stops to count the cost, but, as we say, he pitches right in and does it there and then. That was what our soldiers did, what the old miser did, what Faraday did, and what all men do who show their Clear Grit right through. There it stands, the thing to be done, and there is the man with the Grit to do it. Something comes into him he cannot tell you what. He wonders very likely, after it's all done, how he did it, but then it's done once and forever. The power has possessed him as Italy possessed Garibaldi, as Germany possessed Bismarck, as Methodism possessed Wesley, as freedom for the slave possessed Garrison, and as honesty possessed Abraham Lincoln. It comes and fills the heart, as the sight of the young maiden fills the heart of the young man who goes into a room at 7 o'clock this evening, with a heart as free as that of an unmated swallow, meets a girl he never saw before, and at 10 o'clock that evening comes out of that room a captive for life.

And once let this power take hold of such a man, then he cares nothing about what risk he has to run or how hard it is to do he puts on the steam and goes ahead and does it. ahead and does it. I well remember in our great fire in Chicago, a slender young man who undertook to carry a lady and her little