Gideon Lee could not even get shoes to wear in winter, when a boy, but he went to work barefoot in the snow.  He made a bargain with himself to work sixteen hours a day.  He fulfilled it to the letter, and when from interruption he lost time, he robbed himself of sleep to make it up.  He became a wealthy merchant of New York, mayor of the city, and a member of Congress.

COMMERCIAL COURAGE.

The business affairs of a gentleman named Rouss were once in a complicated condition, owing to his conflicting interests in various states, and he was thrown into prison.  While confined he wrote on the walls of his cell: 

“I am forty years of age this day.  When I am fifty, I shall be worth half a million; and by the time I am sixty, I shall be worth a million dollars.”

He lived to accumulate more than three million dollars.

“The ruin which overtakes so many merchants,” says Whipple, “is due not so much to their lack of business talent as to their lack of business nerve.”

Cyrus W. Field had retired from business with a large fortune when he became possessed with the idea that by means of a cable laid upon the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, telegraphic communication could be established between Europe and America.  He plunged into the undertaking with all the force of his being.  It was an incredibly hard contest:  the forests of Newfoundland, the lobby in Congress, the unskilled handling of brakes on his Agamemnon cable, a second and a third breaking of the cable at sea, the cessation of the current in a well-laid cable, the snapping of a superior cable on the Great Eastern—­all these availed not to foil the iron will of Field, whose final triumph was that of mental energy in the application of science.

FOUR NEW YORK JOURNALISTS.

To Horace Greeley, the founder of the “Tribune,” I need not allude; his story is or ought to be in every school-book.

James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the “Daily Express,” and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of New England rum.  He was so eager to go to college that he started for Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station as he went home.

When James Gordon Bennett was forty years old he collected all his property, three hundred dollars, and in a cellar with a board upon two barrels for a desk, himself his own typesetter, office boy, publisher, newsboy, clerk, editor, proofreader, and printer’s devil, he started the “New York Herald.”  He did this, after many attempts and defeats in trying to follow the routine, instead of doing his own way.  Never was any man’s early career a better illustration of Wendell Phillips’ dictum:  “What is defeat?  Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better.”