“How? Let me tell you a little story. Years ago a young printer went to New York City to find work. He hadn’t any fine clothes, and scarcely any money, and I doubt if in all that great city there was a single person that he knew. After much searching he found something to do; and in the office where he was employed the other printers delighted in annoying him, playing jokes upon him, and daubing his light-colored hair with ink. I wouldn’t wonder if this sort of treatment made him feel sad and homesick, sometimes, and wish he was back again among the mountains where he came from. However, he paid little attention to it; he worked all day, faithfully, and at night he read and studied a good deal; and when he couldn’t afford to pay for a light to study by, he would take his book out by the street-lamp and study there—sometimes when it was cold, too. Wasn’t he persevering? Well, he worked, and read, and studied, and persevered, till he got to be an editor; yes, in time he became the most famous editor—or journalist, some would call it—the most famous one that ever lived. Last fall he died—this man who was once a penniless, friendless boy—and at the news of his death there was sadness all over the country; and, at his burial, thousands and thousands of people crowded those same streets where he used to read, shivering, by the lamp-light; thousands and thousands went to get a glimpse of his dead face, and wept over it, because he had helped them and they loved him and were sorry he was gone.
“Oh, was it Horace Greeley?” the lad whispers. (He has stopped crying now.)
“You have guessed.”
“I’ve thought, sometimes,” says the boy, presently, in a hesitating way—“I never told it to anybody before—but I’ve thought I’d like to be great, too, some time, to be a lawyer—and—and go to Congress—and—oh, I never told it to anybody before, because it’s foolish, I know, and they’d laugh at me. I can’t help thinking about it, though. But of course there’s no hope for me.”
“Ah, but there is, though! I doubt if our Vice-President thought there was much hope of his ever going to Congress when, in his youth, he was earning his livelihood in a shoemaker’s shop. But, you see, he kept pegging away; when it wasn’t at boots and shoes it was at books, at gaining knowledge, and making the most of the talents that were given him, working his way up, inch by inch, till he became congressman, surely, till now he presides over the Senate. And our President, at your age, little dreamed that he would ever be called upon to control a great army, to plan campaigns and sieges, to ‘fight it out all summer on this line,’ as you have heard about—persevering, you see—and so to put an end to the bloody war, and be chosen once and again to the highest office in the land—like Washington, long ago. Yes, it’s perseverance that does it. Did you ever hear of Cyrus Field, the man who brought the Old World and the New nearer together by his Atlantic cable? When he first proposed to do it, to send dispatches through two thousand miles of water, that seemed to every one a very absurd idea. But when his cable was finished and ready to be laid, then people began to be interested; indeed, they were really excited over it, and it was quite the fashion to wear attached to one’s watch-chain a bit of that gutta-percha cable, set in gold. But the cable, or telegraph, was a failure, after all; it didn’t ‘work.’ So people disbelieved once more, and lost interest in the enterprise, and took the bits of gutta-percha from their watch-chains, and put them away out of sight and of mind. And it fared with the experimenter just as it fared with those trinkets. But years passed by, and lo! one day, to everybody’s surprise, the President received from Queen Victoria a polite message that had taken but a few moments to cross the wide Atlantic. And now, you know, Europe and America can talk with each other almost as easily as you and I here, sitting side by side. For what had Cyrus Field been doing all that time that nobody took any notice of him? He had been making trial after trial, and failure after failure, and losing fortune, and, very likely, friends, but never losing hope. So he persevered—and succeeded, at last. And who does your history say discovered America?”
“Christopher Columbus.”
“Well, this Christopher Columbus of whom all the histories tell and everybody knows, he was only a sailor boy, once, roving about in the Mediterranean, with small chance of ever becoming noted. As little chance would it seem there was when, years later, he went from court to court, vainly asking aid to carry out his project. People had hardly begun, yet, to credit the notion that the world was round; and this tall, sad-eyed, white-haired, shabbily dressed stranger, with his maps and his charts, and his plans for sailing straight West to India, who was going to listen to him? Kings and queens were unwilling to see him or give him an opportunity to explain, courtiers ridiculed him, children in the street would point to their foreheads, as he passed by, and call out to each other, ‘Look at the crazy Italian!’ But often disappointed, always hoping and persevering, he stuck to his project, and finally, after eighteen long years of waiting and fruitless effort, he got the help he wanted and started on his voyage, and so found—not India, but America.”
And as the Lieutenant and his young guide walk slowly homeward through the silent, moonlit avenues, he speaks of Lincoln, of Herder, of Ferguson, of Beethoven, of Sir William Herschel, and of others who have risen from poverty and obscurity to honor and renown; many of them “self-made,” as it is called, toiling patiently and unaided up that steep hill where the laurels grow.
Kate hears the hopeful ring in the lad’s voice as he says “Good night” to his friend, and through the open window she sees the hopeful expression upon his face as he turns away, glancing down rather proudly at the jacket that is mended with pieces of many shades, and the boots that have been patched and patched again. “What can you have been saying to him, Walter?” she wonders. “Oh, if you could only have seen his face just now! He doesn’t look like the same boy.” And Walter musingly repeats those lines with which every “wide-awake” American boy and girl is familiar. For was it not Longfellow who wrote them?