LITTLE BIOGRAPHIES .—HOW SUCCESS IS WON. my audiences, I always try to do my best.” Another secret is his throbbing sympathy for humanity. He is determined to win the erring, and therefore succeeds, He has given nearly nine thousand lectures, and trav- elled about five hundred thousand miles to accomplish this purpose. Over a million copies of his lectures have been sold, and one hundred thousand of his helpful autobiography. He and his wife have reared seven * fatherless children, and I know not how many boys “he has helped through college. Mr. Gough’s hair has LITTLE BIOGRAPHIES.—HOW SUCCESS 275 grown white in his labors. He has perhaps done more than any other one man to make temperance an absorbing topic of the time. When he began his work few had taken the pledge; now the signers are mil- lions. States are prohibiting that which works harm to citizens ; schools are teaching that beer and brandy poison both blood and brain. But his own personal history, his struggle and his complete victory shall re- main to the end of time as personal hope and courage for the most complete outcast. IS WON. By Sarau K. Botron. III. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. FELT I was in the world to do something, and thought I mst,” said Mr. Whittier, speaking to me of his early years, as we sat in his home at Oak Knoll, Danvers, before a cheerful wood-fire. This consciousness of “ must” is the secret of the noble life and noble work which has impressed the very heart of the American people. While no poet has sung more lovingly of our flowers, brooks and mountains, so no other has labored so heroically for the great principles of the American Republic. To free the slave, to give woman an equal chance in the world with man, to make the nations love each other and learn war no more — these are the once unpopular principles which he has fearlessly championed. “ But,” says Mr. Whittier, “it is always safe to do right ; and the truest expediency is simple justice.” Mr. Whittier, now seventy-six years old, is a tall, slender man, with dark, kind eyes, winsome smile, and gentle manners. The moment he begins to talk, his self-forgetfulness shows, and his kindli- ness. Probably no one in this country has helped so many young writers, by kind words to editors, or by commendation of a first book. “I read a book with sympathy for the author,” he says. “It is easy to tear a volume in pieces by criticism, but I try to find its merits.” Many who have come up through struggles to success forget the great crowd of toilers below when they have reached the top of the mountain, but Mr. Whittier never forgets. . His boyhood was passed in Haverhill, Mass., in a lonely farmhouse half-hidden by oak woods, with no other home in sight. Here, he says, on stormy nights — We heard the loosened clapboards tost, The board-nails snapping in the frost; And on us, through the unplastered wall, Felt the light-sifted snow-flakes fall. Besides a brother and two sisters, there were few companions. The father was a good Quaker, one of the selectmen of the town; the mother a re- fined, dignified woman, fond of reading the best books. She spun and wove the linen and woollen cloth needed in the family, always finding time to teach her children from the Bible. There were only twenty volumes in the home, most of these journals of Quaker ministers; and the only fresh book for the young boy was the yearly almanac! He longed for reading, especially for books of biog- raphy and travel; and wherever he heard of a vol- ume, he would walk miles in the snow to borrow it. When he was fourteen, his first schoolmaster, Joshua Coffin, brought a volume of Burns to the house, and read it aloud. Little John was de- lighted, begged him to leave it, and lo! forthwith began to make rhymes, and to imagine stories and adventures. This is not the first time that a book has changed, or swollen the current of a life. Jar. aday would have remained a bookbinder, perhaps, if he had not read an article on electricity in a book he was binding. Robert Dick became the noted Scottish geologist from reading a book of Hugh Miller’s. Between one baking and another, he often walked fifty and eighty miles, toiling at his scien- tific diggings and hammerings and spyings, with but a dry biscuit for food, which he moistened in brooks by the roadside. Whittier’s elder sister, Mary, encouraged him to write in the spare moments he could save from work on the farm, and errand-going for his mother; and, moreover, she sent one of his poems to the Newburyport “ree Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison. Says Mr. Whittier: . Some weeks afterwards, the news-carrier came along on horseback, and threw the paper out from his saddle-bags. My uncle and I were mending fences. I took up the sheet, and was surprised and overjoyed to see my lines in the * Poet’s Corner.” I stood gazing at them in wonder, and my uncle had to recall me several times to my work.