"The boy felt for his knife again, opened it with his teeth as he held on, and hauling the rope up, cut off a part of it. He threw a short piece around the trunk and tied himself with it to the tree. Then he could lean back for a longer throw. He tied the rope to his hand again, and threw the stone with all his energy. It went straight as an arrow, drew the rope squarely over the nest and fell down the other side of the tree. After a struggle he reached around for the stone, and tied that end of the rope to a long broken limb. When he drew the other end of the rope which had been fastened to his hand, it broke down the sides of the nest, and an old bird arose with a wild scream. "Then he loosed the rope which held him to the tree, and pulling himself up with his hands on the scaling line, digging his bare toes, heels and knees at times into the ragged bark, he was up in two minutes to the nest." "That is a child's ambition," said one of the men, as they both drew a breath of relief, when he stepped safely to the ground. "Wait until he has a man's ambition. If that vein of perseverance doesn't run out, he will do something worth while." CHAPTER IV TWO MEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE John Brown. Fireside Discussions. Runaway Slaves. Fred Douglas. Rev. Asa Niles. A Runaway Trip to Boston. Two men entered into Russell Conwell's life in these formative days of boyhood who unconsciously had much to do with the course of his after life. One was John Brown, that man "who would rush through fire though it burn, through water though it drown, to do the work which his soul knew that it must do." During his residence in Springfield, this man "possessed like Socrates with a genius that was too much for him" was a frequent visitor at the Conwell home. Russell learned to know that face with "features chiselled, as it were, in granite," the large clear eyes that seemed fairly to change color with the intensity of his feelings when he spoke on the one subject that was the very heart of the man. Tall, straight, lithe, with hair brushed back from a high forehead, thick, full beard and a wonderful, penetrating voice whose tones once heard were never forgotten, his arrival was always received with shouts by the Conwell boys. Had he not lived in the West and fought real Indians! What surer "open sesame" is there to a boy's heart? He was not so enrapt in his one great project, but that he could go out to the barn and pitch down hay from the mow with Russell, or tell him wonderful stories of the great West where he had lived as a boy, and of the wilderness through which he had tramped as a mere child when he cared for his father's cattle. Russell was entirely too young to grasp the meaning of the earnest discussions that went on about the fireplace of which this Spartan was then the centre. But in later years their meaning came to him with a peculiar significance. A light seemed to be shed on the horrors of slavery as if the voice of