“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.”