It is rather nice to remember that after William Emerson had sold his bass viol, after all the pinching and saving of Mrs. William, and after going with half a coat, Ralph Waldo Emerson proved, in the end, to be such an uncommon man and scholar that his name is known the world over. Perhaps if all of us were as willing to study and work, and to keep studying and working, as the Sage of Concord was, there would be ever so many more famous Americans than there are to-day. JANE ADDAMS When Jane Addams was a little girl about seven years old, out in Cedarville, Illinois, her father used to wonder why she got up in the morning so much earlier than the other children. She explained to him politely that it was because she had so much to do. Her mother was dead, but her father looked after the children very carefully, and to make sure that Jane read something besides fairy stories, gave her five cents every time she could tell him about a new hero from _Plutarch's Lives_ and fifteen cents for every volume of Irving's _Life of Washington_. She would have read what he asked her to without a cent of pay, for she almost worshiped him. He was tall and handsome and a man of great importance in the west. Jane was very proud of him, and as she was plain, toed in when she walked, and had rather a crooked back, she imagined that he must really be ashamed of her, only he was too kind to say so. So she tried to keep out of his way. The Honorable John Addams (her father) taught a Bible class in Sunday-school, and Jane was so afraid it would mortify him if she walked home with him that she always ran ahead with an uncle, urging him to hurry. "My," she used to say, "he would be too ashamed to hold his head up again, if I should speak to him on the street." No one knew she felt this way, and she had been dodging him some years when one morning, over in the neighboring town, she saw him coming down the steps of a bank building across the street from her. There was no place to hide, so she stood there blushing and breathing pretty hard. But he lifted his tall silk hat to her, smiled, and waved his hand. He looked so pleased to see her that she never worried any more about meeting him on the street. Across the road from Jane's house was a nice green common, and beyond this a narrow path led to her father's mills. He owned two, a flour-mill and a sawmill. In the sawmill great trees from the Illinois forests were sawed into lumber. Jane used to sit on a log that was every minute being drawn nearer the great teeth of the saw and jump off it when she was within a few inches of the saw. Jane and the other children had great fun in the flour-mill, too. They made believe the bins were houses, and down in the basement played on the tall piles of bran and shorts as they would on sand piles.