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of man you become. Nothing in the universe can ever take the place to you of yourself. What manner of man will you be, is therefore the all important question. On it depends your final, eternal success or failure. Now success, like life, is a most momentous thing. Things destined to endure are long in maturing. The success you seek for should accordingly always be worthy of you; for the testament of Nature, and the testament of the Bible, have the same foundation proviso, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." In order to reap, one must prepare seed and soil. He must sow; he must cultivate; he must have long patience for it; he must reap when the harvest is ripe. He who will not do all these will not succeed. To do them requires much perseverance, for casual effort will not accomplish it.

See how some men of note won their success in life. It may not be the kind you desire, but this is the way theirs came to them. Elias Howe, the inventor and patentee of the first practical sewing machine in this country, received a royalty on his patents during his lifetime of over two millions of dollars. In 1844, after five years of apparently fruitless experimenting, he hit upon the present principle of the sewing machine,-that of a needle grooved, and eyed at the point, and two interlocking threads. Although unknown to him, Mr. Walter Hunt of New York had embodied essentially the same principle in a machine constructed ten years previously, but which Mr. Hunt had laid aside as useless.

Mr. Howe was by no means an extraordinary genius, nor a remarkable mechanic, but at the first a plain, plodding farmer boy, and later an everyday mechanic, and was considered rather dull brained by the neighbors. He was born in Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9, 1819, and died in Brooklyn, New York, October 3, 1867, three weeks after the expiration of his patent on the sewing machine. His father was a small farmer and miller, living in the south part of Spencer, and, when a small child, Elias had to help eke out the family living by sticking wire teeth into leather strips for cards (then made by hand) for

the woolen and cotton machines used in his own and neighboring towns. His schooling was very meager, being only that gained in the winter terms. When eleven years old he "lived out" at a neighbor's for a year. He then worked for his father awhile, and when sixteen he went to Lowell and worked in a cotton factory for fifty cents a day until the panic of 1837 closed the mill, and then he traveled to Cambridge, and obtained work in a machine shop, rooming with his cousin, afterward known as Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks.

In 1838 Mr. Howe went to Boston to work for a machinist, where he continued for some years, or until his interest in his "machine" led him so to neglect his work that he had to leave. That "machine" of his originated in this wise: shortly after going to work in Boston he chanced to overhear a conversation in which one of the speakers, a gentleman of wealth, offered to guarantee a fortune to the man who should invent a machine for sewing. Young Howe gave it no thought, but, in 1840, being of legal age, and then getting nine dollars a week, he took a wife, and shortly after found that his family needed more money for a comfortable support than he was earning. Besides, his work was hard and his health poor, and his wife not over strong, and discouragement was coming, and so one evening in 1841, as he sat watching his weary wife at her stitching, that remark about a fortune to the man who should invent a sewing machine flashed on him like an inspiration. Immediately he determined to make one, and thereafter gave every moment of spare time to thought and experiment on it.

When he had to leave his employer, his father, who had moved to Cambridge, made room for him and his family in the garret of his house. George Fisher, an old schoolmate of Elias's, then lived in Cambridge and had saved some money. To him Elias went, and had many a long conversation, trying to induce him to assist in the enterprise. At length Fisher agreed, for a half interest in the invention, to provide a home. for Howe and his family and advance five hundred dollars, and more if needed, for tools and materials to make the machine,

and, with his father's attic as a workshop, Howe set to work with great enthusiasm, unmindful of the laughter and ridicule of his acquaintances, who thought they were surely right in judging him to be "half witted." After many a failure he succeeded, in May, 1845, in getting a machine made that would sew more strongly than a tailor could, and then in July, to the intense delight of himself and partner, he made up on the machine two suits of clothes, one for each of them, and they thought that fortune was now at hand. Some further improvements were then made on the crude machine, and they began to make up some of them. But it then cost two hundred and fifty dollars to make such a machine, and they could not sell them to families at that price, and journeymen tailors denounced them as contrivances to take bread out of their mouths; so Mr. Fisher, whose one suit of clothes had now cost him over two thousand dollars, would do no more, and Elias had again to move his family to his father's attic, and begin work as a railroad engineer. He was unfitted for this, and had soon to give

it up.

Mr. Howe's machine was patented in the United States, September 10, 1846, and, after many vain efforts to interest capitalists in it, he succeeded at last in sending one of the machines to London, England, by his brother Amasa, in October, 1846. The brother sold the machine to a corset maker, William Thomas, for fifty pounds, which included the sole right to control the manufacture of it in England. Mr. Thomas agreed also to pay a royalty of three pounds for each machine sold, and to pay Elias three pounds a week while fitting the machine for corset making. Amasa came to America, and in February of the next year returned with his brother Elias to England, where Elias entered the service of Mr. Thomas, and soon after sent for his wife and three children. At the end of the seven months Mr. Thomas concluded that he no longer needed the aid of the inventor, and soon made it so uncomfortable for him that Mr. Howe left.

Many months of great poverty now fell to his lot. Sickness

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