The Power of Perseverance.

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

HE book of Nature is the oldest of all God's testaments to

men, and the most important. On it are based all the others. But for it, they would not be. To render it a success, they are given. Not that the book of Nature is imperfect, but men are imperfect. The volume is yet too wise for them to understand it. Its pages have been open to be read of all men for thousands of years, yet they do not even now know how to train and care for their bodies so as to make of them a success. If they did, physicians would long ago have departed, and hospitals and asylums be unknown. And as to the best method of developing and using that one mighty and only instrument for gaining success, the mind, how wide is the difference of opinion among them, and what a lamentable failure many of them make of it! Happy is the man who can read Nature aright, and then obeys her instruction, for, "He that doeth these things shall live by them," is the promise. But multitudes of men misunderstand, or abuse, or refuse Nature's teachings as to the body, and disease and pain come, followed by the doctor with real, or assumed, antidotes and palliatives. Men overlook, or scorn, or are ignorant of Nature's mental laws for success, and in consequence the maimed, the wrecked, the failed, are everywhere, appealing both to the philanthropist and to the philosopher of morals for aid.

The most important of all things to you in this world is yourself. I do not mean your selfishness, but your selfhood, or, if you please, manhood. Or, as the good old Anglo-Saxon word "manhood" means, the kind, the quality, the manner,

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

came to him; starvation looked in at the window. At length a charitably disposed acquaintance gave him a little help, and he set about to make and sell a machine. By the aid of relatives and friends and the pawnbroker, he at last got money enough to send his family home to America, and when he had completed the machine, although it was worth fifty pounds, he sold it for five, and took a note at that. Discounting the note for four pounds, he took passage for New York, where he arrived in April, 1849, with two dollars and a half in his pocket. Here tidings of the fatal illness of his wife met him, and, begging his way home to Cambridge, he arrived only in time to receive her dying farewell. Soon after news of the wreck, on Cape Cod, of the ship that brought his few household goods came, and the poor man literally sat amid the ruins of his family and his hope of a fortune.

But the clouds that so long lowered over him now began to lift, and he found that, though the capitalists would not buy his invention when he offered it to them, they had not hesitated to steal it while he was absent from the country, and that other inventors had combined his discoveries with improvements of their own, and sewing machines were rapidly coming into use. He succeeded in interesting a friend, George W. Bliss, who, taking as security a mortgage on Mr. Howe's father's farm, bought out Fisher's interest in the invention, and after Mr. Howe had succeeded in redeeming his original machine, and his letters patent, which he had been compelled to pawn in London, he began suit against the infringers, and in 1850 he commenced to manufacture his machine in New York, and thereafter was above want. In 1854 the United States courts decided the case against Isaac M. Singer and others for infringements, in Mr. Howe's favor. The infringers combined and paid him royalties that enabled him in 1855 to repurchase the rights he had parted with in the sad days of poverty and sickness, and Mr. Howe established a large factory at Bridgeport, Conn., for the manufacture of his machine, and soon became a millionaire.