Here, then, is
material for a perfect comparison.
Mark, now, the parallel. One of them was a college man, the son of a
noted educator and himself a professor in the University of Boston. He
used the gifts which God gave him for that purpose, and as long as the
transmission of human speech continues among men, the name of
Alexander Graham Bell will be rightly honored by all the world.
The other of these men could no more have gone to college than he
could have crossed the Atlantic on a sheet of paper. You who read this
never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy.
Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was
and is. But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will
not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his
ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has
tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used
himself?
At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway.
That didn't satisfy him. The mystery of the telegraph (and what is
more mysterious?) constantly called him. The click of the instrument
was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different
from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.
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