beggar?"

"Very well," was the reply, "_I will be a king_."

His parents left him to his fate in a garret. For ten years he fought
terrible battles with hardship and poverty, but won a great victory at
last. He won it after producing forty novels that did not win.

Zola's early manhood witnessed a bitter struggle against poverty and
deprivation. Until twenty he was a spoiled child; but, on his father's
death, he and his mother began the battle of life in Paris. Of his dark
time, Zola himself says:

"Often I went hungry for so long, that it seemed as if I must die. I
scarcely tasted meat from one month's end to another, and for two days I
lived on three apples. Fire, even on the coldest nights, was an
undreamed-of luxury; and I was the happiest man in Paris when I could
get a candle, by the light of which I might study at night."

Samuel Johnson's bare feet at Oxford showed through the holes in his
shoes, yet he threw out at his window the new pair that some one left at
his door. He lived for a time in London on nine cents a day. For
thirteen years he had a hard struggle with want. John Locke once lived
on bread and water in a Dutch garret, and Heyne slept many a night on a
barn floor with only a book for his pillow. It was to poverty as a thorn
urging the breast of Harriet Martineau that we owe her writings.

There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which record
how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of a
certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount