"If you only knew yourself," I said, "you would set yourself to writing. You ought to be an author."

She shook her head and smiled, as if she thought I was making fun of her. Later, force of circumstances drove her to take up the pen. And when she came to me and told me that she was making three thousand dollars a year in literary work, and was soon to go higher, I thought back to the time when she was a poor girl making three dollars a week when she failed accurately to estimate herself.

There is a
deplorable tendency—

II

There is a deplorable tendency among many people to wait for a particularly favorable opportunity to declare themselves in the battle of life. Some people pause for the rap of opportunity when opportunity has been playing a tattoo on their resonant skulls for years.

Hardly a single great invention has been placed on the market without a number of men putting forth the claim that they had the idea first—and in most cases they proved the fact. But while they were sitting down and dreaming, or trying to bring the device to a greater perfection, a man with initiative rose up and acted. The telegraph, telephone, sewing-machine, air-brake, mowing-machine, wireless, and linotype-machine are only a few illustrations.

The most wonderful idea is quite valueless until it is put into practical operation. The Government rewards the man who first gets a patent or first puts his invention into practical use—and the world does likewise. Thus the dreamer must always lag behind the door.