How to Succeed | Page 5

declared.
Now we must be up and doing. We shall have our hands full, but we
can do as much as anybody."
He was owner and part owner of several ships lying dismantled during
the war, three miles up the river, which was covered with ice an inch
thick. He knew that it would be a month before the ice yielded for the
season, and that thus the merchants in other towns where the harbors
were open, would have time to be in the foreign markets before him.
His decision therefore was instantly taken.
"Reuben," he continued, addressing one of his clerks, "go and collect as
many laborers as possible to go up the river. Charles, do you find
Mr.----, the rigger, and Mr.----, the sailmaker, and tell them I want them
immediately. John, engage half-a-dozen truckmen for to-day and
to-morrow. Stephen, do you hunt up as many gravers and caulkers as
you can, and hire them to work for me." And Mr. A. himself sallied
forth to provide the necessary implements for icebreaking. Before
twelve o'clock that day, upward of an hundred men were three miles up
the river, clearing the ships and cutting away ice, which they sawed out
in large squares, and then thrust under the main mass to open up the
channel. The roofing over the ships was torn off, and the clatter of the
caulkers' mallets was like to the rattling of a hail-storm, loads of
rigging were passed up on the ice, riggers went to and fro with belt and
knife, sailmakers busily plied their needles, and the whole presented an
unusual scene of stir and activity and well-directed labor. Before night
the ships were afloat, and moved some distance down the channel; and
by the time they had reached the wharf, namely, in some eight or ten
days, their rigging and spars were aloft, their upper timbers caulked,

and everything ready for them to go to sea.
Thus Mr. A. competed on equal terms with the merchants of open
seaports. Large and quick gains rewarded his enterprise, and then his
neighbors spoke depreciatingly of his "good luck." But, as the writer
from whom we get the story says, Mr. A. was equal to his opportunity,
and this was the secret of his good fortune.
A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
supposed it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak. Years afterward,
she walked the streets near the Peabody Institute to get money to
purchase food. She cut up an old, worn out, ragged cloak to make a
hood of, when lo! in the lining of the cloak, she discovered the
diamond bracelet. During all her poverty she was worth thirty-five
hundred dollars, but did not know it.
Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities if we could
only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more than
diamond bracelets, in power to do good.
In our large eastern cities it has been found that at least ninety-four out
of every hundred found their first fortune at home, or near at hand, and
in meeting common everyday wants. It is a sorry day for a young man
who cannot see any opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do
better somewhere else. Several Brazilian shepherds organized a party to
go to California to dig gold, and took along a handful of clear pebbles
to play checkers with on the voyage. They discovered after arriving at
Sacramento, after they had thrown most of the pebbles away, that they
were all diamonds. They returned to Brazil only to find that the mines
had been taken up by others and sold to the government.
The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for forty-two
dollars by the owner, to get money to pay his passage to other mines
where he thought he could get rich.
Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a farmer who owned a
farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and rocks, and
concluded to sell out and try some more remunerative business.

He studied coal measures and coal oil deposits, and experimented for a
long time. He sold his farm for two hundred dollars and went into the
oil business two hundred miles away. Only a short time afterward the
man who bought the farm discovered a great flood of coal oil, which
the farmer had ignorantly tried to drain off.
A man was once sitting in an uncomfortable chair in Boston talking
with a friend as to what he could do to help mankind. "I should think it
would be a good thing," said the friend, "to begin by getting up an
easier and cheaper chair."
"I will do it," he exclaimed, leaping up