Pushing to the Front | Page 8

cylinder head, and an express was due in a few minutes
upon the same track. The conductor hurried to the rear car, and ordered
Joe back with a red light. The brakeman laughed and said:
"There's no hurry. Wait till I get my overcoat."
The conductor answered gravely, "Don't stop a minute, Joe. The
express is due."
"All right," said Joe, smilingly. The conductor then hurried forward to
the engine.
But the brakeman did not go at once. He stopped to put on his overcoat.
Then he took another sip from the flat bottle to keep the cold out. Then
he slowly grasped the lantern and, whistling, moved leisurely down the
track.
He had not gone ten paces before he heard the puffing of the express.
Then he ran for the curve, but it was too late. In a horrible minute the
engine of the express had telescoped the standing train, and the shrieks
of the mangled passengers mingled with the hissing escape of steam.
Later on, when they asked for Joe, he had disappeared; but the next day
he was found in a barn, delirious, swinging an empty lantern in front of
an imaginary train, and crying, "Oh, that I had!"
He was taken home, and afterwards to an asylum, and there is no
sadder sound in that sad place than the unceasing moan, "Oh, that I had!
Oh, that I had!" of the unfortunate brakeman, whose criminal
indulgence brought disaster to many lives.
"Oh, that I had!" or "Oh, that I had not!" is the silent cry of many a man
who would give life itself for the opportunity to go back and retrieve
some long-past error.
"There are moments," says Dean Alford, "which are worth more than
years. We cannot help it. There is no proportion between spaces of time
in importance nor in value. A stray, unthought-of five minutes may

contain the event of a life. And this all-important moment--who can tell
when it will be upon us?"
"What we call a turning-point," says Arnold, "is simply an occasion
which sums up and brings to a result previous training. Accidental
circumstances are nothing except to men who have been trained to take
advantage of them."
The trouble with us is that we are ever looking for a princely chance of
acquiring riches, or fame, or worth. We are dazzled by what Emerson
calls the "shallow Americanism" of the day. We are expecting mastery
without apprenticeship, knowledge without study, and riches by credit.
Young men and women, why stand ye here all the day idle? Was the
land all occupied before you were born? Has the earth ceased to yield
its increase? Are the seats all taken? the positions all filled? the chances
all gone? Are the resources of your country fully developed? Are the
secrets of nature all mastered? Is there no way in which you can utilize
these passing moments to improve yourself or benefit others? Is the
competition of modern existence so fierce that you must be content
simply to gain an honest living? Have you received the gift of life in
this progressive age, wherein all the experience of the past is garnered
for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one the sum total
of purely animal existence?
Born in an age and country in which knowledge and opportunity
abound as never before, how can you sit with folded hands, asking
God's aid in work for which He has already given you the necessary
faculties and strength? Even when the Chosen People supposed their
progress checked by the Red Sea, and their leader paused for Divine
help, the Lord said, "Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the
children of Israel, that they go forward."
With the world full of work that needs to be done; with human nature
so constituted that often a pleasant word or a trifling assistance may
stem the tide of disaster for some fellow man, or clear his path to
success; with our own faculties so arranged that in honest, earnest,
persistent endeavor we find our highest good; and with countless noble

examples to encourage us to dare and to do, each moment brings us to
the threshold of some new opportunity.
Don't wait for your opportunity. Make it,--make it as the shepherd-boy
Ferguson made his when he calculated the distances of the stars with a
handful of glass beads on a string. Make it as George Stephenson made
his when he mastered the rules of mathematics with a bit of chalk on
the grimy sides of the coal wagons in the mines. Make it, as Napoleon
made his in a hundred "impossible" situations. Make it, as all leaders of
men, in war and in peace, have made their chances of success. Golden
opportunities are nothing to laziness,