Such a sight as this sometimes sets us thinking how many germs of excellence are in this world turned to no account.  You see the polished diamond and the rough one side by side.  It is too late now; but the dull colorless pebble might have been the bright glancing gem.  And you may polish the material diamond at any time; but if you miss your season in the case of the human one, the loss can never be repaired.  The bumpkin who is a bumpkin at thirty must remain a bumpkin to threescore and ten.  But another thing that makes us think how many fair possibilities are lost is to remark the fortuitous way in which great things have often been done,—­and done by people who never dreamt that they had in them the power to do anything particular.  These cases, one cannot but think, are samples of millions more.  There have been very popular writers who were brought out by mere accident.  They did not know what precious vein of thought they had at command, till they stumbled upon it as if by chance, like the Indian at the mines of Potosi.  It is not much that we know of Shakspeare, but it seems certain that it was in patching up old plays for acting that he discovered within himself a capacity for producing that which men will not easily let die.  When a young military man, disheartened with the service, sought for an appointment as an Irish Commissioner of Excise, and was sadly disappointed because he did not get it, it is probable that he had as little idea as any one else had that he possessed that aptitude for the conduct of war which was to make him the Duke of Wellington.  And when a young mathematician, entirely devoid of ambition, desired to settle quietly down and devote all his life to that unexciting study, he was not aware that he was a person of whom more was to be made,—­who was to grow into the great Emperor Napoleon.  I had other instances in my mind, but after these last it is needless to mention them.  But such cases suggest to us that there may have been many Folletts who never held a brief, many Keans who never acted but in barns, many Vandyks who never earned more than sixpence a day, many Goldsmiths who never were better than penny-a-liners, many Michaels who never built their St. Peters,—­and perhaps a Shakspeare who held horses at the theatre-door for pence, as the Shakspeare we know of did, and who stopped there.

Let it here be suggested, that it is highly illogical to conclude that you are yourself a person of whom a great deal more might have been made, merely because you are a person of whom it is the fact that very little has actually been made.  This suggestion may appear a truism; but it is one of those simple truths of which we all need to be occasionally reminded.  After all, the great test of what a man can do must be what a man does.  But there are folk who live on the reputation of being pebbles capable of receiving a very high polish, though from circumstances they did not choose to be polished.  There are people