I remember well a man up in my native hills, a poor man, who for twenty years was helped by the town in his poverty, who owned a wide-spreading maple tree that covered the poor man’s cottage like a benediction from on high.  I remember that tree, for in the spring—­there were some roguish boys around that neighborhood when I was young—­in the spring of the year the man would put a bucket there and the spouts to catch the maple sap, and I remember where that bucket was; and when I was young the boys were, oh, so mean, that they went to that tree before than man had gotten out of bed in the morning, and after he had gone to bed at night, and drank up that sweet sap.  I could swear they did it.  He didn’t make a great deal of maple sugar from that tree.  But one day he made the sugar so white and crystaline that the visitor did not believe it was maple sugar; thought maple sugar must be red or black.  He said to the old man:  “Why don’t you make it that way and sell it for confectionary?” The old man caught his thought and invented the “rock maple crystal,” and before that patent expired he had ninety thousand dollars and had built a beautiful palace on the site of that tree.  After forty years owning that tree he awoke to find it had fortunes of money indeed in it.  And many of us are right by the tree that has a fortune for us, and we own it, possess it, do what we will with it, but we do not learn its value because we do not see the human need, and in these discoveries, and inventions this is one of the most romantic things of life.

I have received letters from all over the country and from England, where I have lectured, saying that they have discovered this and that, and one man out in Ohio took me through his great factories last spring, and said that they cost him $680,000, and said he, “I was not worth a cent in the world when I heard your lecture “Acres of Diamonds”; but I made up my mind to stop right here and make my fortune here, and here it is.”  He showed me through his unmortgaged possessions.  And this is a continual experience now as I travel through the country, after these many years.  I mention this incident, not to boast, but to show you that you can do the same if you will.

Who are the great inventors?  I remember a good illustration in a man who used to live in East Brookfield, Mass.  He was a shoemaker, and he was out of work, and he sat around the house until his wife told him “to go out doors.”  And he did what every husband is compelled by law to do—­he obeyed his wife.  And he went out and sat down on an ash barrel in his back yard.  Think of it!  Stranded on an ash barrel and the enemy in possession of the house!  As he sat on that ash barrel, he looked down into that little brook which ran through that back yard into the meadows, and he saw a little trout go flashing up the stream and hiding under the bank.  I do not suppose he thought of Tennyson’s beautiful poem: 

  “Chatter, chatter, as I flow,
   To join the brimming river,
  Men may come, and men may go,
   But I go on forever.”