When I wrote the life of General Garfield, one of his neighbors took me to his back door, and shouted, “Jim, Jim, Jim!” and very soon “Jim” came to the door and General Garfield let me in—­one of the grandest men of our century.  The great men of the world are ever so.  I was down in Virginia and went up to an educational institution and was directed to a man who was setting out a tree.  I approached him and said, “Do you think it would be possible for me to see General Robert E. Lee, the President of the University?” He said, “Sir, I am General Lee.”  Of course, when you meet such a man, so noble a man as that, you will find him a simple, plain man.  Greatness is always just so modest and great inventions are simple.

I asked a class in school once who were the great inventors, and a little girl popped up and said, “Columbus.”  Well, now, she was not so far wrong.  Columbus bought a farm and he carried on that farm just as I carried on my father’s farm.  He took a hoe and went out and sat down on a rock.  But Columbus, as he sat upon that shore and looked out upon the ocean, noticed that the ships, as they sailed away, sank deeper into the sea the farther they went.  And since that time some other “Spanish ships” have sunk into the sea.  But as Columbus noticed that the tops of the masts dropped down out of sight, he said:  “That is the way it is with this hoe handle; if you go around this hoe handle, the farther off you go the farther down you go.  I can sail around to the East Indies.”  How plain it all was.  How simple the mind—­majestic like the simplicity of a mountain in its greatness.  Who are the great inventors?  They are ever the simple, plain, everyday people who see the need and set about to supply it.

I was once lecturing in North Carolina, and the cashier of the bank sat directly behind a lady who wore a very large hat.  I said to that audience, “Your wealth is too near to you; you are looking right over it.”  He whispered to his friend, “Well, then, my wealth is in that hat.”  A little later, as he wrote me, I said, “Wherever there is a human need there is a greater fortune than a mine can furnish.”  He caught my thought, and he drew up his plan for a better hat pin than was in the hat before him, and the pin is now being manufactured.  He was offered fifty-five thousand dollars for his patent.  That man made his fortune before he got out of that hall.  This is the whole question:  Do you see a need?

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