First, to the boys before me.  If I had life to live over one of my first purposes would be to seek my calling in life.  Do you know half the failures of life come from misfits of occupation?  There are lawyers starving for want of clients, doctors with patients under monuments, and preachers talking to empty pews, who might have been successful in factories or furrows.  Cowper was a failure as a lawyer, he was a success as a poet; Goldsmith was a bungling surgeon, he was a power with his pen; Horace Greely was a success in the Tribune office, he was a failure as a farmer and a slow candidate for president.

When U.S.  Grant was a very young man his father sent him to sell a horse to a buyer and instructed him to ask one hundred dollars, but if he could not get that amount to take eighty-five.  The buyer looked the horse over and said:  “Young man, what is your price?” Young Grant replied:  “Father told me to ask you one hundred dollars, but if you would not give that to take eighty-five.”  It is needless to say the calling of U.S.  Grant was not horse trading.  This same young man afterwards tried the grocery business and bought potatoes far and wide to corner the market, but the price went down, the potatoes rotted in Grant’s bins and his grocery effort was on a par with his horse trading.  He then tried the ice market but that became watered stock on his hands and again he was a failure.  Later on in life ’mid roar of cannon and rattle of musketry the misfit found his element.  Here he was so sure of his calling he made his motto, “I’ll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” and to the general, who could not drive a horse trade, or corner the potato market, or deal in ice, one of the greatest generals the world ever knew surrendered his sword, and from the highest military position Grant was called to be President of the United States.

If it is true that “ever since creation shot its first shuttle through chaos design has marked the course of every golden thread,” then every human being is designed to fill a certain place in life.  There are young women teaching school, getting to be old maids, who should be the wives of good husbands, and there are some wives who ought to be old maid “schoolmarms.”

We have born architects, born orators, born bookkeepers, born musicians, born poets, born preachers, born teachers, born surgeons, born bankers, born blacksmiths, born merchants, born farmers.

Two farmers live side by side; one doesn’t seem to work hard, yet everything is neatness from one end of the farm to the other; his neighbor works hard, yet the cattle are in his corn, the fences are broken, gates off the hinges and everything seems out of order.  That man was not made to be a farmer.  He should rent out, or sell out, and go to the legislature, or find some other place he can fill.