s day.

"The time comes to the young surgeon," says Arnold, "when, after long
waiting, and patient study and experiment, he is suddenly confronted
with his first critical operation. The great surgeon is away. Time is
pressing. Life and death hang in the balance. Is he equal to the
emergency? Can he fill the great surgeon's place, and do his work? If
he can, he is the one of all others who is wanted. _His opportunity
confronts him_. He and it are face to face. Shall he confess his
ignorance and inability, or step into fame and fortune? It is for him
to say."

Are you prepared for a great opportunity?

"Hawthorne dined one day with Longfellow," said James T. Fields, "and
brought a friend, with him from Salem. After dinner the friend said,
'I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based upon a
legend of Acadia, and still current there,--the legend of a girl who,
in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and
passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him
dying in a hospital when both were old.' Longfellow wondered that the
legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and he said to him, 'If
you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you
let me have it for a poem?' To this Hawthorne consented, and promised,
moreover, not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen
what he could do with it in verse. Longfellow seized his opportunity
and gave to the world 'Evangeline, or the Exile of the Acadians.'"

Open eyes will discover opportunities everywhere; open ears will never
fail to detect the cries of those who are perishing for assistance;
open hearts will never want for worthy objects upon which to bestow
their gifts; open hands will never lack for noble work to do.

Everybody had noticed the overflow when a solid is immersed in a vessel
filled with water, although no one had made use of his knowledge that
the body displaces its exact bulk of liquid; but when Archimedes
observed the fact, he perceived therein an easy method of finding the
cubical contents of objects, however irregular in shape.

Everybody knew how steadily a suspended weight, when moved, sways back
and forth until friction and the resistance of the air bring it to
rest, yet no one considered this information of the slightest practical
importance; but the boy Galileo, as he watched a lamp left swinging by
accident in the cathedral at Pisa, saw in the