hissing escape of
steam.

Later on, when they asked for Joe, he had disappeared; but the next day
he was found in a barn, delirious, swinging an empty lantern in front
of an imaginary train, and crying, "Oh, that I had!"

He was taken home, and afterwards to an asylum, and there is no sadder
sound in that sad place than the unceasing moan, "Oh, that I had! Oh,
that I had!" of the unfortunate brakeman, whose criminal indulgence
brought disaster to many lives.

"Oh, that I had!" or "Oh, that I had not!" is the silent cry of many a
man who would give life itself for the opportunity to go back and
retrieve some long-past error.

"There are moments," says Dean Alford, "which are worth more than
years. We cannot help it. There is no proportion between spaces of
time in importance nor in value. A stray, unthought-of five minutes
may contain the event of a life. And this all-important moment--who
can tell when it will be upon us?"

"What we call a turning-point," says Arnold, "is simply an occasion
which sums up and brings to a result previous training. Accidental
circumstances are nothing except to men who have been trained to take
advantage of them."

The trouble with us is that we are ever looking for a princely chance
of acquiring riches, or fame, or worth. We are dazzled by what Emerson
calls the "shallow Americanism" of the day. We are expecting mastery
without apprenticeship, knowledge without study, and riches by credit.

Young men and women, why stand ye here all the day idle? Was the land
all occupied before you were born? Has the earth ceased to yield its
increase? Are the seats all taken? the positions all filled? the
chances all gone? Are the resources of your country fully developed?
Are the secrets of nature all mastered? Is there no way in which you
can utilize these passing moments to improve yourself or benefit
others? Is the competition of modern existence so fierce that you must
be content simply to gain an honest living? Have you received the gift
of life in this progressive age, wherein all the experience of the past
is garnered for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one
the sum total of purely animal existence?

Born in an age and country in which knowledge and opportunity abound as
never before, how can you sit with folded hands, asking God's aid in
work for which He has already given you the necessary faculties and
strength? Even when the Chosen People supposed