faculties worth more
than diamond bracelets. In our large Eastern cities it has been found
that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
wants. It is a sorry day for a young man who cannot see any
opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
with on the voyage. After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
diamonds. They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by others
and sold to the government.

The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for $42 by the
owner to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
he could get rich. Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a
farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and
rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
business. He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time. He
sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
miles away. Only a short time after the man who bought his farm
discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
previously ignorantly tried to drain off.

Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
Persian by the name of Ali Hafed. He lived in a cottage on the river
bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
stretching away to the sea. He had a wife and children, an extensive
farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
of forest. He had a plenty of money and everything that heart could
wish. He was contented and happy. One evening a priest of Buddha
visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
earth's surface into diamonds. The old priest told that a drop of
sunlight the size of his thumb was worth more than large mines of
copper, silver, or gold; that with one of them he could buy many farms
like his; that with a handful he could buy a province, and with a mine
of diamonds he could purchase a kin