ry 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 were, oh, so mean, that they went to that tree before that man
had gotten out of bed in the morning, and after he had gone to bed at
night, and drank up that sweet sap. I could swear they did it. He didn't
make a great deal of maple sugar from that tree. But one day he made the
sugar so white and crystalline that the visitor did not believe it was
maple sugar; thought maple sugar must be red or black. He said to the
old man: "Why don't you make it that way and sell it for confectionery?"
The old man caught his thought and invented the "rock maple crystal,"
and before that patent expired he had ninety thousand dollars and had
built a beautiful palace on the site of that tree. After forty years
owning that tree he awoke to find it had fortunes of money indeed in it.
And many of us are right by the tree that has a fortune for us, and we
own it, possess it, do what we will with it, but we do not learn its
value because we do not see the human need, and in these discoveries and
inventions this is one of the most romantic things of life.

I have received letters from all over the country and from England,
where I have lectured, saying that they have discovered this and that,
and one man out in Ohio took me through his great factories last spring,
and said that they cost him $680,000, and said he, "I was not worth a
cent in the world when I hea