yroscopes. It may
be that one hundred years in the future airships will be seen soaring
over the cities, delivering packages in parachutes at the back doors
of residences, but the day will never dawn when there will be an
airship, gyroscope, or an automobile that will supplant the
fleet-footed, sleek-coated, handsome Kentucky horse.

Now I come to the more practical, for I do not bring you this talk,
challenging your criticism or inviting your praise of it as a literary
production, but with the purpose of helping some one live as I would
wish to live if I had my life to live over.

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.