It is the faith which the sunshiny spirit has in the "worth whileness" of life and its possibilities that makes him or her who possesses it prepare for the best that is to come. It is because of the "preparedness" achieved by labor that men and women are able to seize upon and make the most of the "lucky chance" that may bring them happiness and success.
While Thomas A. Edison was yet a youth, the desire to make himself of worth to the world and to be able to do something that would make him a living while he was still fitting himself for better things, he spent the leisure which most boys would spend in idleness or purposeless pastime in learning the telegrapher's code. Later on this knowledge gave him work which enabled him to gain experience as a telegraph operator, which in turn led to his invention of the quadruplex telegraph. But the invention was temporarily a failure, although later on a great success. Sorely reduced in circumstances, he was one day tramping the streets of New York without a cent.
"I happened one day," he says, "into the office of a 'gold ticker' company which had about five hundred subscribers. I was standing beside the apparatus when it gave a terrific rip-roar and suddenly stopped. In a few minutes hundreds of messenger boys blocked up the doorway and yelled for some one to fix the tickers in the office. The man in charge of the place was completely upset; so I stepped up to him and said: 'I think I know what's the matter.' I removed a loose contact spring that had fallen between the wheels; the machine went on. The result? I was appointed to take charge of the service at three hundred dollars a month. When I heard what the salary was I almost fainted." It had been his hopeful, cheerful, expectant attitude toward the future that had ever prompted him to fit himself so well that when the opportunity offered itself he was able to show that he possessed the grasp of things that made him
There's a day, there's an hour, a moment of time When Fate shall be willing to try us; This one test of our worth and our purpose sublime, It will not, it cannot deny us. 'Tis our right to demand one true crisis, else how Shall we prove by our valor undaunted That we merit the wreath Fortune lays on the brow Of the man who is there when he's wanted?