This man came to Louisiana many years since, a silver-smith by trade, poor, and largely in debt. He was born in New York, and in that city worked industriously at the business to which he had been apprenticed, until a competency rewarded his labors, and wealth, which he had before little thought of, was brought near enough to his door to be both seen and desired. The hammer, the soldering-iron, and the file were now thrown aside, as instruments of a slow getting; and the head was taxed with schemes for the acquisition of sudden and great gains. At the close of two years he was a bankrupt. But he was not a man of half-measures; true courage he had enough of; and honesty has never been denied him; so, he called his creditors together, laid before them a statement of his affairs, surrendered all that he had, gave his notes for eighty thousand dollars, and departed, with nerves unshaken, and a will indomitable, in search of a new land and a new fortune. When the ambition of wealth drew him from his work-shop, he carefully laid aside the tools of his trade in a stout oaken box, to be kept as mementoes of former labor; they were now all that remained to him, the only gift which he had asked, and would receive of creditors who were disposed to be generous. With them, at thirty-five years of age, he bid the North good-bye, went on shipboard, entered before the mast, in payment of a passage to New Orleans, and on his arrival there, at once hired himself into the service of a silver-smith, who has since ranked with the wealthiest of its citizens, and who has since met with ruin more disastrous than that which brought the best of his journeymen to his door. John Cornelius, when you first scented the Mississippi marshes, and stepped from ship to shore with a debt of eighty thousand dollars upon your back, John Gravier had not wholly parted with that domain, which now forms the noblest portion of the second municipality. To one with a soul in his body, bent on money-getting, the track clear, the goal in view, to be won with effort, eighty thousand dollars of debt is like weight to the race-horse—it is not best to run too light at the start. Your eye saw what John Gravier did not. You read the page written by the hand of God, legibly enough—the Mississippi with all its tributaries, rolling through lands of an unequalled fertility, and of every variety of clime, and you had faith. God’s promises are certain. With the return of spring comes the flower, and with the breath of autumn comes the fruit; with the twinkling star comes rest, and with the rise of day comes light and labor; every mountain, every hill and valley, every plain and running-stream, river and ocean, speak of God’s promises, and accomplish them. Read, and understand; this it is, which separates the man gifted from the common herd, who are born to toil for the benefit of the few.