Our fate or our fortune is not in great occasions; it is in our readiness to seize the opportunities that make great occasions. We frequently hear young men complain that they have not had a chance. Are they always sure of that? How often is it that their chance has been and gone, without their knowing it? "There are scores of young fellows in our place," said a large employer of labour lately, "who would be in vastly better positions than they are, had they worked as hard to be ready for the better positions as they are anxious to have them." There are multitudes of young men who appear to have lost sight of the distinction there may be between wishing for an opportunity and being ready to use the opportunity when it presents itself. As Sir Frederick Treves once said to the students at the Aberdeen University: "The man who is content to wait for a stroke of good fortune will probably wait until he has a stroke of paralysis." He who waits for good fortune without doing his part to make it possible, opens up the way for lazy habits and morbid conclusions about the arrangements of life. Luck in any serious business or profession is not so much the coming of opportunity as readiness to make the most of the opportunity when it comes. A man was speaking to me not long ago about one of the leading commercial men in this city. "What is there in him or about him to explain his success?" asked the man, and he answered his own question with the round assertion that "it was all luck." It happened that I had some reliable information about the man under discussion, and I want you to have it. Thirty years ago he was working from ten to twelve hours in the day as just an ordinary workman. At the close of each day's toil he had his programme of studies, which, in its range and character of the subjects attacked, would not have disgraced a good student at any university. Eventually his attention to business and his marked attainments won for him the recognition of his employers, which meant in after years a place which was ultimately a leading place, as one of them. Yet this was the man who was said to have won his success by a lucky turn of the wheel. I admit his advantages. I grant you that he showed himself to have brains and will above the average endowment of these great possessions. But let me ask you to mark this: he might have left his gifts unused, as so many of us do. It is probably not gifts, in eight cases out of every ten, that determine position, but our use of them. We have infinitely more in us than our will and determination ever bring out. How few of us know the rich things God has put in our nature; and we verily live and die in ignorance of rare deposits of wealth because we do not work the inward mines. This young man was wiser. He did not wait for his opportunity to turn up, he turned up the opportunity. Because he neither slumbered nor slept while it tarried, he was prepared to make the most of it when