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GOOD LUCK

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 24, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 30.

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GOOD LUCK.

THE old doctor had been away for a fortnight on one of his fishing trips, and now loitered in the drug-shop, listening to the news of the village.
“And Sam Vance,” said the druggist, Phelps, “has had his usual hard luck. He bought a whole ticket in the lottery with part of his grandmother’s legacy, and it has turned out a blank.”
“Good!” said the doctor. “Now he will take up his saw and go to work.”
“Well, it was hard luck,” said Phelps. “The prize was $200,000, and Sam had the very next number to the winning ticket, and drew nothing.”
“He has the bent of his family toward laziness and drink,” said the doctor. “You know that. With money he would be a sot in a year. Without it he has a chance to be a good carpenter and a useful man.”
He paused, and presently went on: “I tell you, Phelps, bad luck is usually the best of our good angels. The things that we don’t have in this world are the ones that help us most.”
“What do you mean?” asked the druggist.
The doctor looked at him.
They were both old men. They had grown old together in the village, and both of them knew all of its histories of human life, both tragic and comic.
“Well,” he said, “there is the squire. If he had married the woman he loved—I need not mention any names—he would have been a miserable man. She had a small, mean nature. She was greedy and full of petty malice. She married another man, and presently died, and the squire makes out of her memory a noble, fine impulse, that perpetually lifts his whole life.
“And there are the Randalls, both husband and wife. They never have ceased to mourn for their only son, who died when he was ten years old. There is no good quality which they do not give him. They talk of him incessantly, of his talents, his piety. If they hear of a great discovery or a noble deed, they fancy Tom would have done it if he had lived. I was the boy’s physician. He was weak in body and mind. He was cruel and vicious. If he had lived to develop his real nature, he would have broken their hearts.
“And look at me!” he continued, with an uneasy laugh. “If I had become the great specialist I aimed to be, if I had won fame and money, I should have been hard and grasping. You needn’t wag your head; it’s in me. It is my ill luck, poverty, and lack of success, that have given me any good, kindly feelings that I may have.
“Yes, Phelps, at the end of the long day, when we reckon up our blessings to thank God for them before we go to sleep, we shall see that it was the things that He refused, the things that He took from us, which helped us most.”—Youth’s Companion.