Hot coffee at all hours, day or night"--very inviting. Very
much different, however, from the abode whose windows shed no light and
whose door _is barred from within_.

"Nobody Home!" that's the sign for this door.

Mister Numbskull lives here and most of the time _he sleeps_. When
anyone knocks on his door he pulls the covers up over his head to shut
out the noise. He's down on his luck anyhow, therefore it would be a
waste of good shoe leather for him to be up and puttering around. If
Opportunity ever knocked at his door he could say in all truth that _he
never heard it_. He had often heard of Opportunity being in the
neighborhood, but one thing is certain--_someone else had invariably
seen him first_. He felt sure he would know Opportunity if ever he met
him face to face, and if ever he did he would have it out with him then
and there.

Meanwhile--dadgast the luck!--always the fates pursued him with some
sort of hoodoo. And his neighbors--well, some of them had sense enough
to keep their distance and let him alone. Others, however, had not been
considerate of the fact that a "Jinx" was on his trail, and were given
to making sarcastic remarks concerning him. And thus it was that Mister
Numbskull spent his days, dodging his neighbors, sidestepping the
highways and obscuring himself from the very individual he wanted so
much to behold--_Opportunity_. At last there came a time when, in
despair, _and in disrepute_, he took to the woods and is yet to be
heard from. Opportunity still visits the neighborhood, but the path
leading to Mister Numbskull's home is grown up in weeds.

The fact is that our real opportunity _knocks from within_. Through
experience, built upon consecutively by continuous effort, our vision
expands and pounds its way out through the portals of our brain. We see
the thing that we ought to do and _we go to it_! To the man who didn't
see it _the opportunity did not exist_.

"What we don't know doesn't hurt us any"--so runs the old saw. And
here's a case where we who didn't see, _were_ hurt, but we didn't know
it.

For those of us who have vision there are all sorts of opportunities,
but many of them are not good for us. The ones we make for ourselves are
the healthy ones, and generally they are the best for us. "Our own baby"
is the one we will take the greatest pride in and enjoy the most. Then
we become masters of our own destiny in a sense and can be more
independent through having no senior pa