ventor sits next to you, or you are the person yourself.
"Oh," but you will say, "I have never invented anything in my life."
Neither did the great inventors until they discovered one great secret.
Do you think it is a man with a head like a bushel measure or a man like
a stroke of lightning? It is neither. The really great man is a plain,
straightforward, every-day, common-sense man. You would not dream that
he was a great inventor if you did not see something he had actually
done. His neighbors do not regard him so great. You never see anything
great over your back fence. You say there is no greatness among your
neighbors. It is all away off somewhere else. Their greatness is ever
so simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and
friends never recognize it.

True greatness is often unrecognized. That is sure. You do not know
anything about the greatest men and women. I went out to write the life
of General Garfield, and a neighbor, knowing I was in a hurry, and as
there was a great crowd around the front door, took me around to General
Garfield's back door and shouted, "Jim! Jim!" And very soon "Jim" came
to the door and let me in, and I wrote the biography of one of the
grandest men of the nation, and yet he was just the same old "Jim" to
his neighbor. If you know a great man in Philadelphia and you should
meet him to-morrow, you would say, "How are you, Sam?" or "Good morning,
Jim." Of course you would. That is just what you would do.

One of my soldiers in the Civil War had been sentenced to death, and I
went up to the White House in Washington--sent there for the first time
in my life to see the President. I went into the waiting-room and sat
down with a lot of others on the benches, and the secretary asked one
after another to tell him what they wanted. After the secretary had
been through the line, he went in, and then came back to the door and
motioned for me. I went up to that anteroom, and the secretary said:
"That is the President's door right over there. Just rap on it and go
right in." I never was so taken aback, friends, in all my life, never.
The secretary himself made it worse for me, because he had told me how
to go in and then went out another door to the left and shut that.
There I was, in the hallway by myself before the President of the United
States of America's door. I had been on fields of battle, where the
shells did sometimes shriek and the bullets did sometimes hit me, but