That very chief [the guide who shared the parable] called his wife "Something More." They name the people there from a characteristic. I wonder what kind of name some people would have in this country if they had a name following their natural characteristic. He called his wife "Something More," because she always wanted something more; never satisfied, the more she had the more she wanted, and that was in that very land and in the family of that very man who told me this story. And I asked him if he would not stop the caravan when we came to the Angel's Lily, between Bagdad and Borzar. He said, "We always pass it before we know we have passed it, no matter which way we go." That parable contained an important lesson in the wisest philosophy of human living.

The men who succeed in business and live happily at the same time need to find that Angel's Lily. I have asked myself, and I ask you now: "How much money do you think you should possess in order to make yourself perfectly happy? Just how many thousand dollars would fill all your needs?" The time was when you thought if you had five hundred dollars you would be perfectly happy. Perhaps if you could get fifty cents, as Charles Schwab once needed, you would be contented. Schwab, now that he has one hundred million, is discontented. Somewhere he has passed that border, the line where the lily blossomed. Some men always do that in business. How foolish they are!

Some man says, "I will get five thousand dollars, and then I will be happy"; and the moment he gets five thousand dollars he never thinks of stopping where the lily is, but goes on to further discontent. Old Hutchinson of Chicago was a great illustration of that. He gained a few thousand dollars, but he went into speculations and finally cornered wheat in Chicago until he had five millions of dollars. It is said that his nieces and nephews were very anxious that he should not spend that five million dollars or run any risk of losing it until he died. He could not take it with him; they knew that, and so they tried to persuade him not to do anything more in speculations; but he said: " I can have six millions just as well as five; I can make another million in one more corner in wheat." You remember how he made a corner in wheat, lost all the five million he did have and was several hundred thousand dollars in debt; and how he went to work as a porter in a hotel in order to get back his millions. If they paid as much fees then as they do now in the hotels, one will not be surprised if he had gotten it all back by this time.

Many remarkable things have happened in my travels of sixty years on the railroads and in the hotels almost continually, but I never had so remarkable an incident to occur as happened last night. When I went into my room, as is usual, I took some change out of my pocket and gave to the porter who showed me into the room, and it happened to be about thirty cents. He threw it back on the bed, and said, "We do not accept any fees now less than a half-dollar." Well, I told him I felt more like thirty cents than I ever did before, and that I would not give him any more. That illustration shows how the porter who was dissatisfied with thirty cents was once satisfied with fifteen cents, then twenty, then twenty-five, now wants a half-dollar, and feels insulted if he is not given it by persons who are not obliged to give him anything. And Old Hutchinson's experience was that he wanted six millions, and he went after the six millions, but he had so far passed the Angel's Lily that it may have left him in suffering poverty, going to that extreme which many of our business men do.

How much wealth do you suppose could possibly have made Solomon happy? He was a very unhappy man, and did most foolish things, because he was the most wealthy man in the world then. There seems to be no suffering more acute than the suffering from the possession of too great wealth; and when a man has succeeded in business, the time for him is then to retire, when he is half-way between a pauper and a multimillionaire.

I went out to see the soft-coal miners recently, and as I visited there and had a talk with them as they were going into a "strike," I saw that they showed that same disposition precisely. The miners said that their pay had been raised three times, but so many people had told them they might just as well have ten dollars advance as three, consequently the very raise of their wages made them the more discontented. While they do not get any more than they ought to get, yet this increase has made them more and more discontented, and if they were to be paid all they ask for, they would be more discontented than they are now. It is human nature, and especially human with that class. They should be contented with a fair wage in order to be happy. Happiness is not found in drawing an immense income which results in enriching a person without his having earned it, and thus, without having an opportunity to appreciate it.

How much do you think Mr. Rockefeller knows about his two or three hundred millions? How much does he get out of it? He does not get as much out of it as you do out of what you possess. He cannot enjoy it. No man can enjoy perhaps over fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars furnishes everything that any healthy man or woman could enjoy, and when a man gets beyond that sum he is going into care; he has passed beyond the place where perfect happiness is found. The men who divide with their employees as they go along are the successful men. They are rich in more ways than one. They are the happy men who divide as they go along.

If the "coal barons" had only taken time by the forelock, and, consulting with each other, had decided that they would raise the pay of those miners to balance their increasing profits, it would have been all peace. While they would not have received, at first, so many millions in money themselves, they would have been happier, and happiness is worth more than the millions could be to them. Men who divide with their employees as they go along are the happiest men that you find in the world of business. The time has come when men must divide as they go along in their business, or they become very unhappy, and certainly, in these days, will be very unsuccessful.

Did you ever try to carry seven eggs in one hand? If you are not a farmer's boy your hand would not be as large as mine, for you did not hold that plow as many years as I did. But I would like to see you try that. You can carry six all right. I have often carried six eggs and a pail of milk into the house from the barn in the morning. But one day there were seven fresh eggs there, and I decided I would carry the seven in one hand. I went in and washed my hands and clothes. You can carry six and be happy; seven, and you are extremely unhappy, for there is the point where you go beyond the line.

Twenty-five years ago the very worst men that I had anything to do with in my travels as a lecturer were the traveling salesmen. They were full of all manner of evil suggestions. They always took me for a salesman, and would call me up in the night to come down and play poker or have a drink. Once they sent a bottle of whisky up to my room as a compliment from other salesmen, thinking I too was a salesman. Once a salesman staggered on to a New York ferry so intoxicated that he could hardly manage his satchels. He finally fell into a seat, and seeing me with my two satchels he said, "Partner, won't you wake me up when I get across to New York?" He went sound asleep, and by the time we reached Twenty-third Street it was difficult to awaken him. I had to shake him, finally did awaken him, and balanced him, and as he stepped off the boat he turned and said to me, "I've got a pretty heavy jag on, but you know how it is yourself!" Each salesman thought every other salesman "knew how it was himself." I protested with one salesman in Illinois, and said: "I cannot believe that is good business; I think you will be sorry you took advantage of the farmers." They were boasting they had done so. That salesman said: "You cannot sell goods unless you can overreach men. You have to lie and keep lying until you sell the goods." That salesman quoted as an illustration the case of the salesman who was arrested for murder and tried in the court. When they asked him to plead, he pleaded "Guilty," and the judge said, "Gentlemen of the jury, you do not need to go out to bring in your verdict, you hear what he said about it." Then when the jury gave their verdict as "Not guilty," the judge looked at them and said, "Did you not hear him say that he was guilty?" "Yes," said the foreman, "but you can't believe a word a traveling salesman says!"

Anyhow they were the most unprincipled class of people I have ever traveled with. I was ashamed to be seen in their company because I did not wish to inform them that I was a preacher. I learned many things about dishonest methods I never knew before. But it has all changed since then. The very best class of people that you now meet on the road are the traveling salesmen. The merchants have found out that that selfish way of dealing was only a loss to them, and that they should not overreach or cheat the farmers or the ignorant people of the city. One firm in Boston sent their salesman to Bradford, Pa., when I was lecturing there, and he seemed so weary when he came in to supper that I asked, "Did you sell a lot of goods?" He said, "Yes, I never sold so many in my life, but I did not sell a penny's worth for my firm in Boston." I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, "My firm in Boston tells me that if I arrive in a town and have spare time, I am to make sales for the local merchants whether they handle our line or not." And he canvassed the village as best he could to see how many orders he could get. He went out for the local groceryman and had canvassed the village, and he said he believed that man would be more than a week trying to deliver the orders he got for him that day, and not a penny did his firm make on it. I happened to know that firm, and had passed their little store in Boston, and now they are the largest firm in the wholesale business in the city of Boston. They have grown by being satisfied and by stopping at the Angel's Lily. They have been satisfied with reasonable profit; they have been willing to turn in and help some one else when they have gotten all they could honorably get from that community. The business that ever takes this middle course of commerce is the business that succeeds; and, anyhow, happiness is success whether you get much money or not.

One day a traveling salesman illustrated this thing to me at the Pennsylvania Station. There was a great excursion and a crowd there, and my train was within ten minutes of departing. There was such a crowd between me and the gateway I tried to look up some other way. A traveling salesman I had never seen before heard me, and said, “Do you need to get that train?” And I answered, "If it is possible!" Then he said, "Don't worry, step right up behind me, hold on to your satchel!" I stepped close to him, and then he stepped into the edge of the crowd. There was an old lady there with a basket on the floor, and he put forward his foot and moved the basket. She reached down and picked up the basket, and he stepped in the place where the basket had been. In front of him was a gentleman with an umbrella under his arm, and he took hold of the end of the umbrella and slightly moved it, and the man turned around to see what was going on, and he then stood edgewise and the salesman pushed in. So he went from one to another with deliberation, and finally asked the last man to step aside, and that man let me through, and then the salesman bade me good-bye and went his way. I have never known who did me that kindness, but I was in the train a minute before it started.

Successful life and successful business is the one that works like that; that touches the basket and moves that; that touches the umbrella and moves that; and steps inch by inch into the advanced places. That steady, permanent advance is a much better place in business than is any sudden speculation which overloads a man with responsibility and anxiety. The way to be happy in getting rich is to proceed in that steady and careful way.

Happiness, or the Angel's Lily, blooms in learning where a man may know too little or a man may know too much. There comes to me tonight the figure of Ruskin, that great writer on art and music, that wonderful English composer who wrote the ''Stones of Venice," a book that will live with increasing fascination as the ages go on. I was in England as a correspondent, and I went to see him; I heard that he was not well, not himself, and when I stepped up to the cottage there at the English lakes where he had gone for his health, he was in charge of an attendant nurse. When I put my hand on the gate and asked if I could see Mr. Ruskin, the nurse came and said, "He would not know you, but," he said, "you may speak to him if you have traveled so far to do it; I do not think it would do him any harm." I spoke to him and found his mind wandering on something that had occurred years and years before. Poor, weak man, broken in mind, he had studied too hard, he had learned too much, he had gone beyond the Angel's Lily even in learning.

And it is possible for men to study so hard and so long as to make grave mistakes as to the truths of life, because of their overstudy. There is such a thing as being such a scholar as to be terribly ignorant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was another one who was great during his middle life, and in that period he expressed great philosophic ideas. But his conversation at last became nothing but frivolous expressions of disconnected language. When at the funeral of Mr. Longfellow we were passing the coffin at Cambridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson was led along by one of his family; and as he looked into the coffin of Mr. Longfellow, who had been one of the most intimate friends he ever had, he shook his head and said, "It seems to me I have seen that face somewhere before," and the magazines and newspapers of that day spoke of the pathetic thing, that this great man with that wonderful mind should have so broken down as to be almost silly in his intercourse with other people. Overdone, overlearned, gone beyond the Angel's Lily.