In memoriam Dick Francis (1920-2010)

By my count the 43rd Dick Francis novel, Crossfire (co-authored by his son Felix and published this year) is dedicated "to the memory of Dick Francis, the greatest father and friend a man could ever have."
    While we can hope that Dick Francis left some plots for his son to work into a few more novels, or that Felix is capable of continuing up to snuff on his own, we are sad at the news of Dick Francis's passing. We felt that we knew you, so consistently good and brave were your narrator heroes, right down to Crossfire's Captain Thomas Forsyth of the Grenadier Guards¹, lately from Afghanistan, where an IED had taken his right leg below the knee. So many of your heroes were wounded.
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1. Crossfire is also dedicated to "the men and women of the British forces who have lost limbs in Afghanistan. For them the battle is never over."

Wait...or hustle?

Thought for the day

Reading Dick and Felix Francis's 2007 novel, Dead Heat, this morning, I found on pages 176-177:

Who was it, I thought, who said, "Things may come to those who wait"?
    ...
    I asked my computer who said the quote. It came back with the answer: Abraham Lincoln. But his full quote was: "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."

I too asked my computer about the quote, and a number of sites have it and attribute it to Lincoln, but none of the ones I found indicate where or when Lincoln wrote or uttered it.

A plumbing company (I don't think it was Joe the Plumber's) recast the first clause in the more New Age or New Testament way: "Good things [emphasis mine] come to those who wait, but only the things left over by those who hustle." (Strict New Agers and fundamental New Testament folks, of course, don't include the second part, intent as they are to sit back and wait for the good things to roll in without any more effort than it takes to be optimistic.)

The intent of Lincoln's statement seems to be to recommend hustling as the way to get the best things, since otherwise you'll get only the things that the hustlers didn't manage to get or didn't want.

Of course, many a hustler comes a cropper. And some waiters come into a fortune. I wonder whether Lincoln said anything about luck? Of course, there's the business of the "Lucky Penny" charm. Was that a Lincoln penny?

The only possible Lincoln quote containing "luck" that I could find through a spot of googling was one site's claim that Lincoln said (or wrote): "The harder I work, the luckier I get." Lincoln really did seem to recommend that we hustle.