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Worth Woman's While
Joy, the Grace We Say to God.
There is no habit like that of just being glad.
It is a habit, just as worrying is, or repining, or
being dissatisfied, and we have such infinite oppor
tunity to cultivate it; there are such countless
things to incite to gladness. And the best of all
is the older we grow the more there are. Youth
is a bright and beautiful time, but maturity
brings a realization that youth can only grow to;
perception grows with age, and vision becomes
farther reaching and truer; it takes in more ob
jects.
The more we cultivate the habit of being glad,
the more we see to be glad for, and so years, in
stead of bringing dullness and disappointment, as
some imagine, are fruitful of a greater store than
ever youth comprehended.
If this is not the case it is because the gracious
and generous opportunity afforded all alike has
been neglected; the eyes have been trained to lin
ger on the shadows rather than the bright spots of
life’s picture, and with continual giving up to
the dark and unwholesome, mind and heart have
become warped and narrow, and chill and unhealthy
like a tenement where no sun has been allowed to
penetrate.
One of the saddest experiences we ever had was
in meeting with an old woman who knew no joy.
She was a lone creature bereft of husband and
children, and home with all its blessed sanctity,
its privileges and its duties, its joys and its sorrow’s.
We saw her in the home provided by the kindness
of a friendly and sympathizing world; and grateful
in our own heart that helpless age was so gener
ously cared for, we expressed our gratification,
remarking on the comfort of her pleasant sur
roundings, and the brightness and goodness of the
world, seeking to divert her from what seemed
an habitual gloom.
Here she was rescued from want and cruel anx
iety. all the necessaries of life provided without
so much as a thought on her part, a comfortable,
sunshiny room, quiet, and books and papers to read
—yet this was what she said: “I love to be
sad. What have I got to be glad about?”
What, indeed, if she counted all those blessings
for naught! And she was not decrepit, either;
she had fair health, and intellect to enjoy; if only
she had had the habit to be glad. But plainly this
habit had not been hers, and now when she had
come to age and misfortune, she looked only on
what was lost, not on the comfort that was provid
ed and the goodness that prompted it. She seemed
to forget what she had been saved from, and in
sisted that she had nothing to be glad for! We
have never remembered this poor lady since without
a sense of sadness and depression.
How’ different the thought of tw’o little neigh
bors w T e have! One, a tiny mite of a girl, is a
veritable ray of sunshine. Her sunny little heart
gleams forth constantly in smiles that wait not to
he called forth; they are always there. The glad
dest little soul in the world, she is simply happy
to be living, scattering sunshine as she runs about
on her tiny feet, or pats them upon the floor for
very joy as she sits in her little chair.
Our other little neighbor is a singer. Just any
time or anywhere she breaks forth into the mer
riest little impromptu snatches that float across
to us where we sit on our porch. So cheerful, so
spontaneous and contagious that involuntarily we
laugh aloud and say, “Listen to little Martha!”
She is so jolly, so w’holesome, we are glad she lives
by us. These dear bits of children have the un
conscious habit of being glad, and what a beautiful
habit it is! And how blessed it will make life to
them and to others if it grows with their growth!
Why shouldn’t w’e cultivate joy in all the things
about us, just as we do the aspiration after what
is good and lovely, or the attitude of charity to
ward the weak and erring? We were meant o
The Golden Age for December 6, 1906.
By FLORENCE L. TUCKER,
be glad; it w*as for this that the world was made
so beautiful, and it is thus that we realize life’s
best and happiest.
“So take joy home,
And make a place in thy great heart for her,
and give her time to grow and cherish her.
Then will she come and oft will sing to thee.
When thou art working in the furrows; aye;
Or weeding in the sacred hour of dawn,
It is a comely fashion to be glad—
Joy is the grace we say to God.”
He who loses his conscience has nothing left that
is worth keeping.—lzaak Walton.
Surround Youth With Books.
The habit of holding the mind steadily and per
sistently to the thought in a good book not only
increases the power of concentration, but also im
proves the quality of the mind.
Inspiring reading is that in which life-building
words abound—for words are things which uncon
sciously enrich character. The image of each help
ful word held in the mind leaves its impress, its
autograph, so to speak, there, and continually re
produces itself in uplifting thoughts.
If our homes were furnished with more charac
ter-building books, and less bric-a-brac and costly
furniture, our children would get a much better
start in life.
To bring a child up in an atmosphere of books,
to surround him with the works of great minds
from his infancy, and lead him gradually to ar
appreciation of the works of the intellectual giants
of the race, is equal to a liberal education.
The boy or girl so nurtured will have been given
the best means of acquiring a mentality of the
very highest order.—Selected.
The One Who Has a Song.
Bv NIXON WATERMAN.
The cloud-maker says it is going to storm,
And .we’re sure to have awful weather—•
Just terribly cold or wet or warm,
Or, maybe, all three together;
But. while his spirit is overcast
With the gloom of his dull repining,
The one with a smile comes smiling past,
And, lo! the sun is shining.
The cloud-maker tells us the world is wrong,
And is bound in an evil fetter,
But the blue-sky man comes bringing a song
Os hope that shall make it better;
And the toilers, hearing his voice behold
The sign of a glad tomorrow,
Whose hands are heaped with the purest gold
Os which each heart may borrow.
Mistaken Economy.
A reasonable economy is commendable. But there
is a hopeless, chronic, grinding economy that is
an insult to God and death to all ambition and
achievement.
There was a woman who prided herself upon hav
ing kept one paper of pins for five years, and never
having used any others. Think of the wasted
vitality and nerve force employed in keeping track
of those bits of brass—of replacing them in the
paper, of guarding them in the toilet! The same
amount of thought and power expended wisely
would have established pin factories throughout
the United States.
I knew a man who passed hours straightening
the pins he found on the floor. The women of his
household could always obtain a pin from the
lapel of his coat when in need of one. but his
daughter, who was not at all economical in her use
of pins, was obliged to buy him the coat in which
he stuck the pins!
He was one of the world’s failures. “Luck is
against me,” he said. He never deemed it his own
mind which produced the conditions, but fate
How could success come to a man who kept his
mental forces down in the dust looking for pins
to straighten?—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Self Control the Secret of Youth.
The man or woman who lacks control cannot ex
pect to carry the freshness of youth into mature
life. As a rule, the wrinkles which appear on the
face are the expression of soul or mental wrinkles.
■The twist, the friction, in its first form, exists back
of the face. Wrinkles are results, not causes. Even
one who is not habitually petulant or irritable, but
occasionally loses self-control, is sure, sooner or
later, to find these dread enemies stamped indelibly
on brow and cheek.
The face is the parchment upon which it writ
ten the history of our lives, not that which we
would wish the world to read, but none the less is
it the record of our hopes and fears, our aspira
tions and ideals. Our discouragements, our vices,
our virtues, are all faithfully chiseled where he who
runs may read.
It is rather remarkable that the character
should not be portrayed upon any other part of the
body so unmistakably as on the face. The skin
elsewhere will remain, even late in life, fair and
smooth, when the face is marred with deep, ugly
wrinkles.
It is the map of life, whereon character stamps
itself so truthfully that there is no getting away
from the story it tells. There is no dodging this
record. No matter how -we may try to cover it up,
it will be a never-failing signboard showing which
way the real man or woman has gone, which of
life’s crossings has been taken.
The face cannot betray the years until the nfind
has given its consent. The mind is the sculptor.
The face bears the traces of the mallet and chisel
it wields. Thoughts are forces, mighty forces, and,
if the mind holds youthful pictures, retains the
freshness, the receptiveness, the simplicity of youth,
the face, as a rule, will not betray age.
Principle never grows old; no one would think
of the rules of the multiplication table becoming
aged; and when the mind once grasps the real se
cret of being—that individuals are fashioned in the
image of their Maker, and that it is possible to
carry youth into the teens of their second century,
if they would erase from their minds, early in life,
the belief that they must grow old because others
do, that they must become useless and helpless in
proportion as they advance in years, the abject ter
ioi with which the thought of old age inspires some
people would soon vanish.
Mind is the master, the dictator of what shall be
recorded in the features or manner; and if men and
women would constantly hold pure thoughts and
high ideals, refusing to entertain the common ideas
of age, the face, even late in life, would respond
with the freshness and smoothness of youth.
Selected.
“Until self passes out of sight and becomes
merged in the harmony of universal life, a man’s
or a woman’s chances of happiness are not worth
considering. To think continually of how we feel,
how we look, how others regard us, whether we
receive our proper share of deference and at/en
tion, whether this one slighted, or that one looked
down upon us, is to be too small to recognize the
tiue grandeur of manhood or womanhood. The
kingdom of the soul should be too large to harbor
such petty thoughts. The ruler of that kingdom
should be too sensible of the height on which, he
stands to feel that any power outside of himself
can hurt or belittle pr humiliate him.”