with the same independence. In this way the growth of breathing power
will be slow, but it will be sure and delightfully restful. Frequent,
full, quiet breaths might be the means of relief to many sufferers, if
only they would take the trouble to practise them faithfully,--a very
slight effort compared with the result which will surely ensue. And so
it is with the fatigue from sewing. I fear I do not exaggerate, when I
say that in nine cases out of ten a woman would rather sew with a pain
in her neck than stop for the few moments it would take to relax it and
teach it truer habits, so that in the end the pain might be avoided
entirely. Then, when the inevitable nervous exhaustion follows, and all
the kindred troubles that grow out of it she pities herself and is
pitied by others, and wonders why God thought best to afflict her with
suffering and illness. "Thought best!" God never thought best to give
any one pain. He made His laws, and they are wholesome and perfect and
true, and if we disobey them we must suffer the consequences! I knock
my head hard against a stone and then wonder why God thought best to
give me the headache. There would be as much sense in that as there is
in much of the so-called Christian resignation to be found in the world
to-day. To be sure there are inherited illnesses and pains, physical
and mental, but the laws are so made that the compensation of
clear-sightedness and power for use gained by working our way rightly
out of all inheritances and suffering brought by others, fully
equalizes any apparent loss.

In writing there is much unnecessary nervous fatigue. The same cramped
attitude of the lungs that accompanies sewing can be counteracted in
the same way, although in neither case should a cramped attitude be
allowed at all Still the relief of a long breath is always helpful and
even necessary where one must sit in one position for any length of
time. Almost any even moderately nervous man or woman will hold a pen
as if some unseen force were trying to pull it away, and will write
with firmly set jaw, contracted throat, and a powerful tension in the
muscles of the tongue, or whatever happens to be the most officious
part of this especial individual community. To swing the pendulum to
another extreme seems not to enter people's minds when trying to find a
happy medium. Writer's paralysis, or even the ache that comes from
holding the hand so long in a more or less cramped attitude, is easily