oving
about and talking. The gentleman was at first so sensitive to
disturbances that he accomplished almost nothing during business
hours, and returned home every evening with a severe headache. One
day a man of impressive personality and extremely calm demeanor
entered the office, and noticing the agitated broker, smilingly
said: 'I see that you are disturbed by the noise made by your
neighbors in the conduct of their affairs; pardon me if I leave
with you an infallible recipe for peace in the midst of commotion:
_Hear only what you will to hear_.' With this terse counsel he
quietly bade the astonished listener adieu. After his visitor
had departed, the nervous man felt unaccountably calm, and was
constrained to meditate upon his friend's advice, and no sooner
did he seek to put it into practical use than he learned for the
first time that it was his rightful prerogative to use unseen ear
protectors as well as to employ his ears. Six or seven weeks
elapsed before he saw his mysterious visitor again, and by that
time he had so successfully practiced the simple though forceful
injunction, that he had reached a point in self-control where the
Babel of tongues about him no longer reached his consciousness."

[Sidenote: _How to Avoid Worry, Melancholy_]

Herein lies a remedy for worry, with its sleepless nights and
kindred torments; for melancholy and despair, with their train of
physical and financial disaster.

How? Simply by shutting off the flow of disagreeable thoughts and
substituting others that are pleasant and refreshing.

You are master. You can change the setting of your mental stage
from portentous gloom to sun-lit assurance. You can concentrate your
thought upon the useful, the helpful and the cheerful, ignore the
useless and annoying, and make your life a life of hope and joy, of
promise and fulfilment.

[Sidenote: _Putting Circumstances Under Foot_]

You will not question the statement that what you do with your life
is the combined result of heredity and environment. At the same time
you doubtless possess a more or less hazy belief in the freedom of
your own will.

The chances are that in any previous reflections on this subject you
have magnified the influence of outside agencies and wondered just
how a man could make himself the master rather than the victim of
circumstances.

You now realize that your environment is an environment of thought,
that your material universe is a thing your own ma