ew that will make you happy, it would be well to study the case of
Harris, the happiest man you know. Perhaps you could manage to do
artificially, as it were, what nature or circumstances has done for him.
He had no prospects, but good health, good heart, and good mind. He was
perfectly delighted when he found he could earn twenty-five hundred
dollars a year, a larger sum than he had ever had; and he saved some and
spent some in new ways until he found, when he married, that his living
expenses consumed it all. His wife, expecting little, was pleased with all
she got; and, altogether, they seemed to get, in a large measure, the
objects for which we strove and fought the war of 1776.

From the start you were differently placed. You became accustomed to
gratifying your desires: you had little purpose in your actions; and,
accordingly, you have now the habit of looking on each wish, whether of
long standing or momentary, as something you might as well gratify.

My second conclusion I will jump to now, without filling in the
intermediate steps leading up to it; namely, that, to attain happiness, it
is necessary to cultivate the custom of restraining your impulse to
gratify your every desire.

To illustrate this, I will carry out my threat of proving it up from the
other side. You have often in your yachting experiences seen the yachts
belonging to the Goulds, Vanderbilts, and other men of great wealth. These
men feel it necessary to own ships almost as large and expensive to
operate as ocean steamers. They build houses that cost several hundreds of
thousands of dollars, and they give balls that would ruin men of moderate
wealth, while their weddings are likely to cost in the neighborhood of a
million dollars in decorations, gifts, and expenses. The deduction from
this is that the ability of man to spend is only limited by the length of
his purse, and a man's desire to spend has no such limits.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that you have got to curb your
desires unless you are unusual in one of two respects, either in your
money-getting ability or in your lack of imagination for inventing new
desires. In any case _you_ can eliminate these possibilities. Now,
admitting that at some point you have got to curb your desires, why not do
it at a point near Harris's, which will leave you in a more comfortable
frame of mind in regard to your money matters, rather than Perry's, who
does not have all he wants, and is disc