chondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a
doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous
man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of
your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces shine in.

Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters
of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to
by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if
light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky,
ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way
if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a
blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take
too much wine "the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's
Plutonian shore," and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let
some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the
whole world "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."

"But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated
days?"

Yes, yes, responded the governor. There are times when everything seems to
go wrong. From seven o'clock a.m. till ten p.m. affairs are in a twist. You
rise in the morning, and the room is cold, and a button is off, and the
breakfast is tough, and the stove smokes, and the pipes burst, and you
start down the street nettled from head to foot. All day long things are
adverse. Insinuations, petty losses, meanness on the part of customers. The
ink bottle upsets and spoils the carpet. Some one gives a wrong turn to
the damper, and the gas escapes. An agent comes in determined to insure
your life, when it is already insured for more than it is worth, and you
are afraid some one will knock you on the head to get the price of your
policy; but he sticks to you, showing you pictures of old Time and the
hour-glass, and Death's scythe and a skeleton, making it quite certain that
you will die before your time unless you take out papers in his company.
Besides this, you have a cold in your head, and a grain of dirt in your
eye, and you are a walking uneasiness. The day is out of joint, and no
surgeon can set it.

The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would
find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost
much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint in