to gain slowly, not to be pulled down by
mistakes or discouragements, but to learn from them, we are sure to be
grateful for the new light and warmth and power for use that will come
to us, increasing day by day.

CHAPTER XXIX

_Plain Every-day Common Sense_

PLAIN common sense! When we come to sift everything down which will
enable us to live wholesome, steady, every-day, interesting lives,
plain common sense seems to be the first and the simplest need. In the
working out of any problem, whether it be in science or in art or in
plain everyday living, we are told to go from the circumference to the
center, from the known to the unknown, from simplest facts to those
which would otherwise seem complex. And whether the life we are living
is quiet and commonplace, or whether it is full of change and
adventure, to be of the greatest and most permanent use, a life must
have as its habitual background plain every-day common sense.

When we stop and think a while, the lack of this important quality is
quite glaring, and every one who has his attention called to it and
recognizes that lack enough to be interested to supply it in his own
life, is doing more good toward bringing plain common sense into the
world at large than we can well appreciate. For instance, it is only a
fact of plain common sense that we should keep rested, and yet how many
of us do? How many readers of this article will smile or sneer, or be
irritated when they read the above, and say, "It is all very well to
talk of keeping rested. How is it possible with all I have to do? or
with all the care I have? or with all I have to worry me?"

Now that is just the point--the answer to that question, "How is it
possible?" So very few of us know how to do it, and if "how to keep
rested though busy" were regularly taught in all schools in this
country, so far from making the children self-conscious and
over-careful of themselves, it would lay up in their brains ideas of
plain common sense which would be stocked safely there for use when, as
their lives grew more maturely busy, they would find the right habits
formed, enabling them to keep busy and at the same time to keep quiet
and rested. What a wonderful difference it would eventually make in the
wholesomeness of the manners and customs of this entire nation. And
that difference would come from giving the children now a half hour's
instruction in the plain common sense of keeping well rested, and in
se