e
breaks, if the cat tips over the milk and the dog elopes with the
roast, if the children fall into the mud simultaneously with the
advent of clean aprons, if the new girl quits in the middle of
housecleaning, and though you search the earth with candles you find
none to take her place, if the neighbor you have trusted goes back on
you and decides to keep chickens, if the chariot wheels of the
uninvited guest draw near when you are out of provender, and the
gaping of your empty purse is like the unfilled mouth of a young
robin, take courage if you have enough sunshine in your heart, to keep
the laugh on your lips. Before good nature, half the cares of daily
living will fly away like midges before the wind. Try it."

What a world of inspiration and cheerfulness in the motto written by
Edward Everett Hale for the Lend-A-Hand Society: "Look up, and not
down; look forward, and not back; look out, and not in; and lend a
hand." It is the lifting of the burden from another's tired shoulder
that does most to lighten the load resting on our own.

No one who truly is conscious of the value of sunshine upon his own
nature and upon the spirits of those with whom he comes into contact
will ever, for one minute, permit himself to be taken possession of by

THE "BLUES"

"Blues" are the sorry calms that come
To make our spirits mope,
And steal the breeze of promise from
The shining sails of hope.

Margaret E. Sangster, who is the kind and gracious foster mother to
all the girls of her time and generation, says that "being in bondage
to the blues is precisely like being lost in a London fog. The latter
is thick and black and obliterates familiar landmarks. A man may be
within a few doors of his home, yet grope hopelessly through the murk
to find the well-worn threshold. A person under the tyranny of the
blues is temporarily unable to adjust life to its usual limitations.
He or she cannot see an inch beyond the dreadful present. Everything
looks dark and forbidding, and despair with an iron clutch pins its
victim down. People think, loosely, that trials that may be weighed
and measured and felt and handled are the worst trials to which flesh
is heir. But they are mistaken. Hearts are elastic, and real sorrows
seldom crush them. Souls have in them a wonderful capacity for
recovering after knockdown blows. It is the intangible, the thing that
one dreads vaguely, that catches one in the dark, that