her face.

But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failing
good-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning." Her uniform
atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I
said to Franz, the head waiter,--

"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing in
that narrow dark place, washing dishes."

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his
shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, and
added,--

"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no one
which will say not nothing if they go by."

That was it. Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her,
"Good-morning, Gretchen," or "It is a fine day;" or, if no word were
spoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere in
kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass by other human beings,
as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to show
recognition of humanity in common.

This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparatively
glad. Her body suffered for want of sun and air. There was no helping
that, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand,
year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery. But,
if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and
had had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in three
months.

If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a small
pleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodies
and souls both would bear up under living! Sensitive people realize it to
the very core of their being. They know that often and often it happens
to them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they could
not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some little
thing,--some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof of
affection or recognition. They know, too, that strength goes out of them,
just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even a
short space, all these are wanting.

People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are
tender. They are by no means inseparable,--tenderness and sensitiveness;
if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more
agreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living
in close relations with them