day for a
week. First, commit something good to memory each day. Three or four
words will do, just a pretty bit of poem, or a Bible verse. Do you
understand?" A girl jumped up. "I know; you want us to learn something
we'd be glad to remember if we went blind." Mrs. Palmer was relieved;
these children understood. She gave the three rules--memorize something
good each day, see something beautiful each day, do something helpful
each day. When the children reported at the end of the week, not a
single day had any of them lost. But hard put to it to obey her? Indeed
they had been. One girl, kept for twenty-four hours within squalid
home-walls by a rain, had nevertheless seen two beautiful things--a
sparrow taking a bath in the gutter, and a gleam of sunlight on a baby's
hair.

If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard--
One glance most kind,
That fell like sunshine where it went--
Then you may count that day well spent.

But if, through all the livelong day,
You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay--
If, through it all
You've nothing done that you can trace
That brought the sunshine to one face--
No act most small
That helped some soul and nothing cost--
Then count that day as worse than lost.

_George Eliot_.

SADNESS AND MERRIMENT

(ADAPTED FROM "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE")

In this passage Antonio states that he is overcome by a sadness he
cannot account for. Salarino tells him that the mental attitude is
everything; that mirth is as easy as gloom; that nature in her
freakishness makes some men laugh at trifles until their eyes become
mere slits, yet leaves others dour and unsmiling before jests that would
convulse even the venerable Nestor. Gratiano maintains that Antonio is
too absorbed in worldly affairs, and that he must not let his spirits
grow sluggish or irritable.

_ANT._ In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.

_Salar_. Then let's say you are sad
Because you are not merry: and 'twere as easy
For you to laugh and leap, and say you are merry,
Because you are not sad. Now, by two-headed Janus,
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time:
Some that will