ed and decorous when I want to fling stones and make faces.
I am tired of smelling the game dinner of my neighbor and sitting down
at home to beans and bacon. I am tired of many more things, the
enumeration of which would take from now until the day after forever.

XVI.

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD LAUGH.

Do you know, my dear, that there is absolutely nothing that will help
you to bear the ills of life so well as a good laugh. Laugh all you
can, and the small imps in blue who love to preempt their quarters in a
human heart will scatter away like owls before the music of flutes.
There are few of the minor difficulties and annoyances that will not
dissipate at the charge of the nonsense brigade. If the clothes line
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 in whom 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 a laugh on your lips.
Before good nature, half the cares of daily living will fly away like
midges before the wind; try it.

XVII.

HOLD! ENOUGH!!

The other evening it chanced that a combination of disastrous
circumstances wrought havoc with my temper. I lost my train; my head
hummed like a bumblebee with weary pain, and the elastic that held my
hat to its moorings broke, so that that capering compromise between
inanimate matter and demoniac possession blew half a block up street on
its own account, and was brought back to me by a youthful son of
Belial, who took my very last quarter as reward for the lively chase.

"There's no use!" said I to myself as I jogged along through the
gloaming; "blessed be the woman who knows enough to cry 'hold!' against
such odds!"

And just then I spied a wizened little mite of a woman trotting by,
carrying a gripsack bigger than herself. She grasped it, and held it
against her wan little stomach, as a Roman warrior might carry his
shield into battle--plucky to the last.

"Now," said I, "look here, Amber, have you a fifty pound sachel to tug
through the darkness?