melt away before the man who carries about a cheerful
spirit and persistently refuses to be discouraged, while they accumulate
before the one who is always groaning over his hard luck and scanning
the horizon for clouds not yet in sight."

"To one man," says Schopenhauer, "the world is barren, dull, and
superficial; to another, rich, interesting, and full of meaning." If one
loves beauty and looks for it, he will see it wherever he goes. If there
is music in his soul, he will hear it everywhere; every object in nature
will sing to him. Two men who live in the same house and do the same
work may not live in the same world. Although they are under the same
roof, one may see only deformity and ugliness; to him the world is out
of joint, everything is cross-grained and out of sorts: the other is
surrounded with beauty and harmony; everybody is kind to him; nobody
wishes him harm. These men see the same objects, but they do not look
through the same glasses; one looks through a smoked glass which drapes
the whole world in mourning, the other looks through rose-colored lenses
which tint everything with loveliness and touch it with beauty.

Take two persons just home from a vacation. "One has positively seen
nothing, and has always been robbed; the landlady was a harpy, the
bedroom was unhealthy, and the mutton was tough. The other has always
found the coziest nooks, the cheapest houses, the best landladies, the
finest views, and the best dinners."

"WHAT IS AN OPTIMIST?"

This is the question a farmer's boy asked of his father.

"Well, John," replied his father, "you know I can't give ye the
dictionary meanin' of that word any more 'n I can of a great many
others. But I've got a kind of an idee what it means. Probably you don't
remember your Uncle Henry; but I guess if there ever was an optimist, he
was one. Things was always comin' out right with Henry, and especially
anything hard that he had to do; it wa' n't a-goin' to be hard,--'t was
jest kind of solid-pleasant.

"Take hoein' corn, now. If anything ever tuckered me out, 'twas hoein'
corn in the hot sun. But in the field, 'long about the time I begun to
lag back a little, Henry he'd look up an' say:--

"'Good, Jim! When we get these two rows hoed, an' eighteen more, the
piece'll be half done.' An' he'd say it in such a kind of a cheerful way
that I couldn't 'a' ben any more tickled if the piece had been all
done,--an' the rest would go lig