- self, "Ah! how happy a very little of that
money would make me!" The merchant overheard him. "What is that you say, my friend?" The poor man was confused, and begged to be excused, as he did not intend to say anything. But the kind-hearted merchant wouldn't excuse him, and so the man had to repeat what he had said. "Well," said the merchant, "how much would it take to make you happy?" "Oh, I don't know, sir," said he, "but the weather is very cold, and I have no fuel; my wife and children are thinly clad, sir, for I have been sick. But we don't want much. I think, sir, about fifteen dollars would get us all we need." "John," said the merchant to his clerk, "count this man out fifteen dollars." The poor man's heart was made glad, and when he got home, his family were made happy. At the close of the day, the clerk asked his employer how he should enter on his books the money given. He answered: "Say, 'For making a man happy, fifteen dollars.'" Perhaps that was the happiest fifteen dollars the merchant himself had ever spent. (Text.)
(1347)
HAPPINESS, RULES FOR
Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer was once
talking to a girls' club, composed of the unkempt
and unprivileged daughters of Eve,
and gave them three rules for happiness in
the promise that they would keep the rules
every day for a week. The rules were, for
each day:
First—Commit to memory a worthy sentence.
Second—Do something for others.
Third—See something beautiful.
She met a while after one little girl who declared that she had fulfilled her promise every day; but that one day, when mother was sick, she could not go to the park to see something beautiful, and thought she had lost it, but while doing something for others, in the way of caring for the baby, she looked out of the attic window of her squalid home, and saw a common sparrow, and as she looked at the little fellow, the dark feathers around his throat appearing to her like a smart necktie, she found her vision of the beautiful in what many would consider the most ordinary of all God's feathered songsters. Oh, but she arrived! arrived in spite of the commonplace which seemed to fetter her, and sunshine came of a dreary day into a dreary room, because of the purpose of her soul.—Nehemiah Boynton.
(1348)
HARDNESS OF HEART
The souls of men are not like the "constant" quantities of the mathematician. Divine love softens the hardest human hearts.
A mass of ironstone, dark and adamantine,
flies through space and suddenly impinges
on our atmosphere. There is a flash
in the air and men gaze on the apparition
of the blazing meteor. They have seen an
aerolite. The soft, invisible, impalpable atmosphere
receives the hard, ferruginous
aerolite and at once melts it. (Text.)
(1349)
HARDSHIP, MISSIONARY
Egerton Young gives below an experience as missionary to the Indians of British Columbia. He shows the spirit of Him who shared the sorrows of man to save the world:
I have seen Indians eighty years of age
who never saw a loaf of bread, or a cake,
or a pie. When my wife and I went out
there we lived as they did; we lived on fish
twenty-one times a week for months together,
and for weeks together we did not
average two good meals a day. For years
we did not begin to live as well as the
thieves and murderers in the penitentiaries
of Great Britain and America. But it was
a blest work, and we were happy in it.
(Text.)
(1350)
Hardship Overcome—See College or Experience.
HARDSHIP VICARIOUSLY BORNE
More than eighty years ago a fierce war
raged in India between the English and
Tipu Sahib. On one occasion several English
officers were taken prisoners. Among
them was one named Baird. One day the
native officer brought in fetters to be put
upon each of the prisoners, the wounded not
excepted. Baird had been severely wounded
and was suffering from pain and weakness.
A gray-haired officer said to the native official, "You do not think of putting chains upon that wounded man?"
"There are just as many pairs of fetters as there are prisoners," was the answer, "and every pair must be worn."
"Then," said the noble officer, "put two pairs on me. I will wear his as well as my own." This was done. Strange to say.
