I know one fresh-faced girl, who, in her simple work-a-day dress, with its neat little finish of spotless linen at neck and throat, and knot of bright ribbon confining the dainty little collar, is as charming a picture as one would ever wish to see, and a hundred times more attractive than those showy, dashing, inartistic girls with all their richness and vanity of unmeaniug adornment.

That girl has the true artistic eye and touch. She cannot lay her hand on an article of dress but it assumes new grace and positiveness, and there is such a sweet simplicity about it all, and a real unconsciousness of the effect, that makes it twice as lovely and graceful. She follows the prevailing style enough not to look old-fashioned, but she modifies it to suit herself, and doesn't lose her identity in her dress as you and I sometimes do, I fear.

a wrong

But this lack of originality is not the worst that this blind following of Fashion is leading us to. Were this all, although I should quarrel with it as much as I do now, yet I should not fear it. At best it is but a want of taste which concerns ourselves chiefly, but the other is a crime, done to ourselves and others. It is generating habits of extravagance among us, there's no question of that. In republican America, where, according to the Constitution, "all men" and I suppose women too-"are born free and equal," where every one is as good as her neighbor, and where the poor girl of to-day may be the rich woman of tomorrow, too many have a foolish idea that the way to assert their equality is in the matter of dress. This is such a sad mistake

the as

there is such a lack of independence, that is after all the best assertion sertion of a true womanliness that doesn't hesitate to say, "I will not, because I cannot; " and so for that very want, the possession of which would give her self-respect and the respect of others, many a girl tries to rival some one, who, as an every-day affair, can wear what to her would be a most extravagant luxury; and she takes from father or brother the means which can illy be spared, careless, in her overweening selfish ness, of what sacrifices they make to humor her in her foolish, and more than foolish,

fancies.

413

Oh, girls! don't you see what wrong, what harm you are doing in your thoughtlessness? Do you not see that every fresh demand of yours brings a new care to those who gratify them? They love you, girls, those fathers and brothers of yours, so dearly, that, rather than disappoint you, or refuse your most unreasonable wishes, they put by plans of their own, plans in which a life's happiness may lie, make sacrifices such as you never dream of, and that they will never let you know. I know this, girls, for I have seen it done, and I wish you could see for yourselves, and know the care you bring to those whom I know you really love. I think thoughtlessness is at the bottom of it, but we've no business to be thoughtless. We have brains, every one of us, and reasoning powers, though in some cases they may be limited, - and it's a sin not to use them.

The idea of going through life constantly doing acts of downright selfishness and injustice, then trying to excuse ourselves by saying, "We didn't think." The time may come when we shall think, and bitterly, too, of the suffering and care we brought, when we should have brought blessing and happiness. We can do that now; it is not too late

yet. We have only to think before we act, to give up these silly, extravagant ways, become women instead of dressmaker's models, and faces will lighten with new happiness that now are careworn and anxious, and you will be the cause of the one as you are

of the other now.

But you mustn't think, because I have said all this, that I don't like pretty things, for indeed I do; nobody better- or that I don't like to see you well dressed; but well dressed, and "extravagantly rigged," are two different affairs. The one I like e; the other I detest.

I think we should like these same pretty things to a certain extent, just as we like everything bright and pleasant. One higher than we has implanted this love in us, and given proof of His love for them in his own works. He did not disdain to clothe the earth with verdure, green and velvety, starred with flowers of every hue. The bare brown earth would have little to make it lovely were it not for the clothing which God has given it. The trees, ungraceful and

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stiff in outline, with their denuded branches stretching and pointing like skeleton fingers, become masses of beauty with their wealth of foliage. The harsh cold rocks he pities for their grim desolation, and clothes them with delicate mosses, wonderful in their , variety and exquisiteness, and the silvery lichens that shine starlike from their dintless surfaces.

And when these beauties are laid aside, each lived out its appointed time, still there is beauty. Mark the changing of the foliage from the cool greenness of summer, to the warm hues of autumn. For the maples hang out their scarlet flags in the face of Nature, the sumach burns like crimson flame in every wood, and the elms glow with golden light till every hill seems aflame with glory. Then, when this magnificence burns itself out, and the leaves, sere and brown, lie rustling mournfully in the cold winds of approaching winter, comes the snow, covering all decay with its mantle of pure whiteness, until, by and by, all Nature bursts forth again into fresh newness of beauty.

So I think from His very care of inani mate things, and the beauty He bestows upon them, together with the innate love for these beauties, that there is a sort of religion in the care for self-adornment. That is, He gives us so much to begin with in the way of personal appearance, and we do the best with what we have, thankful for it, and make our best as attractive as possible, not for our own gratification merely, but in a spirit of gratitude that so much has been given us, and a wish to make others see and feel our gladness.

I have a distrust of people who look upon all these things as folly, who themselves go clad in sombre garments, with no vestige of anything bright or cheerful. It seems to me as though they must have put all the freshness and brightness out of their own lives, and see nothing but the hard, dark sides of living. I have often wondered if Nature held anything for them in her various forms of loveliness; if the blooming of the flowers, the shining of stars, or singing of birds, suggested anything glad to them.

I know it is on the plea of serving God better, putting away worldly things and caring only for spiritual, and people are really

conscientious about it; but it seems to me such a strange sort of religion, the sackcloth and ashes kind, I think it must be, always bewailing one's lowliness, eyes cast so low they see only the debris and filth of earth's slums, instead of looking up in thankful gladness, and catching the glory and shining of the vast beyond. Why, to me there's more real religion in a knot of bright ribbon or a bunch of flowers worn by a glad-faced, happy-hearted girl, than in a score of the melancholy draperies, with their more melancholy wearers.

You may be sure something in the joyous world has gone wrong with them; for them there is some discord in the grand symphony of life; but how they are going to right the one, or restore happiness to the other by wearing ungraceful black dresses and unbecoming poke bonnets, I confess I don't see. I don't believe that God cares any more for them, or considers them more entitled to his special care than he does you and I, who love and reverence Him, but not with long faces and whining complaints. Irreverent? No, no; I am not that; but I cannot believe that He who gave us all this beauty and the capacity for loving it, would care less for us that we do worship him through his own works.

So, girls, don your bright draperies gracefully and joyously. Deck your hair with rosebuds whose hues shall rival the bloom of your cheeks, wear ribbons whose sheen shall match the color of your eyes; make yourselves as sweet and attractive as you can ; be living pictures if it please you, but in the outward adornment don't forget the more important robing. Wreathe your faces with loving, happy smiles, clothe your hearts with charity and gentle thoughts, your souls with the robes of purity and heavenly love, and you shall indeed be clothed with garments that never will wear out, but grow stronger and brighter by each day's wearing.

THERE is no time spent with less thought than a great part of that which is spent in reading.

BE deaf to the quarrelsome, blind to the scorner, and dumb to those who are mischiev. ously inquisitive.

The Art of Being Happy. An essay on the art of being happy is quite a different thing from a treatise on happiness itself. In fact, happiness hardly comes down, to be treated of. We should find ourselves at a loss even to define it, though what it is lies behind all expression as a fact of consciousness. We have words that approximate towards it on various sides: we may call it contentment, but we must add something more to express that of which contentment is the negative side: we may say peace, but we express the passive side of what is peace and something more: we may call it ease or delight, and we catch only partial or transient gleams of what is a constant presence; and so with a score of terms. But though we have no synonym for its fulness, we shall find no quarrel as to its meaning. We interpret it as we do the glance of the eye, the touch of the hand, the flush of the cheek it is above language.

Like all other forces, we know it by its effects, not its proper essence. Light and heat and electricity are the texts of science and the tools of art; but we reach up only to what they do for us, not to what they are. So the art of being happy can only mean the art of appropriating what we may of the mysterious and heavenly gift implied in the word happiness.

That there is such an art we are constantly learning. True, this art, like all others, has its geniuses, rare, sunny temperaments that are happy by instinct, with an independence of all rules and principles; anomalies like Mark Tapley, the sorrow of whose life it was that he never could find circumstances dark enough to make it a credit to be jolly. But most natures come up to the poise and harmony which is the mind's highest exponent of happiness, through slow attainment. Increasing experience teaches us that happiness is less dependent on external things than we had thought. It is less a matter of

VOL. XLI.-25

circumstance, and more of will; less in the great events of life, more in the affairs of every day.

We are constantly learning this because it is becoming more and more true. For it is not true of the child. We are not born happy. Being born innocent, ignorant and impressible, we are more easily made happy in childhood than at a later age, but more easily made sorrowful also. To the child both happiness and misery are external, and he is born into them, not with them. So, of all sorrow, an unhappy childhood seems saddest, because most helpless and hopeless. But, growing beyond that passive age in which we lie on the lap of circumstances, our enjoyment comes less to us, and is more of us.

The gift of happiness independent of our own will becomes less a possibility.

Thus we learn the art of being happy by an inductive process. That into which the child comes as a pensioner at first is continually led in to the heart and life, through the growth of experience and wisdom. In this it follows the analogy of all art and all knowledge. To the undisciplined mind everything is external, and all learning is an induction, a leading in of that which is with

out.

But, turning to the methods by which we may learn this most precious of arts, our analogy between that and other learning fails; for analogies are like circles that touch and curve away. All other arts must be sought after and followed if they would be gained; but the art of being happy is in not seeking to be so. Happiness is the only and exceptional thing that evades its pursuer, and is found of him who seeks it not. The height of this art is not the concealing of art, but the utter absence of it. It is here that he who would save his life shall lose it, and he who is willing to lose his life shall find it.

We have mastered the first and hardest lesson in the art of being happy when we can hold it not as an aim but an incident. There is much fallacy in the popular thinking on this point. The poet's rapturous apostrophe,

"O happiness! our being's end and aim,”—

lacks the first requirement of poetry,-truth. Our being's end it may be, but never its healthy aim. It has been charged against us as a sect, that we make happiness both end and aim of existence without logical means to such result. But the grand words of our Confession refute the charge, and express not only our attitude of belief, but the eter nal truth, nherent in the very nature of things, holiness, and consequent happiness, - a radical distinction, let it be observed, between aim and end. The old Catechism expresses this distinction no less grandly and happily when it makes the chief end of man "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."

If we could but rid ourselves of the fatal error that we were made to be happy! that this is what we are placed here to seek, and what life means to us. We are made for a thousand things else: that we may grow in light and knowledge, that we may strengthen the hands and lighten the hearts of others, that we may help on God's kingdom in the world, these, which include a thousand noble aims, we were made to follow, but never to waste life, as a piquant writer has it, in the coddling of our own poor little soul. Our duty is in our own hands, but our happiness in God's. If we do our work, we need not fear that He will fail of His.

For, though happiness is incidental to

| well-doing, it is none the less sure to accompany it. It is God's good providence that all along the paths of duty the flowers of happiness should bloom thick and fair. If we go out after them we are straightway led into brambles and thorns, but keeping the appointed road they crowd the wayside and sweeten all the air. The hungry man, who eats that his life and strength may be sustained, misses not the incidental gratification of the palate; but if he feasts for this only, the fallacious pleasure ends in pain. God holds us to His uses, and not our own; but His goodness makes the ways of wisdom the paths of pleasantness also.

not.

As a kindred truth that illustrates this, let us turn to the foremost names of history, and ask the secret of their renown. The names loved of Fame are of those who sought her We will but mention Luther, cleareyed and strong-hearted, lifting his single arm against the antichrist of the church, leading the forlorn hope of a better age, and building far higher than he knew, — or, in a later day, Ruskin, whose luxuriant pages enrich the world's literature, pages written only because what he deemed a monstrous falsehood in art stood up in his way, and he could not pass it, or, in our own midst the

two immortal names of our foremost in the

field and the council, — he who wears to-day our proudest gift, and he whom we have borne to his martyr's grave through the rain of a nation's tears. These are but types of all whose names shine out with the luster of unsought honor, for whom

"The path of duty was the way to glory."

But not only does the finding of happiness require that it shall be unsought, it demands also that it shall be recognized when found. In the very unconsciousuess that seems so charming to us, the child loses the greater part of his happiness. Ilow should he know that he is free from care and labor, protected and blest by all that loving guardianship can do, when he has no data to measure the worth of these things? We must come from the shadow of a sick chamber, or the gloom of prison walls to realize what a pleasant thing it is to see the sun. We must be prostrated by long weariness and watching ere we can appreciate the

Let us be especially thankful for this, that we need not wait for blessings to brighten until they take their flight. It is a happy thing to know that we are happy. Amid all our wasted joy we all have in our experience such points of light, seasons when the consciousness of our happiness swelled our hearts with an unwonted gratitude. They remind us of the high lights in Turner's pictures, a touch of white on the edge of a sun-illumined cloud, or the crest of the highest wave.

We are

in a hopeful way when we find comfort in a cup of tea, and genuine happiness in filling a pattern of worsted. The great events of which we spoke at first, it is well for us when we learn what broken reeds they are on which to lean for a life's happiness. There have been things in many of our lives past which we could not have conceived in prospective how it would be possible to live; yet we do live past them, and very comfortably, too. The author of " Gates Ajar" says, "the dreams are gone from the wild flowers, the crown from the sunsets, the thrill from the singing winds. But I have found out a thing; one can live without dreams and crowns and thrills."

If we were to speak our honest experience, we should doubtless say that our most reliable and constant, if not our greatest sources of happiness, have been in ourselves. Inside, and apart from this distracting, inexorable world, in the midst of which we live, there is a world which we may make what we will. Into its fastnesses we must retire for our most secure enjoyments. In the solitude and sweetness of our own thoughts, in the ardor of our favorite pursuits, the companionship of our chosen books, in keeping

highest within our reach, as well as in the appreciation of the thousand kindly offices of daily comfort, the pleasure of life must largely lie. This invariable experience tends to modify our first conceptions of happiness. The early Californians looked to pick up their gold in nuggets, but they found it in the slow filtering of its dust from the sand. In much the same proportion do we find the small and large pleasures of life, and even our ideals take on the soberer colors of experience. We recall the words of a woman of rare culture and wide sympathies, whose life was so burdened with care and good works as almost to shut her from the world of books surrounding her, who smilingly gave as her ideal of happiness, a rocking-chair and a new book." And those of another frail, sweet lady, overburdened with social and domestic cares, who affirmed she could conceive of no more perfect happiness than perfect rest. We have learned much when the highest enjoyment we ask for is to be left for a little with ourselves. When we are no longer at the mercy of the external, we are no novices in the art of being happy. Indeed, if one were to ask a recipe for happiness, we could think of no better rules, aside from the indwelling Spirit of God, - than these two, "Achieve a wholesome independence of circumstances," and "Cultivate an undergrowth of small pleasures."

In saying this we are not belittling the great blessings Heaven sometimes vouchsafes to us, turning thereby the whole current of life, or passing lightly by those terrible clouds which equally through the providence of God throw their baleful shadows across a life-time. But we hold the great blessing through its daily realization, and the taking it up constantly into our daily living, while we lighten the loss by filling the void it leaves with whatever devices of labor or study or interest that shall give us little time or room for the " luxury of grief." It would be a forlorn world indeed, if there were no substitutes for lost joys. The lamps of science shine not only forth into the world, but back into the gloomy and desolate heart of many a follower. The hum of labor's wheels drowns the sigh of regret, and soothes the