Attention to the correct sound and exact meaning of words also helps a young speaker in ordinary conversation, where bêtises jar on hearers and reflect on the utterer, W XXII CHEERFULNESS E all owe to mankind the duty of being as bright and happy as our temperament and circumstances will allow. Cheerfulness is a matter of temperament in the first instance; but cheerfulness is a quality of character that may be cultivated. No moral quality is more appreciated by our fellow-men. Mr. Philip Gibbs, the famous war correspondent, insisted that only the cheerfulness of the British soldier made the long, dreary waiting in the trenches of Flanders endurable. This cheerfulness was certainly a miracle of habit overcoming temperament. The British race is not, by nature, buoyant and ardent. Climate, latitude, and racial characteristics all tend in the opposite direction. Englishmen are said to take even their pleasures sadly. Only by supreme effort of will, often quite unconsciously exerted, were soldiers able to face the horrible discomforts and the appalling risks of trench warfare" the sodden years. of heaped-up weariness"-without falling into a melancholy which would have destroyed their military morale. Cheerfulness is a habit we can all acquire. It is an anodyne against life's hardest buffets. A visitor to a British prison picked up a Bible in one of the cells for long-term-service convicts. He turned over its leaves, and his eye caught a penciled note on the pages, “Cheer up, Jeremiah," that some waggish prisoner had scribbled on the last page of the Lamentations. It was just another manifestation of the spirit of the soldiers in the trenches-an unconquerable resolution not to be downhearted in the most adverse conditions. The habit of looking at the best side of every event was declared by Dr. Johnson to be better than a thousand pounds a year. It was blind George Matheson who sang, "I trace the rainbow through the rain." Six years ago, a dear friend of my own was dying of cancer in the throat. She had devoted her life and her money to helping "the weakest things." In the midst of her busy concern with efforts for ameliorating the lot of slum children she had been seized with cancer of a most malignant type. A week or two before her death she asked me to come and say a last farewell. "I have cast aside all earthly things," she wrote, "and am patiently awaiting the end." I arrived when she was under the influence of morphia, medically administered to allay her excruciating agonies, and I had to wait until the effects of the drug had passed away. Then I was shown into her room. She greeted me with that radiant smile which no one who knew her ever forgets; and before I could speak she said in a perfectly calm and steady voice: "Now, please, let us be cheerful. I am not going to allow anything or anybody to interfere with my enjoying my dying." Surely such cheerfulness has never been surpassed. All my memories of that last quarter of an hour with my dying friend are memories of quiet cheerfulness. I never understood before what Brown ing really meant by "greeting the Unseen with a cheer." For ten years I had as an office colleague the late Rev. Jonathan Brierley (“J. B."), a man whose whole career was dogged by nervous weakness and uncertain physical health. Yet there never was a more incorrigible optimist than this minister-journalist, who never knew when he got up in the morning whether he might not be stricken by illness before. night and condemned to his bed for weeks. But he used to tell us that every morning as he got up he said to himself, "Brierley, you old sinner; you get heaps better than your deserts!" His maxim in life was to "make your own inside weather." Whatever the elements might be doing, however cloudy the skies, or piercing the wind, or depressing the political outlook, or exacting the day's work, he insisted that if you made your own inside weather and kept your mental barometer at set fair" and your spiritual thermometer well above summer heat, you were happy, and no one could rob you of your cheerfulness. By this maxim Jonathan Brierley lived. He advocated cheerfulness by word and pen, but above all by his sunny temperament. Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote four lines that have cheered many wayfarers along life's hard ways. "In this world of froth and bubble, Kindness in another's trouble, "It is quite wonderful in this age," said Thomas Carlyle," to find a man so happy and so serenely con fident as Browning is; but he is very different from me." Carlyle's remark is a combination of worthy, envy and honest confession. The perennial cheerfulness with which Robert Browning confronted life contrasts sharply with Thomas Carlyle's incessant whining. Browning lived in the faith that "God's in His heaven: all's right with the world." Thomas Carlyle wondered daily if life was really worth living. True, Browning had the digestion of an ostrich, while Carlyle suffered from chronic dyspepsia: and while Browning basked in Italian sunshine, Carlyle lived in Chelsea." Still, the poet's experiences of life had not all been happy. He had endured neglect, seen poets of baser metal leap into popularity while he worked in comparative obscurity. He had had disappointments, rebuffs, and setbacks. But Browning's was a cheerful soul; Carlyle's a sombre spirit. Browning found life" smacking sweet." At seventy he sang: "I find earth not grey, but rosy; Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. Do I stand and stare? All's blue!" At seventy, Carlyle, morose and embittered, shrieked and sobbed over life's disillusionments and petty worries; and only rose into an heroic figure when he cried over his dead wife: "Ah, if I could but have five minutes with her, only to assure her that I loved her all through that!" The cheerfulness that most readily wins our admiration is cheerfulness in adversity. Ella Wheeler Wilcox puts it into the familiar rhyme:— |