er._

_Heart health never comes so long as the hand is kept on the pulse._

_Feed on garbage and you soon lose faith in good things._

_The fruitful life seeks showers as well as sunshine._

_It's hard for a man who has ground of his nose on the money mill to
smell a taint on anything._

_Many a man goes back by trying to put up a good front and nothing
more._

_Every life is worth the love it gives._

VIII

STRENGTH FOR THE DAILY TASK

It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear
for the ninety-nine per cent. of us. Sometimes it seems as though we
spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away
for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the
machine in condition for further toil.

How hopeless is the outlook of many a life! The mother with the weary
round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same
task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things,
and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only
augmented as age makes itself felt--all who toil feel at times these
depressing limitations.

Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of
relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and
excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they
foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty
substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.

Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that
often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring
weariness and longing for relief. All worth while work involves much
tediousness, painstaking exertion. All great things stand for so much
life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.

The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but
repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks
only for frivolity and amusement. Life is too large a business to be
always light and trivial. Yet we must not allow its high purposes to
be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and
brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.

How may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture
of duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also
useful, fruitful, and enjoyable? For it is man's duty to be happy;
othe