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every happy person helps to make every one else happy. Yet we all
understand that happiness does not mean smiling all the time. There is
truly nothing more distressing than a giggler or one who is forever
grimacing. "True happiness," says one of our most cheerful writers,
"means the joyous sparkle in the eye and the little, smiling lines in
the face that are so quickly and easily distinguished from the lines
produced by depression and frowning that grow deeper and deeper until
they become as hard and severe as if they were cut in stone." Such
happiness is one of the virtues which people of all classes and ages,
the world over, admire and enjoy. "We do not know what ripples of
healing are set in motion," says Henry Drummond, "when we simply smile
on one another. Christianity wants nothing so much in the world as
sunny people."

Most persons are very quick to see whether or not a smile is genuine
or is manufactured and put on like a mask for the occasion. The
automatic, stock-in-trade smile hardly ever fits the face that tries
to wear it. It is a little too wide or sags at the corners or
something else is wrong with it.

A smile may be as deep as a well and as wide as a church door; it may
be "sweeter than honey," but the instant we detect that it is not
genuine, it loses its charm and becomes, in fact, much worse than no
smile at all. Smiles that are genuine are always just right both in
quality and quantity. So the only really safe rule is for us not to
smile until we feel like it and then we shall get on all right. And we
ought to feel like smiling whenever we look into the honest face of
any fellow being. A smile passes current in every country as a mark of
distinction.

But it is even possible to overdo in the matter of smiling. "I can't
think of anything more irritating to the average human being," says
Lydia Horton Knowles, "than an incessant, everlasting smile. There are
people who have it. When things go wrong they have a patient, martyr-like
smile, and when things go right they have a dutifully pleasant
smile which has all the appearance of being mechanical, and purely a
pose. Now I think the really intelligent person is the one who can
look as though he realized the significance of various incidents or
happenings and who can look sorrowful, even, if the occasion demands
it. It is not a pleasant thing to suffer mentally or physically, for
instance, and have any one come up to you with a smile of patient,