s, that sees the
world with wise and patient eyes.

In a way it does not matter, your physical condition or mine, if our
"eyes have seen the glory" that deifies life and makes even its waste
places beautiful. What is that view from your window as you lie in your
bed? A bit of the sea, if you are fortunate, a corner of garden, surely,
the top of an elm tree against the blue. What is it but the revelations
of a God in the world? There is enough that is sad and unhappy, but over
all are these simple, ineffable things. If the garden is an expression
of God in the world, then the world and life are no longer meaningless.
Even idleness becomes in some degree bearable because it is a part of a
significant world.

Unfortunately, the idleness of disability often means pain, the wear and
tear of physical or nervous suffering. That is another matter. We cannot
meet it fully with any philosophy. My patients very often beg to know
the best way to bear pain, how they may overcome the attacks of "nerves"
that are harder to bear than pain. To such a question I can only say
that the time to bear pain is before and after. Live in such a way in
the times of comparative comfort that the attacks are less likely to
appear and easier to bear when they do come. After the pain or the
"nervous" attack is over, that is the time to prevent the worst features
of another. Forget the distress; live simply and happily in spite of the
memory, and you will have done all that the patient himself can do to
ward off or to make tolerable the next occasion of suffering. Pain
itself--pure physical pain--is a matter for the physician's judgment. It
is his business to seek out the causes and apply the remedy.

V

RULES OF THE GAME

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be.
BEN JONSON.

It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane
mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile
and decent qualities which we call character.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to
yield to it.
PETRARCH.

When I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens,
"nervously" sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I
know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have
no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness,
some from w