r profitable and
pleasant conversation. Why, those four rules just oozed into the
talk, without any sort of flutter or formality, and made our chat
both agreeable and fruitful. Henry Ward Beecher said many good
things. Here is one that I caught in the school reader in my
boyhood: "The man who carries a lantern on a dark night can have
friends all about him, walking safely by the help of its rays and he
be not defrauded." Education is just such a lantern and this
schoolmaster, Will, knows how to carry it that it may afford light to
the friends about him.

Well, the first of van Dyke's rules is: "You shall learn to desire
nothing in the world so much but that you can be happy without it."
I do wonder if he had been reading in Proverbs: "Better is a dinner
of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." Or he
may have been reading the statement of St. Paul: "For I have learned,
in whatever state I am, therewith to be content." Or, possibly, he
may have been thinking of the lines of Paul Laurence Dunbar,

"Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,
My garden makes a desert spot;
Sometimes the blight upon the tree
Takes all my fruit away from me;
And then with throes of bitter pain
Rebellious passions rise and swell--
But life is more than fruit or grain,
And so I sing, and all is well."

I am plebeian enough to be fond of milk and crackers as a luncheon;
but I have just a dash of the patrician in my make-up and prefer the
milk unskimmed. Sometimes, I find that the cream has been devoted to
other, if not higher, uses and that my crackers must associate
perforce with milk of cerulean hue. Such a situation is a severe
test of character, and I am hoping that at such junctures along
life's highway I may find some support in the philosophy of Mr. van
Dyke.

I suspect that he is trying to make me understand that happiness is
subjective rather than objective--that happiness depends not upon
what we have, but upon what we do with what we have. I couldn't be
an anarchist if I'd try. I don't grudge the millionaire his turtle
soup and caviar. But I do feel a bit sorry for him that he does not
know what a royal feast crackers and unskimmed milk afford. If the
king and the anarchist would but join me in such a feast I think the
king would soon forget his crown and the anarchist his plots, and
we'd be just three good fellows together, living at the very summit
of life and wishing that all men coul