u begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is
just the same as if you never did. For you have no foreshadow of an
inevitable termination to your rapture, and so practically your night
has no limit. It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other
end floats off into eternity. And there really is no abrupt
termination. You roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness
into the bosom of another happiness,--sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is
bliss just as truly as society to the lonely. What in the distance
would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your
happiness is continuous. Just as it is in mending. Short-sighted,
superficial, unreflecting people have a way--which in time fossilizes
into a principle--of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the
wash,--a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words
thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used,
namely, as applied to what is worth economizing. Time, happiness,
life, these are the only things to be thrifty about. But I see people
working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and
embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave
the user worse than they found him. This I call waste and wicked
prodigality. Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of
no importance. Where these things can minister to the mind and heart,
they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the
appetite or the vanity, or any foolish and hurtful lust, they are
foolish and hurtful. Be thrifty of comfort. Never allow an
opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence,
for kind of good, to go unimproved. Consider seriously whether the
syrup of your preserves or juices of your own soul will do the most to
serve your race. It may be that they are compatible,--that the
concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but
if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as
to which it shall be. If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will
become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for
souls there is no transmigration out of fables. Once a soul, forever a
soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say.
Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are
worthless. It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life
that they