Is poverty your portion?--she will lighten your labours, preside at your
frugal board, and watch your quiet slumbers.

Is your state mediocrity?--she will heighten every blessing you enjoy,
by informing you how grateful you should be to that bountiful Providence
who might have placed you in the most abject situation; and, by teaching
you to weigh your blessings against your deserts, show you how much more
you receive than you have a right to expect.

Are you possessed of affluence?--what an inexhaustible fund of happiness
will she lay before you! To relieve the distressed, redress the injured,
in short, to perform all the good works of peace and mercy.

Content, my dear friends, will blunt even the arrows of adversity, so
that they cannot materially harm you. She will dwell in the humblest
cottage; she will attend you even to a prison. Her parent is Religion;
her sisters, Patience and Hope. She will pass with you through life,
smoothing the rough paths and tread to earth those thorns which every
one must meet with as they journey onward to the appointed goal. She
will soften the pains of sickness, continue with you even in the
cold gloomy hour of death, and, cheating you with the smiles of her
heaven-born sister, Hope, lead you triumphant to a blissful eternity.

I confess I have rambled strangely from my story: but what of that? if
I have been so lucky as to find the road to happiness, why should I be
such a niggard as to omit so good an opportunity of pointing out the way
to others. The very basis of true peace of mind is a benevolent wish to
see all the world as happy as one's Self; and from my soul do I pity the
selfish churl, who, remembering the little bickerings of anger, envy,
and fifty other disagreeables to which frail mortality is subject, would
wish to revenge the affront which pride whispers him he has received.
For my own part, I can safely declare, there is not a human being in
the universe, whose prosperity I should not rejoice in, and to whose
happiness I would not contribute to the utmost limit of my power: and
may my offences be no more remembered in the day of general retribution,
than as from my soul I forgive every offence or injury received from a
fellow creature.

Merciful heaven! who would exchange the rapture of such a reflexion for
all the gaudy tinsel which the world calls pleasure!

But to return.--Content dwelt in Mrs. Temple's bosom, and spread a
charming animation over her countenanc