allowed nothing sour, acrid, or bitter to enter, but made them a
perpetual solace and comfort by their cheerfulness?" There are those
whose very presence carries sunshine with them wherever they go; a
sunshine which means pity for the poor, sympathy for the suffering, help
for the unfortunate, and benignity toward all. Everybody loves the sunny
soul. His very face is a passport anywhere. All doors fly open to him.
He disarms prejudice and envy, for he bears good will to everybody. He
is as welcome in every household as the sunshine.

"He was quiet, cheerful, genial," says Carlyle in his "Reminiscences"
concerning Edward Irving's sunny helpfulness. "His soul unruffled, clear
as a mirror, honestly loving and loved, Irving's voice was to me one of
blessedness and new hope."

And to William Wilberforce the poet Southey paid this tribute: "I never
saw any other man who seemed to enjoy such perpetual serenity and
sunshine of spirit."

"I resolved," said Tom Hood, "that, like the sun, so long as my day
lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything."

When Goldsmith was in Flanders he discovered the happiest man he had
ever seen. At his toil, from morning till night, he was full of song and
laughter. Yet this sunny-hearted being was a slave, maimed, deformed,
and wearing a chain. How well he illustrated that saying which bids us,
if there is no bright side, to polish up the dark one! "Mirth is like
the flash of lightning that breaks through the gloom of the clouds and
glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a daylight in the soul,
filling it with a steady and perpetual serenity." It is cheerfulness
that has the staying quality, like the sunshine changing a world of
gloom into a paradise of beauty.

The first prize at a flower-show was taken by a pale, sickly little
girl, who lived in a close, dark court in the east of London. The judges
asked how she could grow it in such a dingy and sunless place. She
replied that a little ray of sunlight came into the court; as soon as it
appeared in the morning, she put her flower beneath it, and, as it
moved, moved the flower, so that she kept it in the sunlight all day.

"Water, air, and sunshine, the three greatest hygienic agents, are free,
and within the reach of all." "Twelve years ago," says Walt Whitman, "I
came to Camden to die. But every day I went into the country, and bathed
in the sunshine, lived with the birds and squirrels, and played in the
water with the