e delights in a sorrowful man."

The rhyming couplet has set me to thinking, long and seriously, upon
the duty of cheerfulness, a duty which we owe not only to our
fellow-men, but to ourselves. It is such an uncomfortable thing to be
miserable that I marvel that any sensible human being ever gives way
to the inclination to look on the dark side of life.

In writing this article, I wish to state in the beginning that the
women to whom it is addressed are not those over whom bereavement has
cast dark shadows. For genuine grief and affliction I have vast and
unbounded sympathy. For imaginary woes I have none. There is a certain
class of sentimentalists to whom it is positive joy to be made to
weep, and the longer they can pump up the tears the more content they
are. These are people who have never known a heart-sorrow. They revel
in books that end in death, and they listen to the details of a
dying-bed scene with ghoulish interest. Had genuine bereavement ever
been theirs, they would find only harrowing pain in such things.
Shallow brooks always gurgle most loudly in passing over the stones
underlying them. The great and mighty river flows silently and calmly
above the large boulders hidden far below the surface.

The women of this sentimental class are those that read and write
verses upon "tiny graves," "dainty coffins," and "baby shrouds."

The other day a friend shuddered audibly over the poem, admired by
many, entitled--"The Little White Hearse."

"Just listen," she exclaimed, "to this last verse! After describing
the grief of the mother whose baby has just ridden to what she calls
'its long, lasting sleep,' she further harrows up the feelings by
winding up with:--

"'I know not her name, but her sorrow I know--
While I paused on that crossing I lived it once more.
And back to my heart surged that river of woe
That but in the heart of a mother can flow--
For the little white hearse has been, too, at my door.'

"How could she write it? How could she bring herself to put that down
in black and white with the memory of the baby she has lost, in her
mind?"

"My dear," quietly answered a deep-natured, practical woman,--"either
the author of that poem is incapable of such suffering as some
mothers endure, or the little white hearse has never stopped at her
door. If it had, she could not have written the poem."

She who "talks out" her pain is not the one who is killed by it. A
peculiarity of hopeless cases o