He indeed is getting the most out of life who does most to elevate
mankind. How happy were those Little Sisters of the Poor at Tours, who
took scissors to divide their last remnant of bedclothing with an old
woman who came to them at night, craving hospitality! And how happy was
that American school-teacher who gave up the best room in the house,
which she had engaged long before the season opened, at a mountain
sanitarium, during the late war, taking instead of it the poorest room
in the house, that she might give good quarters to a soldier just out of
his camp hospital!
"Teach self-denial," said Walter Scott, "and make its practice
pleasurable, and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than
ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer."
Yet how many there are, ready to make some great sacrifice, who neglect
those little acts of kindness which make so many lives brighter and
happier.
"I say, Jim, it's the first time I ever had anybody ask my parding, and
it kind o' took me off my feet." A young lady had knocked him down in
hastily turning a corner. She stopped and said to the ragged
crossing-boy: "I beg your pardon, my little fellow; I am very sorry I
ran against you." He took off the piece of a cap he had on his skull,
made a low bow, and said with a broad smile: "You have my parding, Miss,
and welcome; and the next time you run agin me, you can knock me clean
down and I won't say a word."
One of the greatest mistakes of life is to save our smiles and pleasant
words and sympathy for those of "our set," or for those not now with us,
and for other times than the present.
"If a word or two will render a man happy," said a Frenchman, "he must
be a wretch indeed who will not give it. It is like lighting another
man's candle with your own, which loses none of its brilliancy by what
the other gains."
Sydney Smith recommends us to make at least one person happy every day:
"Take ten years, and you will make thirty-six hundred and fifty persons
happy; or brighten a small town by your contribution to the fund of
general joy." One who is cheerful is preeminently useful.
Dr. Raffles once said: "I have made it a rule never to be with a person
ten minutes without trying to make him happier." It was a remark of Dr.
Dwight, that "one who makes a little child happier for half an hour is a
fellow-worker with God."
A little boy said to his mother: "I couldn't make little sister happy,
nohow I could fix it. But I made myself happy trying to make her happy."
"I make Jim happy, and he laughs," said another boy, speaking of his
invalid brother; "and that makes me happy, and I laugh."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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