POGANUC PEOPLE. [Sidenote: Longing for love in the unlovely.] There are hard, sinful, unlovely souls, who yet long to be loved, who sigh in their dark prison for that tenderness, that devotion, of which they are consciously unworthy. Love might redeem them; but who can love them? There is a fable of a prince, doomed by a cruel enchanter to wear a loathsome, bestial form, till some fair woman should redeem him by the transforming kiss of love. The fable is a parable of the experience of many a lost human soul.... Who can read the awful mysteries of a single soul? We see human beings, hard, harsh, earthly, and apparently without an aspiration for anything high and holy; but let us never say that there is not far down in the depths of any soul a smothered aspiration, a dumb, repressed desire to be something higher and purer, to attain the perfectness to which God calls it. LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW. [Sidenote: Seeing the bright side.] “She shall be called little Pussy Willow, and I shall give her the gift of _always seeing the bright side of everything_. That gift will be more to her than beauty or riches or honors. It is not so much matter what color one’s eyes are as what one sees with them. There is a bright side to everything, if people only knew it, and the best eyes are those which are always able to see this bright side.” A DOG’S MISSION. [Sidenote: Reaction of harshness.] A conscientious person should beware of getting into a passion, for every sharp word one speaks comes back and lodges like a sliver in one’s own heart; and such slivers hurt us worse than they ever can any one else. * * * * * [Sidenote: Man’s childish impatience.] Ah, the child is father of the man! when he gets older he will have the great toys of which these are emblems; he will believe in what he sees and touches,—in house, land, railroad stock,—he will believe in these earnestly and really, and in his eternal manhood nominally and partially. And when his father’s messengers meet him, and face him about, and take him off his darling pursuits, and sweep his big ships into the fire, and crush his full-grown cars, then the grown man will complain and murmur, and wonder as the little man does now. The Father wants the future, the Child the present, all through life, till death makes the child a man. MY WIFE AND I. [Sidenote: Discipline of patience.] The moral discipline of bearing with evil patiently is a great deal better and more ennobling than the most vigorous assertion of one’s personal rights. * * * * * [Sidenote: Ennobling power of sorrow.]