But we lose joys in life not only by failing to find them and by complicating the machinery of life, but also by making machinery of those things which are really ends in themselves. There is bathing, for example. We take baths so many times a day or week in order to keep clean and healthy. We might, if we arranged things properly, forget about the necessity for health and cleanliness, and jump into the bath just for the sake of “the cool, silver shock of the plunge.” We perfunctorily “change the air” in our homes so many times each day, but it is possible to get so enamored of living out of doors as to find even the stillness of the air in the house unbearable. When one has reached that point an open window is no longer a means to health, but a part of the joy of living, because it brings the sensation of moving air. What a difference, too, between a walk and a “constitutional”! I shall never forget a woman whom I saw one summer at a resort in one of the most beautiful parts of the Adirondacks. She used to come forth of a morning after breakfast and, with a set, determined look upon her face, walk so many times around the veranda, and then retire to the parlor for the rest of the day. Poor lady! I suppose she never saw that woodsy path that led up the hill behind the house, nor knew the joys of “leaping from rock up to rock” in order to get to the top of the hill, nor dreamed of the beauties of the moss-covered rock at the top, with the red-berried bush hanging over it. She never knew the pleasures of getting lost in the cranberry bog and having to wade the stream to get out. Poor, poor lady! As for the joys of social intercourse with those we love, we lose them partly by letting them get mixed up with the machinery of education. Study clubs are all very well in their way and in their place, but there is such a thing as having too many of them. It is possible to get more profit as well as more pleasure from reading a masterpiece of literature for half an hour, and then talking with a friend for an hour and a half, than from listening to a rehash of the masterpiece for an hour and then talking with a lot of people we only half like for another hour. It is possible, also, to lose the pleasures of the expression of friendship by sacrificing them to formalities. If we give dinners and receptions simply for the sake of discharging social obligations, we are bound to throw away time which for the sake of the joy of living ought to be given to those we love.