"With all your sorrows I sympathize from my heart," he wrote. "I have learned to do so through my own sufferings. The same feeling which made you put your hand into your pocket to search among the crumbs for the wanting coin for the beggar, leads me to search in my heart for some consolation for you. The last two years have been fraught to me with such sorrowful experiences that I would gladly exchange my condition for a peaceful grave. A bankrupt in health, hope and fortune, my constitution shattered frightfully, and the almost certain prospect of being a cripple for life before me, I can offer you as fervent and unselfish a sympathy as ever one heart offered another. I have lain awake, alone, and in darkness, suffering severe agony for hours, often thinking that the slightest aggravation must make my condition unbearable and finding my only consolation in murmuring to myself the words patience, courage and submission." That, surely, is a part of what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when, as one element in his statement of the ideal for the perfect life, he named "to be kind." True kindness is impossible without sympathy. So long as there is so much real sympathy in the world there can be no place for the maunderings of a pessimist. Every sight of a man, a woman or a child whose life is beautified by the outgoing of sympathy is an effective message of courage, of cheer, of hope. IV DOING BUSINESS FOR OTHERS A Boston boy, Samuel Billings Capen, wanted to become a minister. Yet it did not seem possible to secure the special training which was essential. Instead of being discouraged, he determined to go into business. But he resolved that he would be a business man of God. From the first he carried his Christian principles with him into the carpet business. His faithful work as office boy was a part of his testimony for Christ, and when--within five years--he became a member of the firm, he was known as one of the solid Christian men of the city. Always his duty to Christ came first. In the words of his biographer, "There was not a moment when he would not have left the firm with which he was associated had the business demanded any compromise with the best things of character." Once he spoke to young men of these few things essential to vital living: "The first is fidelity--that kind of conscientiousness which performs the smallest details well. "The second condition is earnestness. There is no chance for the idle or indifferent. "The third condition is integrity--not that lower form which refuses to tell a downright falsehood, but that higher form of conscientiousness which will not swerve a hair's breadth from the strictest truth, no matter what the temptation; the courage to lose a sale rather than to do that which is mean or questionable.