I take it that all are agreed as to the desirability of good health, although it is often said of a certain class of chronic invalids, that if they were to be deprived of the pleasure of croning over and detailing their symptoms, life would have no charms for them. But this is a provision of nature to prevent the meanest life from becoming altogether an unmitigated burden: when a person becomes so disordered physically that he has nothing else to enjoy, a certain depraved condition of mind is induced which enables him to extract a little satisfaction from dwelling upon and recounting his miseries! In contrast to such cases how gloriously shines out the example of the old lady who, on being interviewed by the minister, thus related her experiences: her husband had been long dead, leaving her with eight children, whom, through her own labor, she reared and educated. One after another all had died after lingering illnesses——the last, a son, the only support of her old age, had been recently buried; and, to crown all, the remnant of the little property left by her husband, had just passed from her possession——the uninsured buildings by fire, and the land by the foreclosure of the mortgage. “But,” concluded the dear old soul, while her brow lightened and her eye kindled with enthusiasm, “thank the Lord, I have two teeth left, and praise and bless His holy name, they are opposite each other!” I pause to note an important lesson——the influence upon health, of prevalent good nature, and the habit, which may be cultivated, of looking on the bright side of things. “People ask me,” says Old Sojourner Truth, “how I came to live so long and keep my mind, and I tell them that it is ‘because I think of the great things of God, not little things.’ I don’t fritter my mind away in caring for trifles.” It has been elsewhere noted——the propensity of people in general for preferring medicine to advice. If the world were convinced that the writer possessed an unfailing remedy——a “medicine” that would cure every physical ailment and prevent disease, it would be demanded faster than it could be manufactured, though every gin-mill in the land were transformed into a laboratory for its production. No price would be deemed exorbitant, and, though the mixture were black as ink, and more nauseating than the vilest drug in our vile Materia Medica, it would still be gulped down as a child demolishes bon-bons, if it never failed in its efficacy.