The material pleasures are the social pleasures of eating, displaying, possessing, and so forth. Material pleasures generate in the human the desire for fluff, feathers, and four-flushing. Material pleasures accentuate the desire to possess things, and in the strife for possession, hearts are broken, fortunes wasted, nerves shattered, and the finer sentiments calloused. The homes where material pleasures abound are the ones where worry, neurasthenia and nervous prostration abound. Material pleasures are merely stimulants for the time being, and there always come the intermittent reflexes of gloom and depression. The desire to show off, to excite envy in others, is always present at the homes where material pleasures are the rule. Material pleasures call for crowds. Mental pleasures are best enjoyed in solitude. The material pleasure-seeker lives a life of convention, engagements, routine, strain, and high tension. [Sidenote: Mental Pleasures Are Best.] The person who is so fortunate as to appreciate and follow mental pleasures is serene, natural, happy and content. A cozy room, loved ones around, music, books, love and social conversation--those are mental pleasures; those are best. He who can pick up a book and read things worth while, gets satisfaction unknown to those whose life is a round of banquets, theaters, dances, automobiles, parties, bridge, clubs and society doings. When you spend the evening playing cards, the chances are you come home late, and when you retire, it takes perhaps an hour or so before you fall to sleep. And during the night you dream of cards, of certain hands, of certain circumstances, or certain persons who were prominent in the evening's game. The reason you do not go to sleep after an exciting evening is that you have set your nerve carburetor at high tension and have forgotten to lower it before you go to sleep. [Sidenote: Good Reading.] On the other hand, when you have been reading a restful book, full of good thought, you establish an equilibrium, a relaxed state of nerves, and particularly, you have switched the current or direction of your day's thoughts. That change spells rest, and you retire and go to sleep easily. You will scarcely believe what a wondrous change for the better you will notice in yourself if you make it a rule to have a brain clearing, mental inventory, and nerve relaxation every night before you go to sleep. Your brain works at night always; oft-times you have no remembrance of your dreams, but if your last hour, before retiring, was an hour of excitement, tension or unusual occupation, you will likely go over it all again in your dreams. If you will let nothing prevent your evening period of soliloquy, you will establish your mental habits into a rhythm that will give you peace, rest and benefit. In the olden days, when most families had evening worship or family prayers, the members of those households slept soundly and restfully.