Though nevermore our paths may meet, Nor heart greet heart with welcoming kiss, An instant makes the sad world sweet; One passing fills the soul with bliss. [Illustration: _HOME_ _BY Mrs. Louise H. Miller._] Last month I spoke of how easy it is to let a light day tire you as much as a heavy one. If you can do three-thirds in one busy day why does it take all another day to do two-thirds and tire you about as much in one case as in the other? Why didn’t you have a third of it for your own amusement or improvement? What became of that third? It is all just another proof that it pays to do a thing with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your body. If you had worked as earnestly the second day as you did the first, you would have done the day’s work, had a third of it to yourself, and been no more tired than you were the first. It wasn’t because you were lazy—you just “had the time” and put it all on the daily work instead of taking some of it for yourself. I can hear a small chorus of objections to the above. Wait a minute. No one knows better than I that the housework for one day is often different in kind and amount from that of the day before; that one’s strength is often not the same two days in succession; that there are extras and specials and interruptions; that the baby may sleep most of one day and cry most of the next; that many things depend on the mother; that some women really have all they can do day in and day out and year after year and work at high speed all the time until they die of it; that often what fits one case does not fit another. I know all that. _But the principle is true!_ And nine times out of ten that principle applied to your own case would help you physically, mentally and morally. And those about you. “I know all that,” says some one. “There’s nothing new in that.” I venture that this person, however well she knows it, hasn’t been _applying it_. No there’s nothing new in it. That’s just where the danger lies—it is so old a principle that we forget all about it. “Yes,” say a dozen more, “you are right. That person ought to apply it and profit by it. If we had work like hers we could accomplish a lot by it. But we haven’t, more’s the pity, and _our_ work is such that we can’t do that way with it.” There lies the real trouble. As in everything else, we can see how _others_ can make an improvement, but when it comes to our own case, why, that is quite different, because this and because that and because the other. The funny part of it is that these other people, while they are blind about themselves as we are about ourselves, can see very easily how we could improve matters. Of course other people generally think they could improve our methods much more than they really could, but it is equally true that we think they could improve it less than they really could. Two heads are better than one, and it does help to see ourselves as others see us.