O not keep the alabaster box of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffin, send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them.

Let us learn to anoint our friends while they are yet among the living. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened heart; flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.

-George W. Childs.

Y BUSINESS is not to remake myself,

But make the absolute best of what God made.
-Robert Browning.

E just shake hands at meeting
With many that come nigh;
We nod the head in greeting
To many that go by-

But welcome through the gateway
Our few old friends and true;
Then hearts leap up, and straightway
There's open house for you,
Old friends,

There's open house for you!

-Gerald Massey.

THE HUMAN TOUCH

D'

IGH thoughts and noble in all lands
Help me; my soul is fed by such.
But ah, the touch of lips and hands,—
The human touch!

Warm, vital, close, life's symbols dear,-
These need I most, and now, and here.

--Richard Burton.

IF THAT WERE ENOUGH

O thrill with the joy of girded men,

To go on forever and fail and go on again, To be mauled to the earth and arise,

And contend for the shade of a word and a thing

not seen with the eyes:

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night,
That somehow the right is the right

And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough!

-Robert Louis Stevenson.

I

FIND earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.

Do I stand and stare? All's blue.

-Robert Browning.

who claims that he knows about it

Tells me the earth is a vale of sin;
But I and the bees, and the birds, we doubt it,
And think it a world worth living in.

-Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

***

HE inner side of every cloud is bright and shining;
I therefore turn my clouds about

And always wear them inside out
To show the lining.

GOD help me speak the little word

And take my bit of singing.

-Ellen Thorncroft Fowler

T'S the song ye sing, and the smiles ye wear,
That's a-makin' the sun shine everywhere.
-James Whitcomb Riley.

THE GIST OF LIFE
TO be up and doing, O
Unfearing and unshamed to go
In all the uproar and the press
About my human business!
My undissuaded heart I hear
Whisper courage in my ear.
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth
Summons me to a daily birth.

Thou, O my love, ye, O my friends-
The gist of life, the end of ends-
To laugh, to love, to live, to die,
Ye call me by the ear and eye!

F YOU have knowledge, let others light their candles by it. -Thomas Fuller.

HE people who always live in houses, and sleep on beds, and walk on pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The circumstances of their existence are too mathematical and secure for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else. -Henry van Dyke.

N THE school of life many branches of knowledge are taught. But the only philosophy that amounts to anything after all, is just the secret of making friends with our luck. -Henry van Dyke.

OUR KIND OF A MAN

HE kind of a man for you and me!
He faces the world unflinchingly,
And smiles as long as the wrong exists,
With a knuckled faith and force like fists:
He lives the life he is preaching of,
And loves where most is the need of love;
And feeling still, with a grief half glad,
That the bad are as good as the good are bad,
He strikes straight out for the right-and he
Is the kind of a man for you and me!

-James Whitcomb Riley.