MAKE HOME PLEASANT.



THE home should be ever full of cheerfulness. Many a child goes astray, not because there is a want of prayer or virtue at home, but because home lacks sunshine. 

We all need smiles as much as flowers need sunbeams. Children, especially, look little beyond the present moment. If a thing displeases, they are prone to avoid it. 

If home is a place where faces are sour and words harsh, and fault-finding is ever in the ascendant, they will spend as many hours as possible elsewhere. Every father and mother, therefore, should seek to make home a bright and happy place.

And for the children there is something to do; they should study to make home a pleasant place. There is a right way to open and shut the door; a right way to move from one part of the room to another; a right way to sit down, to rise, to hold a book, a right way to do everything that is worth doing at all. And yet we have known children to give their parents sad hearts by the neglect of these little home duties. It is more easy to do these things right than to do them wrong. One very bad habit some young people have is that of calling aloud the name of a brother or sister, or even of a father or mother, who may be in another room, or up-stairs, or in the yard. A polite person will always go to the one whose attention is required, and speak in a low and modest tone of voice. Home might be made far more pleasant by a strict observance of many of these little matters.




WITHIN AND WITHOUT.


WHEN we see individuals arrayed in costly garments, and decked in all the fashionable paraphernalia of the times, we are very likely to speculate as to what kind of jewels these caskets may contain. Not unfrequently we find all fair without, while within dwells a raging tempest; all the evil of their nature is left unchecked, while the outer man is made perfect, and so they have become as whited sepulchers.

Many a corrupt thought is veiled beneath a smile, many a heart rankling with evil passions throbs beneath a costly robe. Ah! This outward life is but an empty show. It matters little how beautiful the face and form may be if the inner life does not correspond. Have you ever taken an apple in your hand and admired its beautiful color, and then cut it open only to find it decayed? Or plucked a lovely flower, hoping to be refreshed by its breath, and found it odorless?

The imperfect fruit and the odorless blossom are but types of the life within.



HAPPINESS.


‘T is nothing short of an art to be happy and an art worthy of being cultivated in the highest degree. That perfect happiness is attainable in this world, no one will admit; but that comparative happiness is within the reach of all is, without doubt, true.

The most real and enduring happiness is that which we find within our own hearts. 

We should therefore gather into them all the sunshine that we can; and there is enough of it in the world to brighten any spot, provided we will throw open the doors and windows and let the light enter. It is a fact that this world is to us what we make it. Life's happiness is composed of small joys; then let us not trample under foot the little pleasures which are scattered in the daily path, and which, in our eager search after some great joy, we are apt to overlook; but, gathering the roses at our feet, make our pathway to bud and blossom forth into happiness to ourselves and those around us.

He who seeks for sorrow and misery can find them to his heart's content; but he who looks on the bright side will find his heart filled with gladness. To be looking into the future for either light or darkness is not well; but we should live a day at a time, remembering that every day rightly lived makes us stronger for the next.

One source of happiness is to be always busy. Weave into the warp of life all the happiness possible; let the pattern be made up of that which is good, true, and beautiful. And though some days are darker, as necessarily they must be, for,"Into each life some rain must fall," still keep to the same pattern though the colors are more somber even gray.

We should study not only to be happy ourselves, but to make others happy; and in doing this the result is two-fold happiness to ourselves and to those around us for God has thus ordered it, that if we seek to do good to others, it will reflect upon ourselves.

The most simple rule of happiness of which we know is this: Love God, and believe that he loves you.





 V. A. M.