Wear a Smile
– Which will you do – Smile and make others happy, or be crabbed*, and make every one around you most miserable? The amount of happiness you can produce is incalculable, if you show a smiling face, a kind heart, and speak pleasant words. Wear a smiling countenance – let joy beam in your eyes, and love grow on your forehead. There is no joy like that which springs from a kind act or pleasant deed – and you may feel it at night when you rest, and at morning when you rise, and through all the day when about your business.
A smile; who will refuse a smile,
The sorrowing breast to cheer?
And turn to love the heart of guile,
And check the falling tear?
A pleasant smile for every face,
O, ‘tis a blessed thing!
It will the lines of care erase,
And spots of beauty bring.
…. In a metropolitan criminal court, eight years ago, a poor woman, whose boy had been sentenced to a long term in the penitentiary, for some not well-proved offence, said, “Won’t your Honor give him a shorter term? He is a good boy to me, your Honor – he always was. I’ve just made him some nice clothes, your Honor, which fit him beautiful,” (and she looked, as she said this, as only a mother can look at her boy,) “ and if you give him a long time to stay in the prison, the clothes won’t fit him when he comes out, for he’s a growin’ boy.”
Poor mother! She had saved much (for her) from her scant earnings to clothe her boy “like the neighbors’ children.” This was too much for her son. He melted – he wept – he repented – he was forgiven. And he is now one of the most promising, enterprising, and honourable young merchants in our city. Every word of this is true, and known to be so to very many persons.
Miss Bremer
…. MISS BREMER thus expresses a good wife’s duty: -
“If you will learn the seriousness of life, and its beauty also, live for your husband; be like the nightingale to his domestic life; be to him like the sunbeams between the trees; unite yourself inwardly to him; be guided by him; make him happy, and then you will understand what is the best happiness of life, and will acquire, in your own eyes, a worth with God and with man.”
…. THE BIBLE.
– Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, in a lecture in New York said: -
“I have always found, in my scientific studies, that when I could get the Bible to say anything on the subject, if afforded me a firm platform to stand upon, and another round in the ladder, by which I could safely ascend.”
*Crabbed (in Wear a Smile above) means Irritable and perverse in disposition, ill-tempered and derives from Middle English crabbe, from Old English crabba; Indo-European roots gerbh, grebh to scratch, to make cuts, notches.