In one of our chats the other day he was dilating upon Henry van Dyke’s four rules, and very soon had banished all my little clouds and made my mental sky clear and bright.  When I get around to evolving a definition of education I think I shall say that it is the process of furnishing people with resources for profitable and pleasant conversation.  Why, those four rules just oozed into the talk, without any sort of flutter or formality, and made our chat both agreeable and fruitful.  Henry Ward Beecher said many good things.  Here is one that I caught in the school reader in my boyhood:  “The man who carries a lantern on a dark night can have friends all about him, walking safely by the help of its rays and he be not defrauded.”  Education is just such a lantern and this schoolmaster, Will, knows how to carry it that it may afford light to the friends about him.

Well, the first of van Dyke’s rules is:  “You shall learn to desire nothing in the world so much but that you can be happy without it.”  I do wonder if he had been reading in Proverbs:  “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”  Or he may have been reading the statement of St. Paul:  “For I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content.”  Or, possibly, he may have been thinking of the lines of Paul Laurence Dunbar,

  “Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,
  My garden makes a desert spot;
  Sometimes the blight upon the tree
  Takes all my fruit away from me;
  And then with throes of bitter pain
  Rebellious passions rise and swell—­
  But life is more than fruit or grain,
  And so I sing, and all is well.”

I am plebeian enough to be fond of milk and crackers as a luncheon; but I have just a dash of the patrician in my make-up and prefer the milk unskimmed.  Sometimes, I find that the cream has been devoted to other, if not higher, uses and that my crackers must associate perforce with milk of cerulean hue.  Such a situation is a severe test of character, and I am hoping that at such junctures along life’s highway I may find some support in the philosophy of Mr. van Dyke.

I suspect that he is trying to make me understand that happiness is subjective rather than objective—­that happiness depends not upon what we have, but upon what we do with what we have.  I couldn’t be an anarchist if I’d try.  I don’t grudge the millionaire his turtle soup and caviar.  But I do feel a bit sorry for him that he does not know what a royal feast crackers and unskimmed milk afford.  If the king and the anarchist would but join me in such a feast I think the king would soon forget his crown and the anarchist his plots, and we’d be just three good fellows together, living at the very summit of life and wishing that all men could be as happy as we.