“I know what you mean,” cried Kate, coloring.

“Were you listening?”

“Oh, you mean our mouths are doors!” exclaimed Harry, “and the crimson lady is Miss Tongue; but who are the guards, and where do they come from?”

“You may ask the Great King.  This is what you must say:  ’Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth:  keep the door of my lips.’  Then He will send Patience to stand on one side and Love on the other, and no unkind word will dare come out.”

[Illustration]

THE GOLDEN WINDOWS

* * * * *

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Ruth impatiently, as she put the library to rights.  “I do wish we could have a new carpet this spring.  I never liked this at all, and now it is so faded and worn it is simply dreadful.  It makes me miserable every time I look at it.”

“Then, since you say you cannot very well have a new one just now, why do you look at it?” asked Aunt Rachel, smiling.  “There are a great many unpleasant things in our lives—­we find them every day—­some of which we are unable to prevent.  If we persist in thinking of them and keep fretting about them, we make ourselves and everybody about us miserable.

“It seems to me we might all learn a lesson from the bees.  I have read that when anything objectionable that they are unable to remove gets into a hive, they set to work immediately to cover it all over with wax.  They just shut it up in an airtight cell, and then forget all about it.  Isn’t that a wise way for us to manage with our vexations and troubles?

“Someone sent me a postal the other day with this motto:  ’The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.’  It is not in having and doing just as we like, but in being determined to make the best of the inevitable.  When you find an unpleasant thing in your life that cannot be removed, learn to seal it up and forget it.

[Illustration]

“And then I think that many times it helps to get a different view of things.  You remember the fable of the golden windows, do you not?  A little boy who had very few pretty things in his own home because his parents were poor, used often to stand in his own doorway at sunset time and look longingly at the big house at the top of the opposite hill.  Such a wonderful house as it was!  Its windows were all of gold, which shone so bright that it often made his eyes blink to look at them.  ’If only our house was as beautiful,’ he would say.  ’I would not mind wearing patched clothes and having only bread and milk for supper.’

“One afternoon his father told him he might do just as he pleased, so he trudged down the hill from his house and up the other long hill.  He was going to see the golden windows.  But when he reached the top of the other hill he stopped in dismay; his lips began to quiver, his eyes filled with tears.  There were no golden windows there—­nothing but plain, common windows like his own.  ’I thought you had beautiful golden windows in your house,’ he said to the little girl in the yard.