“You have a disagreeable duty to do at twelve o’clock.  Do not blacken nine, and ten and eleven with the color of twelve.  Do the work of each and reap your reward in peace.”

One woman makes it her boast that she never sets bread for the morning that she does not lie awake half the night wondering how it will “turn out.”  She is so besotted in her ignorance as to think that the useless folly proves her to be a person of exquisite sensibility, whereas it testifies to lack of self-control, common sense and economical instincts.

It was old John Newton who likened the appointed tasks and trials of men to so many logs of wood, each lettered with the name of the day of the week, and no single one of them too heavy to be borne by a mortal of ordinary strength.  If we will persist; he went on to say, in adding Tuesday’s stick to Monday’s, and Wednesday’s and Thursday’s and Friday’s to that marked for Tuesday, “it is small wonder that we sink beneath the burden.”

Our Heavenly Father would have us carry one stick at a time, and for this task has regulated our systems—­mental, moral and spiritual.  We, like the presumptuous bunglers that we are, bind the sticks into faggots, and then whine because our strength gives out.

The lesson of unlearning what we have practiced so long is not easy, but it may be acquired.  In your character as day laborer, sift carefully each morning what belongs to to-day from that which may come to-morrow.  Be rigid with yourself in this adjustment.  If you find the weight beginning to tell upon bodily or mental muscles, ask your reason, as well as your conscience, whether or not the strain may not be from to-morrow’s log.

For example:  You have a servant who suits you, and whom you had hoped you suited.  She is quiet to-day, with a pre-occupied look in her eye that may mean CHANGE.

As a housekeeper you will sustain me in the assertion that the portent suffices to send the thermometer of your spirits down to “twenty above,” if not “ten below.”  Instead of brooding over the train of discomforts that would attend upon the threatened exodus, bethink yourself that since Norah cannot go without a week’s warning you have nothing to-day to do with possibilities of a morrow that is seven times removed, and put the thing out of your mind.

In the italicized passage lies the secret of a tranquil soul.  Learn by degrees to acquire power over your own imagination.  By-and-by you will be surprised to find that you have formed a habit of reining it when it would presage disaster.  It is not getting ready for house-cleaning to-day that terrifies you so much as the fancy that with the morrow will begin the actual scrubbing and window-washing.  You do not mind ripping up an old gown while John reads to you under the evening lamp, but you are positively cross in the reflection that you must sew all of to-morrow with the seamstress who is to put the gown together again.