“Let those who will, repine at fate,
    And droop their heads in sorrow,
  I’ll laugh when cares upon me wait,
    I know they’ll leave to-morrow.

  “My purse is light, but what of that? 
    My heart is light to match it;
  And if I tear my only coat,
    I’ll laugh the while I patch it.”

I know a millionaire, who controls numerous industries, whose wife must apply cold cloths to his head at night to induce sleep.  I know another man not so well off in this world’s goods, whose wife must apply the cold water to get him awake.  Care is often pillowed in a palace, while contentment is asleep in a cottage.

At the close of my lecture at a chautauqua several years ago, a gentleman said to me:  “Sir, we live in a very humble cottage in this town, but there is a big welcome over the door for you and we want you to take tea with us.”  I accepted the invitation and soon was seated on the porch of the small cottage home.  While my host was inside getting a pitcher of ice water, I looked across the way and there was the home of a railroad king, his wealth numbered by millions, and the grounds surrounding his home were rich in flower beds, fountains and forest trees.  My host, pouring the water, said:  “You see we are very fortunately situated here.  Our little home is inexpensive and our taxes very light.  Our rich neighbor across the way employs three gardeners to care for those grounds; he pays all the taxes, has all the care; they do not cost us a cent, yet we sit here on our little porch and drink in their beauty.”  There was a philosopher.

John Wanamaker can pay $100,000 for a picture, which he did some years ago, and hang it on the walls of his mansion home, but you go out in the country in the springtime, get up in the early morning while the cattle are still sleeping in the barnyard and the birds silent in the trees, watch the rich glow of the day god as it comes peeping through the windows of the morning, then see the birds leave their bowers, the larks to fly away to the fields, the mocking-bird to sing in the cedar at the garden gate, the robin to chirp to its mate, and you will see a picture which will pale that of the merchant prince.

Or go out on a summer evening just after a rain storm, when nature hangs itself out to dry; when the golden slipper of the god of day hangs upon the topmost bough of the tallest tree.  You will see a picture no artist’s brush can paint.  And God does not hang these pictures on a wall twenty feet by ten, but on the blue tapestry of the sky for the world’s poor to admire “without money and without price.”  Abraham Lincoln well said:  “God must have loved the common people, else he wouldn’t have made so many of them.”

Let me illustrate the two classes of people to which I have referred.  An old man who dwelt in the shadows of life said:  “My life has been one continual drudgery and disappointment; for fifty years I have had to get up at 5 o’clock every morning while others enjoyed their sleep, then all day in the harness of oppression I have had to work with bad luck dogging my footsteps.”