Get into the habit of being happy, I tell you.  You can do it.  Practise saying to yourself, when you waken in the morning, “Everything is all right,” and keep on saying it.  You will be surprised to find how nearly “all right” the mere saying of it at the beginning of the day will really make everything, after all.  This is true of business as well as of the new home.  Prophets of gloom are never popular, and ought not to be.

Then, too, a quiet cheeriness of heart makes you treat your fellow man better; and this is important in your dealings with other human male animals.  They will make it unpleasant for you if you don’t.  But it is far more important in your new home than it is out in the world of men.  That is what the new home is for—­to exercise and multiply the beauties of character and conduct.

Returning again to the view-point of business wisdom, you cannot treat your wife too well, as a mere matter of policy—­though you will never treat her well, nor anybody else, from that low motive.  I am merely calling the attention of your commercial mind to the fact that there are actually dollars and cents in a reputation for chivalrous bearing in your new home.

You know yourself how you feel toward a man of whom everybody says, “He is good to his wife.”  Everybody wants to help that kind of a fellow.  If he is a strong man, his community glories in his strength and increases it by their admiration and support.  If he is not a strong man, everybody wishes that he were, and tries in a thousand ways, which a general kindly disposition toward him suggests, to supply his deficiencies.

And this is no jug-handled rule either.  The same thing is true of the wife.  When her acquaintances declare of any woman, “She is lovely in her home,” they have placed upon her brow the crown of their ultimate tribute and regard.  It depends upon both, of course, whether these domestic beatitudes will exist in the new home.

Undoubtedly, however, it depends upon the young man more than the young woman.  He is a man—­and that is everything.  And being a man, he should have a large and kindly forbearance, a sort of soothing strength and calming serenity.  And to all this the rule of smile and cheeriness is helpful, if not essential.

When I was a boy in the logging-camps, I read in some stray newspaper an article about the influence which the pleasant countenance exercises over groups of men.  The idea was that men work willingly under the control of a strong man who is strong enough to carry in his daily look the suggestion of a smile.  It worked splendidly.  It has never been satisfactorily explained why it is next to impossible for a man “to be down on his luck” if he will only keep the corners of his mouth turned up.  Perhaps it is the mental effort of forcing this mechanism of a smile which brings a really happy state of mind.