The ability to get on with scolding, irritating people is a great art in doing business.  To preserve serenity amid petty trials is a happy gift.

A sunny temper is also conducive to health.  A medical authority of highest repute affirms that “excessive labor, exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth, and intemperance are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passions;” that men and women have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these; but that instances are very rare in which people of irascible tempers live to extreme old age.

Poultney Bigelow, in “Harper’s Magazine,” in relating the story of Jameson’s raid upon the Boers of South Africa, says that the triumphant Boers fell on their knees, thanking God for their victory; and that they prayed for their enemies, and treated their prisoners with the utmost kindness.  Our foreign missionary books relate similar anecdotes, it being a characteristic feature of their childlike piety for new converts to take literally the words of our Lord,—­“Love your enemies.”

It is not true that the devil has his tail in everything.  A stalwart confidence in God, and faith in the happy outcome of life, will do more to lubricate the creaking machinery of our daily affairs than anything else.

“Lediable est mort.”

“Courage, ami, le diable est mort!” “Courage, friend, the devil is dead!” was Denys’s constant countersign, which he would give to everybody.  “They don’t understand it,” he would say, “but it wakes them up.  I carry the good news from city to city, to uplift men’s hearts.”  Once he came across a child who had broken a pitcher. “Courage, amie, le diable est mort!” said he, which was such cheering news that she ceased crying, and ran home to tell it to her grandma.

Give me the man who, like Emerson, sees longevity in his cause, and who believes there is a remedy for every wrong, a satisfaction for every longing soul; the man who believes the best of everybody, and who sees beauty and grace where others see ugliness and deformity.  Give me the man who believes in the ultimate triumph of truth over error, of harmony over discord, of love over hate, of purity over vice, of light over darkness, of life over death.  Such men are the true nation-builders.

Jay Cooke, many times a millionaire at the age of fifty-one, at fifty-two practically penniless, went to work again and built another fortune.  The last of his three thousand creditors was paid, and the promise of the great financier was fulfilled.  To a visitor who once asked him how he regained his fortune, Mr. Cooke replied, “That is simple enough:  by never changing the temperament I derived from my father and mother.  From my earliest experience in life I have always been of a hopeful temperament, never living in a cloud; I have always had a reasonable philosophy to think that men and times are better than harsh criticism would suppose.  I believed that this American world of ours is full of wealth, and that it was only necessary to go to work and find it.  That is the secret of my success in life.  Always look on the sunny side.”