“What did you say, Levi?  ’Most time for supper?  Well, land’s sake, so it is!  I must have got to meditating.  I’ve been a-thinking, Levi, you needn’t tell the minister anything about me.  If the pancakes and pumpkin pies are good, you just say so as we go along.  It ain’t best to keep everything laid up for funerals.”

It is the grand secret of a happy home to express the affection you really have.

“He is the happiest,” it was said by Goethe, “be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”  There are indeed many serious, too serious-minded fathers and mothers who do not wish to advertise their children to all the neighbors as “the laughing family.”  If this be so, yet, at the very least, these solemn parents may read the Bible.  Where it is said, “provoke not your children to wrath,” it means literally, “do not irritate your children;” “do not rub them up the wrong way.”

Children ought never to get the impression that they live in a hopeless, cheerless, cold world; but the household cheerfulness should transform their lives like sunlight, making their hearts glad with little things, rejoicing upon small occasion.

“How beautiful would our home-life be if every little child at the bed-time hour could look into the faces of the older ones and say:  ‘We’ve had such sweet times to-day.’”

“To love, and to be loved,” says Sydney Smith, “is the greatest happiness of existence.”

V. FINDING WHAT YOU DO NOT SEEK.

Dining one day with Baron James Rothschild, Eugene Delacroix, the famous French artist, confessed that, during some time past, he had vainly sought for a head to serve as a model for that of a beggar in a picture which he was painting; and that, as he gazed at his host’s features, the idea suddenly occurred to him that the very head he desired was before him.  Rothschild, being a great lover of art, readily consented to sit as the beggar.  The next day, at the studio, Delacroix placed a tunic around the baron’s shoulders, put a stout staff in his hand, and made him pose as if he were resting on the steps of an ancient Roman temple.  In this attitude he was found by one of the artist’s favorite pupils, in a brief absence of the master from the room.  The youth naturally concluded that the beggar had just been brought in, and with a sympathetic look quietly slipped a piece of money into his hand.  Rothschild thanked him simply, pocketed the money, and the student passed out.  Rothschild then inquired of the master, and found that the young man had talent, but very slender means.  Soon after, the youth received a letter stating that charity bears interest, and that the accumulated interest on the amount he had given to one he supposed to be a beggar was represented by the sum of ten thousand francs, which was awaiting his claim at the Rothschild office.

This illustrates well the art of cheerful amusement even if one has great business cares,—­the entertainment of the artist, the personation of a beggar, and an act of beneficence toward a worthy student.