“There’s the dearest little old gentleman,” says James Buckham, “who goes into town every morning on the 8.30 train.  I don’t know his name, and yet I know him better than anybody else in town.  He just radiates cheerfulness as far as you can see him.  There is always a smile on his face, and I never heard him open his mouth except to say something kind, courteous, or good natured.  Everybody bows to him, even strangers, and he bows to everybody, yet never with the slightest hint of presumption or familiarity.  If the weather is fine, his jolly compliments make it seem finer; and if it is raining, the merry way in which he speaks of it is as good as a rainbow.  Everybody who goes in on the 8.30 train knows the sunshine-man; it’s his train.  You just hurry up a little, and I’ll show you the sunshine-man this morning.  It’s foggy and cold, but if one look at him doesn’t cheer you up so that you’ll want to whistle, then I’m no judge of human nature.”

“Good morning, sir!” said Mr. Jolliboy in going to the same train.

“Why, sir, I don’t know you,” replied Mr. Neversmile.

“I didn’t say you did, sir.  Good morning, sir!”

“The inborn geniality of some people,” says Whipple, “amounts to genius.”  “How in our troubled lives,” asks J. Freeman Clarke, “could we do without these fair, sunny natures, into which on their creation-day God allowed nothing sour, acrid, or bitter to enter, but made them a perpetual solace and comfort by their cheerfulness?” There are those whose very presence carries sunshine with them wherever they go; a sunshine which means pity for the poor, sympathy for the suffering, help for the unfortunate, and benignity toward all.  Everybody loves the sunny soul.  His very face is a passport anywhere.  All doors fly open to him.  He disarms prejudice and envy, for he bears good will to everybody.  He is as welcome in every household as the sunshine.

“He was quiet, cheerful, genial,” says Carlyle in his “Reminiscences” concerning Edward Irving’s sunny helpfulness.  “His soul unruffled, clear as a mirror, honestly loving and loved, Irving’s voice was to me one of blessedness and new hope.”

And to William Wilberforce the poet Southey paid this tribute:  “I never saw any other man who seemed to enjoy such perpetual serenity and sunshine of spirit.”

“I resolved,” said Tom Hood, “that, like the sun, so long as my day lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything.”

When Goldsmith was in Flanders he discovered the happiest man he had ever seen.  At his toil, from morning till night, he was full of song and laughter.  Yet this sunny-hearted being was a slave, maimed, deformed, and wearing a chain.  How well he illustrated that saying which bids us, if there is no bright side, to polish up the dark one!  “Mirth is like the flash of lightning that breaks through the gloom of the clouds and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a daylight in the soul, filling it with a steady and perpetual serenity.”  It is cheerfulness that has the staying quality, like the sunshine changing a world of gloom into a paradise of beauty.