Ordinary good looks depend on one’s sense of humor,—­“a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.”  Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young.  A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everybody around us, and puts us into closer touch with what is best and brightest in our lot in life.

Physiology tells the story.  The great sympathetic nerves are closely allied; and when one set carries bad news to the head, the nerves reaching the stomach are affected, indigestion comes on, and one’s countenance becomes doleful.  Laugh when you can; it is

A cheap medicine.

Merriment is a philosophy not well understood.  The eminent surgeon Chavasse says that we ought to begin with the babies and train children to habits of mirth:—­

“Encourage your child to be merry and laugh aloud; a good hearty laugh expands the chest and makes the blood bound merrily along.  Commend me to a good laugh,—­not to a little snickering laugh, but to one that will sound right through the house.  It will not only do your child good, but will be a benefit to all who hear, and be an important means of driving the blues away from a dwelling.  Merriment is very catching, and spreads in a remarkable manner, few being able to resist its contagion.  A hearty laugh is delightful harmony; indeed, it is the best of all music.”  “Children without hilarity,” says an eminent author, “will never amount to much.  Trees without blossoms will never bear fruit.”

Hufeland, physician to the King of Prussia, commends the ancient custom of jesters at the king’s table, whose quips and cranks would keep the company in a roar.

Did not Lycurgus set up the god of laughter in the Spartan eating-halls?  There is no table sauce like laughter at meals.  It is the great enemy of dyspepsia.

How wise are the words of the acute Chamfort, that the most completely lost of all days is the one in which we have not laughed!

“A crown, for making the king laugh,” was one of the items of expense which the historian Hume found in a manuscript of King Edward II.

“It is a good thing to laugh, at any rate,” said Dryden, the poet, “and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.”

“I live,” said Laurence Sterne, one of the greatest of English humorists, “in a constant endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health and other evils by mirth; I am persuaded that, every time a man smiles,—­but much more so when he laughs,—­it adds something to his fragment of life.”

“Give me an honest laugher,” said Sir Walter Scott, and he was himself one of the happiest men in the world, with a kind word and pleasant smile for every one, and everybody loved him.

“How much lies in laughter!” exclaimed the critic Carlyle.  “It is the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man.  Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies the cold glitter, as of ice; the fewest are able to laugh what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snicker from the throat outward, or at least produce some whiffing, husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool.  Of none such comes good.”