“Well, if happiness is the deep undercurrent, as you say, I don’t want it.  I want the ripples, the foam, and the sparkle.  So let us go to bed and rest, and to-morrow ride over the hills on horseback.  I’ll take Arrow, he’s fiery, and you may take Jessie.  Will you?  You need some roses on your cheek.”  And the joyous-hearted woman kissed the pale face of her friend till the flush came on her cheeks and brow.

“There; now you look like life; you seemed a moment since as still and white as snow!”

“Your warm nature has surely changed the condition of things, for I feel more like riding just now than sleeping.”

“That’s good.  Suppose we have a moonlight race?”

“I protest against any such proceeding, being the lord and master of this manor,” said her husband, looking up from his book, in which they supposed he was too deeply engaged to hear their conversation.

Reader, don’t trust a gentleman who has his eyes on the page of a volume when two ladies are conversing.

“Then I suppose there’s nothing left for us but to go to bed.”

“Yes, a something else,” said her husband.

“What?”

“Go to sleep.”

“Stupid!  I suppose you think you have made a brilliant speech.”

“On the contrary I think it the reverse.  I never waste scintillations of genius on unappreciative auditors.”

“Edward Austin! you deserve to be banished a week from ladies’ society.  Come Dawn, let us retire.”

It was in this pleasant, light vein of thought that Dawn recovered her mental poise, and she sank into a sweet and profound slumber, which otherwise would not have come to her.  Thus do we range from one sphere to another, and learn, though slowly, that all states are legitimate and necessary, the one to the other.  The parts of life contribute to the perfection of the whole.  Each object has its own peculiar office, as it has its own form.  The tulip delights with its beauty, the carnation with its perfume, the unseemly wormwood displeases both taste and smell, yet in medicinal value is superior to both.  So each temperament, each character, has its good and bad.  The one has inclinations of which the other is incapable.

“This is a world of hints, out of which each soul seizes what it needs.”  So from other lives we draw and appropriate continually into our own, and we need the manifestations of life to make us harmonious.  Each person draws something from us that none other can, and imparts out of its special quality that which we cannot receive from any other.  We need at times to surrender our will, to merge ourselves into another sphere, and loose the tension of our own action; this surrender being to the mind what sleep is to the brain.

The whole of life does not flow through any one channel; we drink from many streams.  “A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope.”  Slowly we learn life’s compliments, and the value of its component parts.  Many threads make up the web, and many shades the design.  As we advance in experiences, we feel that we could not have afforded to have lost one shade, however dark it may have been.  Time, the silent weaver, sits by the loom, seeing neither the light nor shade, but only the great design which grows under his hand in the immortal web.