Happiness Not in Riches.
By Rose Terry Cooke
The abundance of man's life consisteth not in the things that he possesseth, any more to-day than it did two thousand years ago. I know two poor people at this present speaking, who work hard for daily bread, struggle with debt, precarious health, and have no earthly prospect of better things, who are happy as the day is long; and side by side with them I can place two others, who grind their lives away, with pinched and sorrowful faces, day in and day out, for money; merely money. They groan and sigh, and have no pleasure in their abundance, no merry hosts of friends, no clinging arms of children; for theirs are all trained up in loveless neatness, and intellectual cramming, but only the carking of hourly care and dread lest they come to that poverty which is but an imagination, yet has terrors far mightier than its fact brings to the hearth of the unselfish and loving.—Rose Terry Cooke.