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The Smooth Handle

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 2, 1912

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 89, No. 18.

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The Smooth Handle

WHEN I was a girl, how often I heard my mother say in her cheerful way: “Don’t fret. Always take things by the smooth handle.”
As I think of her life,—the wife of a farmer of unlimited health, vigor, and push, who could not understand ill health, and who abhorred laziness; the mother of seven children, and the housewife in the days when life on a farm was so much more laborious than it need be now, and her consequent illnesses,—I wonder at the almost unvarying cheerfulness of her disposition. The few times that I can remember her as sad or “cross” made a great impression on my childish mind. Twice I remember that she cried, and then I felt all adrift and lost.
My mature judgment is that this cheerful disposition was a gift of God, but that this gift had been polished and improved and enlarged by a generous use of her own proverb.—Farm Journal.