WHAT IF YOUR LOT IS HARD?
[Frank H. Sweet, in Home and Flowers.] THAT submission to one's lot means that one should sit helplessly before sorrow and disappointment while weeks and months pass by, is a terrible misapprehension. Life should be growth. These trials come to us that we may conquer them, wrest power from them. To yield faint-heartedly is surely ignoble, for there is no life so barren, or hard, or sorrowful, that it does not hold some door to wider living, if we will but seek it. Is it loneliness that closes about us and shuts joy from our days? Have we tried honestly and patiently to touch other lonely lives? Is it because we have no time for study that life seems so hard and barren? A friend of working girls advised them to learn a poem as they went to and from their work instead of simply reading street-car advertisements. A verse, a line of poetry, a single noble thought every day—who of us could not make time for this, if we would? And how rich a harvest one short year would give us! Is it poverty that is eating the gladness from our days? It is hard, but there are things within our reach that no gold could purchase for us—friendship, the power of an upright life, the joy of earth and sky. Dare we, with all we have within reach, bemoan our poverty?