How to Make a Home Happy
By Editor
IN no sphere of life is happiness so easy to attain or so easily transformed to unhappiness as in the home. It does not depend on the number of luxuries obtainable, for some of the very happiest homes, the almost ideal ones, are those of the poor. One cheerful member in the home may uplift the tone of all the rest. Let the daughter but sing at her dish-washing, or allow her broom to keep time to her happy song, and her happiness is sure to infect the others. On the other hand, some little dispute, some little criticism, fault-finding, etc., by but one member of the family may upset the happiness of the entire family, probably for the whole day. And it would have been so easy to have left those words unsaid or instead to have spoken an appreciative word, or to have laughed instead of grumbling. An interesting anecdote is told of Joseph H. Choate, of New York: Once at a dinner party he was asked who he would prefer to be if not himself. He waited a moment before replying. The guests thought he was running over in his mind the great ones of earth before giving his decision. Then his eyes rested on Mrs. Choate, at the other end of the table, and he replied, "If I could not be myself, I should like to be Mrs. Choate's second husband." What a beautiful tribute to pay to any wife! but it suggests to us what is really the case: It is the wife who largely makes the home happiness of her husband. If he comes home at night and finds her face wreathed in smiles, his unhappiness is almost sure to vanish. It is hard, perhaps, harder for the wife and mother than any one else, to be always bright and cheerful; but in view of the fact that her little actions are so far-reaching, it is worth while to try. The real secret of happy home-life is unselfishness. The happiness, to be complete, calls for unselfishness, or thought of others, from each member of the family. There is only one recipe for permanency in the happiness of an individual, or for permanency to their unselfishness. It is this: Let the joy come from within. See that there, within your own heart, is the spring of perpetual happiness. That spring is Christ, and from that, and that alone, can flow a continual stream of happiness, for both yourself and others. There is a beautiful story told of a young girl who went out with a number of friends to spend the day rambling through the fields and woods. Early in the morning she plucked a sprig of sweetbrier and tucked it away in the bosom of her dress, but soon forgot that she had placed it there. All day long she smelled its sweet fragrance; when climbing over rocks, through open fields, on narrow pathways that same fragrance seemed to be, and she wondered whence it came. When on the boat returning home the fragrance still seemed to surround her, so she concluded that some friend must have in her bouquet of wild flowers, a bunch of sweetbrier. When she went to her room that night she found the sweetbrier she had tucked away in the morning, and knew that the secret of the sweetness that had surrounded her all day, even in the barren places, was within her own bosom. Just so we may carry about in our own hearts the secret of a perpetual sweetness, and our own inner life may make all our world; and it, and it alone, will envelop every one we meet with something of sweetness to us; it will also hide much that otherwise would appear wrong in others. The ideal woman that Mrs. Browning described must certainly have possessed this virtue, for: "None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall;
They knelt more to God than they used, that was all.
If you praised her as charming, some asked what you meant;
But the charm of her presence was felt where she went."