A CHEERFUL SPIRIT. SIR JOHN LUBBOCK.

Sir John Lubbock was born in England in 1834. He is a banker and has introduced great improvements into banking and custom-house business.

He has written a number of books on literary and scientific subjects.

Cheerfulness is a great moral tonic. As sunshine brings out the flowers and ripens the fruit, so does cheerfulness—the feeling of freedom and life—develop in us all the seeds of good—all that is best in us.

Cheerfulness is a duty we owe to others. There is an old tradition that a cup of gold is to be found wherever a rainbow touches the earth, and there are some people whose smile, the sound of whose voice, whose very presence seems like a ray of sunshine, to turn everything they touch into gold.

Men never break down as long as they can keep cheerful. “A merry heart is a continual feast” to others besides itself. The shadow of Florence Nightingale cured more than her medicines; and if we share the burdens of others, we lighten our own.

All wish, but few know how, to enjoy themselves. They do not realize the dignity and delight of life.

Do not magnify small troubles into great trials. We often fancy we are mortally wounded when we are but scratched. A surgeon, says Fuller, “sent for to cure a slight wound, sent off in a great hurry for a plaster. ‘Why,’ said the gentleman, ‘is the hurt then so dangerous?’ ‘No,’ said the surgeon, ‘but if the messenger returns not in post-haste, it will cure itself.’ ” Time cures sorrow as well as wounds.

“A cultivated mind, I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught in any tolerable degree to exercise its faculties, will find sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of Nature, the achievements of Art, the imagination of Poetry, the incidents of History, the ways of Mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future.”

From “The Pleasures of Life.”