GOOD WORDS.

Clutha Leader, Volume V, Issue 208, 5 July 1878, Page 7

GOOD WORDS.

A good temper is one of the principal ingredients of happiness. This, it may be said, is the work of nature, and must be born with us ; and so in a good measure it is ; yet sometimes it may be acquired by art, and always improved by culture.

There is nothing in this world that a man places so high a value upon, or that he parts with so reluctantly, as the. idea of his own consequence. Amidst care, sickness, and misfortunes, amidst dangers, disappointments, and even death itself, he holds fa^t to this idea, yielding it up only with his last breath. Pure religion and undefined is "ministering " — not the other thing, " being ministered unto." It is handing 1 over the morning paper to another for first perusal. It is vacating a pleasant seat by the fire for one who comes in chilled. It is giving up the most restful arm-chair for one who is weary. It is giving up your own comfort and convenience for the comfort and convenience of another This is at once true courtesy and real Christianity. To cultivate the faculties, both physical and moral, which enable us to be equal to emergencies is one of our first duties as parents, and also one of the most important towards ourselves as individuals — these faculties representing the chief part of the causes why some fail and others succeed in life, why some are ordained to perpetual slavery by any stronger will that cares to hold them, and others are able to walk to the end free and independent, self-protected against all assaults, and sure to escape with honour when threatened with dangers and surrounded by difficulties. Home-love is the best love. The love that you are born to us the sweetest you will ever have on earth. You, who are so anxious to escape from the home-nest, pause a moment ar.d remember that this is so. It is light that the hour should come when you, in your turn, should become a wife and a mother and give the b«Bt love to others ; but that will be just it. Nobody — not a lover, not a husbandwill ever be so tender or so true as your mother and father. Never again, after strangers have broken the beautiful bond, will there be anything so sweet as the little circle of mother, father, and children, where you were cherished, protected, praised and kept from harm. You may not know it now, but you will know it some day. Whomsoever you marry, true and good i though he may be, will, after the loverdays are over and the honeymoon has waned, give you only what you deserve of love or sympathy — and usually much less, never more. You must watch and be wary, lest you lose that love which came in through the eyes because the one who looked thought you beautiful. But those who bore you, who loved you when you were that dreadful little object, a small baby, and thought you exquisitely beautiful and wonderfully brilliant-^they do not care for faces that are fairer and forms that are more graceful than yours. You are their very own, and so better to them always than others.