Evening Round Up | Page 8

instead of frowns, with occupation instead of sluggishness, and wonders will appear.
The little shredded, tingling nerve ends will then commence to synchronize instead of fight, to harmonize instead of discord, to build instead of destroy.
The building, or coming back to a normal state, is slow; it takes time, patience and will power, but it can be done. I know. I have been through the mill, and I pass the word to you and try to stir you to be up and doing, even as I did.
Your nerves can be steadied, your thoughts uplifted, your health restored, your ambition re-established, your normality fixed.
Smiles, love and content are to be yours. Poise, efficiency, peace, your blessings. Health, happiness and hope your dividends. All these I promise you if you will read carefully this book from cover to cover and follow its plain, practical teachings.
The curriculum is not hard, it is not my discovery. I am merely the purveyor of facts, the gleaner of truth, and the selector of helpful experiences, first of all for my own benefit and having proved the truth in my own case and by friends to whom I passed the truths and rules.
I made bold to write books, but the writing has paid me well, not alone in dollars, but from having done a helpful thing in writing for other humans who have had problems, worries and nerves.
The big books on nerves are discouraging and forbidding by their immensity and labyrinth of scientific technical terms. They are fine for teachers, but discouraging for the layman.
The great everyday crowd is the class I want to talk to and so I endeavor to write in plain human, sincere style from heart to heart, with understanding, feeling, charity and sympathy.
I have felt the things you feel, and if I can by example, emphasis, suggestion, rule or good intent, be a help to you, then I have done a service.
Don't worry or criticize this book. Take my suggestions in the spirit offered.

PESSIMISTS
Give Them the Cold Shoulder
The calamity howler is found in the midst of peace and plenty. This pessimist sows seeds of discord, plants envy, generates the anarchist spirit, and is an all-around nuisance.
A man may spend years erecting a building; a fiend can demolish it in a minute with a stick of dynamite.
The calamity howler is a destroyer; he doesn't think, he spurts out words. His words and arguments are simply parrot mimicry and void of intellectual impulse, as are the movements of an angle worm.
These peace destroyers talk of their rights and they expect and demand the same privileges and benefits that are earned by the man who uses his head.
These ghouls are born without heads; they just have necks that grow up and are covered with hair. These brainless mollusks are now telling the people that the Sultan of Sulu is to capture Texas and that Japan is to invade Indianapolis; Germany is to capture Quebec, and France is to siege Milwaukee.
The howlers spread talk of yellow peril and black plague to follow. They spread doubt and fear; they tell you the capitalists are awake nights trying to starve you and that they employ inventors to discover new methods of torture for the poor working man.
They accuse business men of grinding down the farmer, forming pools, establishing starvation prices, and ruining agriculture. Yet, as I write these lines, fat beef cattle sell for $10.00 a hundred on the hoof, wheat is way over $1.00 a bushel, and good farms in Missouri even are selling at from $100.00 to $150.00 per acre.
Good farm mortgages are hard to get. The farmers have money in the banks, honey in the house, and automobiles in the garage.
Our taxes in the United States are lower than anywhere on the face of the earth. Our wages are higher than anywhere in the world. Our schools better, our opportunities greater.
And in the midst of better conditions and brighter prospects the shameless, brainless, fameless bipeds pollute the atmosphere, poison hearts and plant discontent.
If these howlers are any better than foot-pads, thieves, grave robbers, or child beaters, I can't see it.
And it is up to you and to me to denounce these peace destroyers, ridicule them, show our contempt for them; they have no hearts, no souls, they are only decay spots that spread rottenness, disease, despair, discouragement, contamination and anarchy, and we do not want such guests at our quilting parties or husking bees.

GLOOM CONTAGION
A Little Study of Faces in a Street Car
This evening I rode home in a crowded street car. What an interesting study to watch the faces in that car.
Discontent, discomfort, worry, gloominess on nearly every face. Tired faces, tired bodies from a hard day's work, mouth corners drooped. Hopelessness stamped on the countenances.
As the people came in the car some of them had