Evening Round Up | Page 5

crabbed because someone else in the
household is not pleasant. Do your part; you will likely thereby cure the
frown habit on the face of the unfortunate disturber of your peace.
Make yourself right before you criticize your life partner. Answer this
question, "Am I pleasant to live with?"
Don't fool yourself in the matter. Get right down to brass tacks with
yourself, watch your moves and acts and attitude for ten days carefully
before answering the question.
If your answer is no, then now is your time to change your attitude and
try the pleasant plan, and here is my blessing and good wishes in such
an event.

PRACTICAL HELPS
Dealing With Actual Conditions You Are Facing
I have been fortunate in having splendid eye-sight and hearing, and
with these, a good memory.
I've traveled much and my education has been getting experience
directly or learning experience directly from those who had experience.
All the while I've had to do with, and about business and social
problems, and with and about the things which worry and perplex the
man or woman in the business as well as the home world.

I am trying to stage this book, and our relationship, upon practical
things we are to talk about. I want you to know and feel I have hoped
and feared even as you have.
I am in the midst of these things even now as I write this book. I am not
in a reflective mood, living in the past or glorying in deeds of other
days. I am writing this today and of today, even as you are reading it
today.
By day I face reality and problems, and temptations and tricks and
frauds and deceits, and after the day is over I write these lines and try to
inoculate myself with a serum or toxin that will serve as a safeguard on
the morrow to ward off the things which try to annoy and distract me
from my purpose: to do, and to be, as nearly right and fair as I can, in
act and thought and word.
Continuity on a singleness of purpose is a valuable thing. Fabre spent
his life studying insect life. His books on the spider and others on the
life of insects are the result of a whole life spent on the one hobby or
study of insects.
My occupation has been full of abrupt changes. Each day is a
kaleidoscope, and so, as I write between times, these chapters may be
like the boy who said of the dictionary, "a mighty powerful book but
the subject changes so often."
I write these chapters as the spirit moves and opportunity allows, and
you may read the same way. But be sure you make opportunity happen
often.

OBSERVATION
Sitting on the Side Lines, Watching the Crowd
There is fun and interest and diversion all around us. All we need is
keen observation and we will see much that passes unnoticed to the
preoccupied person.

What an interesting thing is the great round world we live in. The
people are as interesting as fish in an aquarium.
See the rushing, surging crowd. Man, pushing along searching for
necessary things to be done, he builds cities, harnesses rivers, makes
ships to sail the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth. Man goes to
war, he builds death-dealing devices.
Man makes the desert blossom like a rose.
Here is the scientist in his laboratory, trying to unite certain elements to
produce new substance. Here is the beauty in her silken nest; here the
lover; there the musician; yonder the peanut man and in the office
building is the captain of industry: All busy bees deeply absorbed in
their respective interests, and intoxicated in the belief that they are
important and greatly necessary.
Yet in the broad measure of ages they are mere ripples on the sea of
time, faint bubbles on the eternal deep, and grains of sand at the
mountain foot.
Great man by his own measure, minute man by the great measure of
time. Mammoths to the near-sighted, mites to the far-sighted. Hustle
and bustle, crowd and push. They tramp down the weaker brothers in
the mad race after the golden shekels, which are only measures of
ability to buy and own material things; symbols of power to make
others serve you. These golden shekels which men fret, sweat and fight
for, can only buy physical and material things.
Away from the crowd is the little group who have learned a great truth,
which is, happiness is not to be bought with gold. This little minority
knows that mental pleasures are best, and that mental pleasures cannot
be found on the great highway of material conquest.
The puffy, corn-fed millionaire pities the man