The family was a fashionable one that had a great deal of company and visited a great deal. The mother, a tall, fine-looking woman, was evidently the ruling spirit among them. Whenever she and her daughters were getting ready for a walk, or a drive, she turned out the picture of a large peacock, and her daughters turned out little peacocks. I followed them into the street, and as they walked along could see the people bowing and smiling to them; but as soon as they had passed, these same people made fun of them.
In a second house that I entered the family was seated at dinner. Though not so fine a house as the first, nor so expensively furnished, I could tell at a glance it was a far happier home. I looked round to see if I could discover the cause of this difference, and here again my eye rested on the mother, who sat at the head of the table; but what a contrast with the other! The dove was on her breast, and a brood of doves on the breasts of the little ones who were gathered around her. There was cheerful, innocent talk in which all took part, without a word of unkindness for any one, present or absent.
I stayed about this house for the rest of the day—it was a pleasant place to be in—and when, toward its close, the mother stole apart to a little room alone, I peeped in and saw there a chair, and a table with an open book on it, and a kneeling-cushion, well used, on the floor beside the table. Then I said to myself:
“Perhaps here is the secret of the difference between this and the more elegant home.”
I cannot close this account of what I saw while I was in that strange country without telling of a difference that I noticed between the old and the young people there. The young were constantly changing their sides; the old did not change them nearly so often. It appeared that if they had turned out their ugly sides for the most part during their former lives, they lost the power, as they grew old, to draw them back again. On the other hand, if they had struggled against the bad and kept out the good, the good became fixed there.
My dream seemed to last a long time, and I visited a great many places and saw a great many persons that I have not told about here. But this I noticed everywhere I went—that those who kept out their good sides had the best time of it. They were contented and cheerful themselves, and helped to make others so. The doves, as we have read, brought out other doves, and the flowers brought out other flowers. Whoever turned out these saw them turned out by other people also. And so, with a pleasant prospect without and a kindly spirit within, the good-sided people experienced a happiness which the ugly-sided people never knew.