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.”
THE RELIEF OF LUCKNOW.
For eighty days the fort of Lucknow had held out against fifty thousand rebel Sepoys. Disease, famine, and the fire of the enemy had thinned the ranks of the little garrison until but twenty remained. Day after day the garrison had hoped for relief, but now hope itself had died away. The Sepoys, grown desperate by repulse, had decided to overwhelm the fort with their whole force. The engineers had said that within a few hours all would be over, and not a soul within Lucknow but was prepared for the worst.
A poor Scotch girl, Jessie Brown, had been in a state of excitement all through the siege, and had fallen away visibly within the last few days. A constant fever consumed her, and her mind wandered, especially on that day, when, as she said, she was “lukin far awa, far awa upon the craigs of Duncleuch as in the days of auld lang syne.” At last, overcome with fatigue, she sank on the ground too tired to wait.
As the Sepoys moved on to the attack, the women, remembering the horrible scenes of Cawnpore, besought the men to save them from a fate worse than death, by killing them with a volley from their guns. The soldiers for the last time looked down the road whence the long-looked-for relief must come; but they saw no signs of Havelock and his troops. In despair they loaded their guns and aimed them at the waiting group; but suddenly all are startled by a wild, unearthly shriek from the sleeping Scotch girl. Starting upright, her arms raised, and her head bent forward in the attitude of listening, with a look of intense delight breaking over her countenance, she exclaimed: “Dinna ye hear it? Dinna ye hear it? Ay, I’m no dreamin’; it’s the slogan o’ the Highlanders! We’re saved, we’re saved!” Then, flinging herself upon her knees, she thanked God with passionate fervor.
The soldiers were utterly bewildered; their English ears heard only the roar of artillery, and they thought poor Jessie still raving. But she darted to the batteries, crying incessantly to the men: “Courage! Hark to the slogan—to the Macgregor, the grandest of them a’! Here’s help at last!” For a moment every soul listened in intense anxiety. Gradually, however, there was a murmur of bitter disappointment, and the wailing of the women began anew as the colonel shook his head. Their dull Lowland ears heard nothing but the rattle of the musketry.
A few moments more of this deathlike suspense, of this agonizing hope, and Jessie, who had again sunk to the ground, sprang to her feet, and cried in a voice so clear and piercing that it was heard along the whole line: “Will ye no believe it noo? The slogan has ceased, indeed, but the Campbells are comin’. D’ ye hear? D’ ye hear?”