You are inclined to be down-hearted upon anniversaries. You need not tell me what I know so well of myself. Another year has gone, another year has dawned, and you are in the same old rut of ordering and cooking meals and clearing up after they have been eaten, sweeping, dusting, making and mending clothes, washing, dressing and training children, and the thousand and one nameless tasks that fritter away strength, leaving nothing to show for the waste.
"God help us on the common days,
The level stretches white with dust!"
prays Margaret Sangster. You would cry out in the pain of retrospection and anticipation, that all the days of the years of your life are common days—"only that and nothing more."
If this be so, you need the Help none ever seek in vain more than those to whom varied and exciting scenes are alloted.
The angel of death who had said upon entering the plague-stricken city that he meant to kill ten thousand people, was accused on the way out of having slain forty thousand.
"I kept my word," he answered. "I killed but ten thousand. Fear killed the rest!"
If work slays thousands of American women, American worry slays her tens of thousands. Work may bend the back and stiffen the joints. It ploughs no furrows in brow and cheek; it does not hollow the eyes and drag all the facial muscles downward. These are misdeeds of worry—your familiar demon, and the curse of our sex everywhere. A good man—who, by the way, had a pale, harassed-looking wife—once told me that on each birthday and New Year's he retired to his study and spent some time behind the locked door in making good resolutions for the coming year.
"I may not keep them all," he said, ingenuously, "but the exercise of forming them is edifying."
With the thought of his wan and worried wife in mind, I shocked him by declining for my part to undertake such a big contract as resolutions for a year, a month or a week. If I live to a good old age, I shall owe the blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life to your spirit.