HEALTHY LIVES FOR WORKING GIRLS.
"Grant her in health and wealth long to live."
These are the words in which many of us, Sunday after Sunday, pray for our gracious Queen. We desire for her health and wealth; and justly so; both are necessary. The one for her comfort, and to enable her to perform her arduous duties; the other for her exalted rank and position.
For ourselves, however, it is to be hoped we rarely pray for what is termed wealth; but, on the other hand, how needful it is that we should supplicate unceasingly for health. "Grant me health, Lord, to perform my daily task." We have, indeed, need to ask for that unpurchasable, that priceless blessing. If we possess it already, we need to implore its continuance; if we have lost it, so much the more earnestly and devoutly should we solicit a return to its paths. Yes, next to the possession of a healthy conscience, we hold physical health to be the greatest of all gifts, but, like most of the grandest, fairest, and divinest things on earth, many of us accept it as a matter of course. And when, through our own want of forethought, through neglect of the most ordinary rules of health, through reckless indifference, we are forced practically to acknowledge that the most robust health has its limits of endurance, then we chafe and pine; and life, which seemed such a joyous, easy thing a month ago, is now a dreary burden, duty a heavy chain, pleasure a fiction; and self, weary self, rises in the ascendant, occupies all our sympathies and thoughts, and leaves us dissatisfied and indifferent, ungrateful and ungracious.
There are those who believe that by not attending to or neglecting their health they are acting unselfishly. They say it is so selfish to be always considering whether this is good or harmful or that is likely to encroach upon the domain of health. If this sentiment is carried to the verge of hypochondria, we grant its truth. There is nothing more odious than a person who is constantly looking out for the weathercocks, and who, as soon as he finds the wind in a certain quarter, shuts himself up, and carefully excludes all intercourse from the outer world; or who can trace certain symptoms—the hypochondriacs' pet word—to the extra spoonful of salt or sugar in yesterday's seasoning; who is a bore to his surroundings and a melancholy object of interest to himself; who is nothing but a useless encumbrance upon the face of the earth.
This is not the taking care which we advise or suggest. Things good in themselves may be perverted into errors by the spirit and the want of judgment with which they are pursued, and we fervently believe that if our prayer for health is answered, it will be first by the opening of our own eyes to facts and laws to which we were hitherto blind, or of which we have been ignorant, than to the practical observance of these laws, and our willingness to be subject to them.
But it is not of those who are merely inconvenienced by illness that we would speak to-day. Not of those who are only subjected to the loss of a little pleasure, a good deal of temper, and who are learning a lesson in being patient. In a word, we do not write for the well-to-do invalid, but for a very different class. Our remarks are intended especially for those of "our girls" to whom health is, perhaps, the only capital they possess. To whom loss of health means loss of work, loss of wage, anxiety, which aggravates matters, and perhaps serious privations to those in any way dependent upon their exertions.