One day I heard a boy say to his younger brother, who was crying lustily, "Now, Tom, I know you don't want anything, but what do you think you want?" That boy was a philosopher, and went to the root of the matter. It is not what we really want, but what we think we want, that frets most of us. Perhaps you tell me that you suffer just as much as if your longing were a reasonable or a sensible one. That's true too; but if you only could snatch to-day's legitimate happiness, instead of wondering if you could not get a great deal more, for that to-morrow which may never come to you, wouldn't it be wiser? The other day I went off into the woods, with a dear little girl, who is much more of a poetess than a philosopher. Not a patch of soft green moss, not the tiniest bud of a wild flower, or flitting butterfly, or bird, or tree-shadow on the smooth clear lake, escaped her bright, glad eyes. The first flower she found enraptured her, and she climbed quite a steep rock with her mites of feet for the second, and so on till her tiny hands were full. Just then she found quite a bunch of bright pink blossoms; and I was so glad for her; when suddenly she burst into such a grieved, piteous cry, "Oh dear! oh dear! what shall I do? I can't hold them all."

If we'd only think of that! That "we can't hold them all." That in order to grasp that which is the moment's wish, we must let something else drop that we prize. Something that we can never retrace our steps, in life's devious paths, to reclaim. It may be health, or character, or life itself, for that which is so perishable, so unsatisfying, so harmful, that we can never cease wondering how the "glamour" of it could have so dazzled our mental and moral vision. The little child I speak of, who clambered up the rock to secure that one flower, was happier in its possession than with the myriads that she afterwards found lying at her very feet. She had earned that one! She had encountered a fierce briar-bush; she had got her hands scratched in the conflict; she had tickled her little nose with a defiant twig; she had tangled her curls; she had scraped her little fat knee till it was red—and got it! All herself, too! I couldn't elaborate a better moral, if I preached an hour. We don't value happiness in heaps. It is the one little sweet blossom, that comes unexpectedly in our way, that we love best after all. Isn't it so?