How happy is that balm to wretches, sleep!
Beaumont.

If all that we have learned were that some persons “naturally” work harder than others to achieve anything, we might say that this was unavoidable; and there would be a degree of truth in it. It is true that the intelligence of some people is so sluggish that they learn little from experience. They continue to work towards any end in the same way that they have always worked, wasting both strength and time. For them there is nothing but repeated experiences and patient guidance until they learn to apply their knowledge practically.

But the intelligent man learns that, often where he has worked in the hardest possible way, he has had the most unsatisfactory return for his effort. The good housekeeper, for instance, wishes above all things to make her family comfortable; she has inherited a feeling of the requirements of healthy living, and decides that she must have a scrupulously clean house to protect her loved ones from the dangers of germs and microbes.

So she sweeps, scrubs, cleans from morning until night; carefully removes every trace of dust, follows her family with dust-pan and brush, and at least looks reproachfully at the offender who does not remove every trace of street or garden dirt from his shoes before entering the house. She cleans so hard that she forgets that the real object of cleaning is to make her family safe and comfortable. They may be safe, but they are a long way from being comfortable, and she knows no more comfort than they; cleanliness has become a fetich with her, and some day, perhaps, she comes to her senses, finding herself chasing the motes in a sunbeam, lest by chance they should rest upon her sacred furniture.

If she then sits down to take stock of things, she finds that husband and children almost dread to come home. However serene and happy they may be before reaching the garden gate, or the apartment door, they then become nervous and distrait. They look themselves over, to be sure that nothing is amiss, for “mother is so particular.” An anxious expression settles upon their faces, for, with their best endeavors, they may have overlooked something that mother’s trained and suspicious eye may note. The joy of life abates, and a sort of painful hush falls upon things.

The average child cannot see that this condition grows out of misdirected love and care; he sees no connection between it and his well-being, but, if he thinks of it at all, he concludes that “the house” counts for more with mother than anything else. Husband and children unconsciously come to regard her as mainly a housekeeper, with interests bounded by the four walls of the home. The very gifts they make her are of a useful nature—“something for the house”—as if the “house” were some special thing in her personal life but meant nothing to them.

When the hungry heart of this woman pains her, she resents the condition that she herself has created, but does not see the correct remedy. Her husband and children have put her out of their inner lives; they take their pleasures away from home, they find their confidantes among outside friends. Who should share their thoughts and their pleasures? she asks. Who has worked day and night for their comfort and happiness as she has? And the chances are that she considers them ungrateful and herself a martyr, when all the time she herself builds the barrier between them and herself by striving to make them happy in her way. That it is not their way, and so could not be in harmony with the natural trend of things, does not once occur to her. As the French say, “Madam costs herself too much.” She has not learned, and may never learn, that the only way to make others happy is to love them sincerely and unselfishly enough to allow them to be happy in their own way.

Sometimes it is the father who destroys the joy of home. A many good men think that their duty is done when they provide food, clothes, shelter, and education for their children, and insist upon obedience from them. They are so busy attending to these things that they have no time to get acquainted with their children, to know or be known by them.

There is too much truth in the newspaper joke on the suburbanite. A mother found her little boy crying bitterly on the doorstep quite early on a Monday morning.

“What is the matter, Freddie?” she asked, anxiously.

“Why,” sobbed the child, “I was just running down the street when the man who stops here on Sundays spanked me and sent me home.” There are many children who have no cause to welcome “the man who stops here on Sundays,” even though he may be counted “a good father.” Very often he “takes a nap,” and all noise must cease for his benefit; or, he cannot read his Sunday paper while they are playing about. He speaks testily to his wife, blaming her that she does not quiet the children. “They have all the week to play,” he complains, “I should think they could keep quiet on Sunday. It is the only day I have to rest, and you ought to see that I am not disturbed.” And the mother, who hasn’t even Sunday to rest, quiets the children in the only way she knows, and everybody is wretched.

As fast as the children grow up they leave home gladly for college or business, and, though they respect and fear “the Head of the Family,” they have no real love for him; they never consult him on their intimate, personal worries or problems, and he many times carries a sore heart behind his seemingly stern manner. He wonders why his children are so ungrateful, when he has spent his whole life toiling for them. In his bitter moments he may even call them monsters of ingratitude; forgetting, as Dickens says, that he is really looking for “monsters of gratitude.” These parents, like everyone else, have it in their power to attract to themselves the affection and the surroundings that they need, and to create a center of repose even in the midst of strife; rest we may attain even amid turmoil; but true repose means that quiet shall spread from us to others.