chair, and by far the happiest holiday I ever spent in my life was under surroundings of discomfort and squalor such as I never before or since experienced.  Those surroundings were certainly not in themselves productive of happiness; but neither did they detract from it.  The pathos of the situation is that we all desire happiness—­it is merely priggish to pretend that it is otherwise—­and that we do not know in the least how to attain it.  Some few people go straight for it and reach it; some people find it by turning their back upon what they most desire, and walking in the opposite direction.  I had a friend once who made up his mind that to be happy he must make a fortune.  He went through absurd privations and endured intolerable labours; he did make a fortune, and retired upon it at an early age, and immediately became a thoroughly unhappy man, having lost all power of enjoying or employing his leisure, and finding himself hopelessly and irremediably bored.  Of course, boredom is the surest source of unhappiness, but boredom is not the result of the things we do or avoid doing, but some inner weariness of spirit, which imports itself into occupation and leisure alike, if it is there.  There is no nostrum, no receipt for taking it away.  A kindly adviser will say to a bored man, “All this discontent comes from thinking too much about yourself; if only you would throw yourself a little into the lives and problems of others, it would all disappear!” Of course it would!  But it is just what the bored man cannot do; and the advice is just as practical as to say encouragingly to a man suffering from toothache, “If the pain would only go away, you would soon be well.”  Ruskin was once consulted by an anxious person, who complained that he was unhappy, and said that he attributed it to the fact that he was so useless.  Ruskin replied with trenchant good sense:  “It is your duty to try to be innocently happy first, and useful afterwards if you can.”

What, then, can we do in the matter?  How are we to secure happiness?  The answer is that we cannot; that we must take it as it comes, like the sunshine and the spring.  Few of us are in a position to alter at a moment’s notice the course of our lives.  It is more or less laid down for us what paths we have to tread, and in whose company.  We can to a certain extent, taught by grim experience of the habits, thoughts, tempers, passions, anticipations, retrospects, that disturb our tranquillity, avoid occasions of stumbling.  We can undertake small responsibilities, which we shall be ashamed to neglect; we can, so to speak, diet our minds and hearts, avoiding unwholesome food and debilitating excesses.  To a certain extent, I say, for the old fault has a horrid pertinacity, and even when felled in fair fight, has a vile trick of recovering its energies and leaping on us from some ambush by the way, as we saunter, blithely conscious of our victory.  It may be a discouraging and an oppressive thought, but the only hope lies in good sense and patience.  There are no short cuts; we have to tread every inch of the road.