“Give love, and love to your heart will flow,
      A strength in your utmost need;
    Have faith, and a score of hearts will show
      Their faith in your word and deed.”

* * * * *

    The kind of a man for you and me! 
      He faces the world unflinchingly,
    And smiles as long as the world exists,
      With a knuckled faith and force like fists: 
    He lives the life he is preaching of,
      And loves where most is the need of love;
    And feeling still, with a grief half glad,
      That the bad are as good as the good are bad,
    He strikes straight out for the right—­and he
      Is the kind of a man for you and me!

    James Whitcomb Riley

* * * * *

After a certain age is reached in any life, the prevailing tone and condition of that life is the resultant of the mental habits of that life.  If one have mental equipment sufficient to find and to make use of the Science of Thought in its application to scientific mind and body building, habit and character building, there is little by way of heredity, environment, attainment of which he or she will not be the master.

One thing is very certain—­the mental points of view, the mental tendencies and habits at twenty-eight and thirty-eight will have externalized themselves and will have stamped the prevailing conditions of any life at forty-eight and fifty-eight and sixty-eight.

* * * * *

    Who puts back into place a fallen bar. 
      Or flings a rock out of a traveled road,
    His feet are moving toward the central star,
      His name is whispered in the Gods’ abode.

    Edwin Markham

* * * * *

We need changes from the duties and the cares of our accustomed everyday life.  They are necessary for healthy, normal living.  We need occasionally to be away from our friends, our relatives, from the members of our immediate households.  Such changes are good for us; they are good for them.  We appreciate them better, they us, when we are away from them for a period, or they from us.

We need these changes to get the kinks out of our minds, our nerves, our muscles—­the cobwebs off our faces.  We need them to whet again the edge of appetite.  We need them to invite the mind and the soul to new possibilities and powers.  We need them in order to come back with new implements, or with implements redressed, sharpened, for the daily duties.

We need periods of being by ourselves—­alone.  Sometimes a fortnight or even a week will do wonders for one, unless he or she has drawn too heavily upon the account.  The simple custom, moreover, of taking an hour, or even a half hour, alone in the quiet, in the midst of the daily routine of life, would be the source of inestimable gain for countless numbers.