284 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



I would add another rule: If I could make sure that she 

 would before the day was over, just conscientiously, even for 

 a minute, open her young eyes and enjoy some beautiful thing. 

 First to learn some beautiful thought, and next to view some 

 beautiful thing. No girl is so poor tonight that she cannot 

 learn noble thoughts from the great, splendid treasury of 

 books, or that cannot afford some book from which to learn 

 a happy noble thought for every day. So far have we come, 

 dear friends, that an hour's work, even with young hands, will 

 earn enough money in the house or the street to buy a copy 

 of Shakespeare, or to buy a copy of the Psalms, or the gospel 

 of St. John, to buy a treasury that can ne\er turn to dross. 

 If she cannot get them herself, so far have we advanced that 

 every public library is a noble treasury, a storehouse of the 

 great and noble thoughts of the past belonging to the Eng- 

 lish-speaking people. 



Well you know, I think, what the third rule for a happy 

 life should be. I think it belongs to the boys of the family 

 as well as to the girls, but I should always give it to every 

 girl, and I should trust that she would teach it to her brothers, 

 and to all the boys she loved. Our girls, and the boys too, 

 should not only learn some noble thought, and look at some 

 beautiful thing every day, but I should lay it down for the 

 third rule of a happy, wholesome, loyal life that they should 

 conscientiously and definitely do some genuinely unselfish, 

 self-sacrificing thing for somebody else every day. 



I had an interesting experience last summer. During the 

 heat of July, which, up in Boston, was very hot, I went away 

 to a cool retreat, and I came down from the country and the 

 quiet of the pine woods to talk to a group of children at a 

 school in the north end of Boston. It was very warm, but 

 there was a great group of them gathered in a room about 

 the size of this. They had been having a little music, and 

 some manual training. When I asked them what they wanted 

 me to talk 'about they looked rather puzzled, and afier a 

 little I said: "You know you can tell me. You can now 

 ask me anything you want to." Most of them were of foreign 

 parentage, Jewish and Polish and Italian, and one little girl 

 finally called out, " tell us about having good times," and so 

 I told them what I knew about the way of having some good 

 times. I asked them if they wanted to have good times 



