The dull days of winter did not drag; indeed, they were accepted with
real pleasure. Our lives had hitherto been too much filled with the
hurry and bustle inseparable from the fashionable existence-struggle of
a large city to permit us to settle down with quiet nerves to the real
happiness of home. So much of enjoyment accompanies and depends upon
tranquillity of mind, that we are apt to miss half of it in the turmoil
of work-strife and social-strife that fill the best years of most men
and women.
It is a pity that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax
their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are
within them. Most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of
the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either
inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world.
I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet,
unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me. When you
discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have
foregone them so long, and are fain to recommend them to all the world.
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