Various

“ If poor Jessie is really, as you seem to say, the irresponsible victim of her vice, just as if it was a disease, it would be truer kindness on your part to sacrifice your pride for her real good. You are only giving her freedom to do some great harm to other people, even if you feel it right to endure such an example as hers among your own children. ”

“ From Psalmist, Apostle, and, better than all, from the lips of Jesus Himself, we receive unfailing guidance to the one source of rest, both for troubled souls and disquieted minds. When all the world fails us, let us, my dear ones, try to remember that He is faithful Who promised, “I will give you rest.”
Then there are these poor frail bodies of ours that have to bear weariness and the pain which makes the rest they cry out for impossible. ”

“ Lucy’s heart fainted within her at this strange mixture of warped exegesis, perverted family pride, and private self-interest. Yet she made another attempt to get the matter set in a right light.
“It is very kind of you and your husband to wish to help Jessie,” she said; “but then, if you are willing to sacrifice yourselves in this direction, it must really be yourselves whom you do sacrifice, and not other people, whom you mislead into being sacrificed blindfold. Our sacrifices must be costly to ourselves and not to others. ”

“ Lucy resolutely pulled herself together. She, too, must make the best of it. Though, as a hostess, she was humiliated and defeated, she must still be the hostess, and try to extract a smile out of the cruel situation. For the time she must put this unhappy woman out of her thoughts, along with what might come on the morrow and the utter upset of all her plans for the future. She must try to turn the household wreck into an impromptu picnic.
She tried and succeeded perfectly, so far at least as Tom Black and Hugh were concerned. ”

“ When this world, with its sorrow, suffering, trouble, and weariness, shall have passed away they shall find eternal rest in the Father’s home above. “And God shall wipe away all tears from their faces, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” ”

“ Tom Black thought in his own mind what a jolly woman Mrs. Challoner was not to be a bit put out by what would have utterly upset some people.
Miss Latimer and Wilfrid Somerset knew better than that; they knew what dramatisations life sometimes forces upon us, and how costly such performances are.
But they nobly seconded Lucy in her determination to put a fair face on things. The dinner was cooked in time and set upon the table with the informal decency which prevails in houses where “the family do their own work.” ”

“ It is an exceedingly common complaint, and really the number of white faces one sees in the streets of great cities, as girls hurry to and from their work, is saddening. When one notices a face of this kind in a beautiful carriage, the girl who owns it being perhaps wrapped up in furs, one may put it down as a bad case. There is either{550} some real disease to account for it, or the girl is over-coddled, the laws of hygiene and dietetics ruthlessly broken, and faith pinned on medicine alone—a broken reed. ”

“ Of course, there may be exceptions in the case of a little girl in her “teens” and an aged man.
Retha.—It is very grievous that you should have engaged yourself to marry a man whom you did not love with more than a feeling of ordinary friendship. But it would be the less of two evils to confess your state of feeling, rather than to allow him to marry a woman who felt so cool towards him. Do not deceive him, however humiliating your own position. Better that he should suffer the disappointment before the irrevocable step is taken, which must result in a life-long regret. ”

“ Roses of all classes and kinds are lovely, grow they where they may, on castle lawn or draping the walls of the humblest cottage. And just as sweet and tender are those lovely buds and blossoms of the crimson rosa canina that bedeck and mantle our hedges in the month of June.
Children are ofttimes comparable to roses—girl-children I mean—mere opening buds, and they ought to be none the less beautiful and innocent-looking when older, but still in their teens. Ah, those “teens,” would we not all prefer to remain that age and never to grow older! ”

“ All the medicine Mary had for the next twelve months could have been placed inside a walnut shell. Her mental medicine was not neglected, and this consisted of books to read—I gave her these—and light work to do, chiefly out of doors, also pleasant quiet companionship.
Fresh air was the most important weapon I used to fight the trouble. Next came food. Cream, butter, good milk, nice bacon, and suet dumplings were ten thousand times better than expensive and fulsome cod-liver oil. She had meat too, as much as she could take, with vegetables—potatoes and greens—and bread. ”

“ In relating my little story of Mary, I may have seemed to disparage cod-liver oil. I merely wish, however, to imply that it is only in cases where it can be easily digested that it can do any good, and that in all others it is positively injurious.
Mind this, mater, that the days have long gone past when people pinned their faith on medicine alone in the cure of diseases. Indeed, mostly every ailment of a chronic nature, if curable at all, has a better chance if physic is left severely alone and a thorough system of hygiene and dietetics adopted ”

“ There was the rest day for us, whatever Monday might bring, and bread for so long, anyway. Every now and then I seemed to hear those words, ‘The Lord will provide,’ and I took the message and put the worry right out of my mind. I had got into a way of never asking for money or anything of that sort on Sundays, and I didn’t on that one. I just enjoyed it in the reg’lar way with my John and the children, and, though I did see a bit of a cloud on his face now and then, I never pretended to notice, but smiled back, and it went. I never slept better than I did that Sunday night. ”

“ Then Ivor returned to his former position, and Jack went on resolutely.
“That’s about all,” he said at length. “As much as I’ve heard yet.... He was his own grand self to the last!... It was the death he would have chosen to die.... He always wished for it.... On the field—in the moment of victory! But the loss to us—to England!... The best—the noblest——”
Jack could say no more. Silence followed.
“Soult is a brave fellow. I heard that he was going to put up a memorial stone [1] —to him! The French know what he was.”
Silence again. Denham had not stirred. ”

“ Jesus accepted an invitation to eat bread with one of the chief Pharisees on the Sabbath day; thus we see that He did not abstain from social intercourse on the day of rest. The Jews were most particular in buying and preparing beforehand the best food for the Sabbath day, in order to do it honour. An old writer, in alluding to this, says, “The Sabbath should not be a day of austerity. The most nutritive food should be procured, if possible, that both body and soul may feel the influence of this Divine appointment, and give God the glory of His grace. ”

“ Sheila looked up with a heightened colour to say—
“I’m afraid I don’t always love my duties. Sometimes they seem very tiresome. And I’m sure you’re not an idle person, Miss Adene; but I am very often. Sometimes I think I’m no real good to anybody.” ”

“ This rest means “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” which those who love and trust in Him enjoy even in this troublesome world. With this soul restfulness all the trials of life lose much of their keenness; without it they pierce more deeply and are doubly hard to bear. Yet there are so many worries and anxieties in daily life to give us unquiet minds. ”

“ Cyril appeared at luncheon in company with some of the Lawrence sons. They had known each other at Cambridge, and saw a fair amount of one another in the vacation. May was the only daughter; but she had several brothers, and was good at most games herself, and would have liked to play tennis with Sheila, only that her habit was rather against any such plan.
“But you must come another day—you must come often. I have so few girl-friends here. There are not many houses where mother cares for me to be intimate. But I should like to have you for a friend! I hope you will come often!” ”

“ One thing of which everyone complains is, that all heads are alike, and it is much to be desired that more individual thought should be devoted to the dressing of the head. The back hair is dressed in coils, winding round and round smoothly, except when the door-knocker style is still retained; but this form of hair-dressing is fast going out. Then the head is covered with a mass of frizzled hair, which is too disorderly to be beautiful, and in which the beauty of its colour is lost. ”

“ The group of figures which I have called “Two harmonies in black and white,” are two pretty gowns in the two hues which are the most fashionable of all. The figure on the left holding a bird wears a gown of white lace over black satin, which is trimmed with crescent-shaped pieces of silk, shading from black to grey and white. These are laid on in regular sequence of size on the skirt as well as on the bodice. The other dress is of plainer character, and is of black, with a white design. It is, in fact, one of the new satin-faced foulards, the pattern being of small leaves and dots. ”

“ I do not think, in spite of Viscountess Harberton, that the majority of English women desire to wear knickerbockers, nor even the divided skirt with which her name has been so much associated in the past; and I hear that French women of the better classes are adopting the skirt of the English women, which they consider much more becoming. ”

“ As landowners, they had to learn that each crop yielded takes something out of the ground, and that it must have a period of rest, or its power of production will be exhausted. Hence the Sabbath for the land. In our time the chemist has taught the farmer that by putting certain substances into the ground, he can restore what the crop has taken from it ”

“ A great many women and girls have deserted the use of hot irons, and have gone back to curl-papers, and hair-pins, to wave the hair. In order to avoid the use of either of these, an inventive genius has found out a way of winding a ribbon round with the hair-pin, so that, after the hair is wound in and out on it, the hair-pin can be slipped out, and the two ends of the ribbon which have been left out are tied tightly together, and the hair is then held on the ribbon only. ”

“ If an ailment, say phthisis or consumption, is the trouble in one family and the children thereof escape, while the grandchildren are attacked, one of two things may have happened; the first generation of the afflicted ones had been reared in circumstances inimical to the dispersing of the disorder, it lay latent in their blood and revivified under circumstances favourable to it, in the grandchildren, or—this is just as likely—the seed of the disease died in the first generation, and the second were infected by ordinary means. ”

“ At that moment the uncertain step of Wilfrid Somerset was heard on the kitchen stair.
“Mrs. Challoner asks me to get the cushions off the armchair,” he said, “and I’m afraid you’ll be wanted,” he added, addressing Tom, “for I’m a poor, useless creature where bodily strength is required.”
Without a moment’s hesitation the doctor had diagnosed Mrs. Morison’s “fit.”
“She’s been drinking,” he said laconically.
“But there is no smell of spirit,” pleaded Lucy, reluctant to lose faith in the unhappy woman. ”

“ He felt that he had been called; that is a very different thing from choosing for yourself, and shilly-shallying as Cyril is doing.”
Sheila began to see that May, although not much older than herself, thought things out more deeply than she had ever done.
“The boys have always talked to me, you know,” she said, “and Arnold in particular. He is the clergyman, you know. That made one think. It would be nicer to believe in everybody; but perhaps it’s better sometimes to see below the surface. Sometimes I wish almost that something would happen just to try the metal we and our friends are made of. ”

“ Believe me, only those can truly enjoy God’s gift of a day of rest who are His servants, and who have in them the spirit of love, which comes from Him Who “is love.” With it they will need no written rules. ”