Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer was once talking to a girls’ club,
composed of the unkempt and unprivileged daughters of Eve, and
gave them three rules for happiness in the promise that they
would keep the rules every day for a week. The rules were, for
each day:
First--Commit to memory a worthy sentence.
Second--Do something for others.
Third--See something beautiful.
She met a while after one little girl who declared that she
had fulfilled her promise every day; but that one day, when
mother was sick, she could not go to the park to see something
beautiful, and thought she had lost it, but while doing
something for others, in the way of caring for the baby, she
looked out of the attic window of her squalid home, and saw
a common sparrow, and as she looked at the little fellow,
the dark feathers around his throat appearing to her like a
smart necktie, she found her vision of the beautiful in what
many would consider the most ordinary of all God’s feathered
songsters. Oh, but she arrived! arrived in spite of the
commonplace which seemed to fetter her, and sunshine came of a
dreary day into a dreary room, because of the purpose of her
soul.--NEHEMIAH BOYNTON.
(1348)