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198 IDEAL HOME LIFE
far from blase if she ever goes to Mentone or Capri, or crosses the Continent and sits among the roses in a garden of enchantment at Santa Monica. Still beyond this, they who cultivate the talent for finding enjoyment in the daily little things, will be the stronger for battling with the sterner realities, and for bearing the greater sorrows, if ever they come.
The Joy of Light
Among tangible aids to cheerfulness in the household, and these should not be overlooked, light and warmth take precedence. Exercise frugality in other directions, but have a well-lighted living room, and, if practicable, a fire that one may poke. The gloomy, vault-like chill of a half-warmed, obscurely lighted home has driven many a boy and man to some hostelry where lamps and fire beckoned. No place in a home should be too ornamental and too costly in its equipment for the use of the family. A stately drawing-room may be the privilege of a palace, where there are suites of other pleasant apartments, but people of ordinary means should live all over their houses, and have no shut-up room, into which the boys and girls may not intrude. Books and periodicals add immensely to the cheer of a home, and to the broadening and brightening of growing youth. That house is always cheerful which is open to' the voices of the period, which keeps a tally of new inventions and discoveries, and which is, to use a graphic phrase, up to date. The up-to-date house must own, not merely borrow from a library, plenty of books. Receptive to new ideas, cheerfulness comes to us as a matter of course. It is to the lonely, • narrow, hopeless home that melancholy creeps a menace and a blight.
Avoid Ruts
They who most prize home cheerfulness will carefully avoid getting into a rut. The bondage of routine fetters those who never have variety, who, year in and year out, walk in the same track and drop seeds into the same furrow. If the mother, the pivot of the domestic machinery, shows symptoms of wearing |
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