Fraser's Magazine Volume 23 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ... Concerning The Cheerfulness Of The Old. I REMEMBER the words vividly, and the bright little face of the human being who uttered them. For memory is wilful: it retains just what it chooses. And it rejects, utterly, things much more valuable. One is frightened, in these later days, at the strange feshion in which old sayings and events recur: looks of people we did not specially care for: sentences long forgotten by the person who said them, and neither wise nor witty; yet coming vividly up, without reason which we can discern.;I am awfully jolly; and I don't know why.' These were the words. They were addressed to the present writer by a little boy of ten years old, who had previously been looking for a few minutes as though he had something to say which he hesitated about saying. Finally they were uttered: and they were listened to with all befitting sympathy. There are folk (religious folk) who would so receive such a bit of confidence from a little boy, that he never would confide in them again in this world. It is easy to freeze up a confiding little boy: and to some folk it comes natural and pleasant. There are human beings (I have known them) who would hasten to inform such a little boy that he had no business to be happy: that nobody has any business to be happy. You remember Lord Neaves's touching song, 'Let us all be unhappy on Sunday.' That song is no doubt excellent, so far as it goes. But it is defective: there is a want in it, as folk used to say in Ayrshire in the writer's boyhood. To complete the sentiment, there ought to be added likewise from Monday morning till Saturday night. So should an elevated and attractive life be fully sketched out. For this world is cursed: and assuredly some of its inhabitants are so in a high...