Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1898 — HUMOR AND ITS USES. [ARTICLE]

HUMOR AND ITS USES.

It Is the Sunshine of the World, but May Be Overworked. “Humor is the very sunshine of the world,” writes Carrie E. Garrett in the Woman’s Home Companion. “Hardly any other single gift will go so far to refresh and inspire one in every-day life and keep the heart still young. It steals merrily across that workaday world, animating the dreariest monotony and finding place In the most hopeless destiny. Such a gay traveling companion is humor for the pilgrimage of life! “The woman with a sense of humor has a safeguard against ennui, against folly and against despair. She can never be dull so long as the comedy of life is being played before her eyes; with a keen sense of the ridiculous she is not likely to ‘make a fool of herself;’ and she will never be hopelessly unhappy, for she will find in the most adverse fate something still to laugh at, and after all laughter is your true alchemist. However it may bo with the unmusical person, surely the surly Individual who cannot laugh spontaneously on occasions is ‘fit for treasons, strategems and spoils.’ “But this blessed gift of humor should be used to lift the shadows of life, not to deepen them. A Joke which causes another a pang of humiliation or makes some sensitive heart ache is not only a cruel sort of amusement, but it Is also a very expensive indulgence. For just a moment’s gratification at having made a ‘hit’ the ’funny woman’ may forever lose a friend, and may even arouse a very genuine spirit of enmity. We learn to forgive, and mayhap forget, many injuries in life’s troubled Journey, but perhaps among the wounds that rankle longest in the human heart are those which are made ‘only in fun.’