Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1875 — Sudden Thoughts. [ARTICLE]

Sudden Thoughts.

Honesty and happiness seem to be alike in this particular—those who have the most of either seem to make the least fuss about it. Envy seems to be a disease that everybody has and everybody is ashamed of. Adversity puts weapons into a man’s hands to fight back, while prosperity too often disarms him. Virtue and vice are so adroitly mingled in some constitutions that the man himself can’t tell which is who. It is more difficult to keep a friend than it is to reconcile an enemy. The most dangerous of all flattery is the very common kind that we bestow upon ourselves.

Although love is blind it can’t be fettered; it has enslaved thousands, but won’t be enslaved itself. We are never more than half as miseraable as we think we are. Broken hearts are scarce anyhow, and there are more cures for them than most any complaint I know of. If a man is only true to himself it will be very difficult for others to overreach him. Heroes, like Fourth of July orations, are often made to order. A success seems to be composed of three ingredients, to-wit: good luck, energy and some more good luck. Some folks don’t seem to have any faculty to get ahead only by hanging on to the coat-tails of others; this may be honest but it is poor. There is nothing perhaps that shows the veneration we all have for money more than the fact that the wealth of others is always overrated. Virtue seems to thrive the best on poor soil; where the ground is very rich, if it ain’t well hoed, there is sure to be two weeds to one corn. Tlie man who undertakes to do two things at once will be pretty sure to spill one and slop over the other. * Don’t be discouraged if your children don’t prove to be young miracles; plants of the slowest growth bear fruit the latest. I would rather trust most men with my pocket-book than with a secret. Lazy people are a great pest. They are as bad as flies, always getting into somebody’s cream or molasses.

There is no grapes so sour as those we can’t reach—Esop says so. I don’t care how cunning a man may be, he will find it is a great deal easier to cheat himself than it is other folks. An affected fool is a great deal more un comfortable to meet than a natural one. He who plays a poor hand well is entitled to more credit than he who wins with a good one. It is the intention that makes a thing good, bad or indifferent, without any regard to the result. It is often hard to distinguish between praise and flattery; the one may be honesi, the other never is. Honest praise will strengthen any man, but flattery will weaken anything except a mule. I know lots of folks who have got just brains enough to spoil them. If they had less they might possibly amount to something.

Weak men are the hardest kind to control. They have no more backbone than an angleworm. It is very seldom we see a man who is too much for tlie business he is engaged utiitti cOilltoOli TOtIiC!TIJUsinCiSS" too much for him. Success is too often the only real merit that can be found in a performance. I don’t care how much brains a woman may have, there’s lots of times in her life that she would be willing to swop them all off for beauty—N, J”. Weekly. a O —Mr. Owen Clarkin, of Pawtucket, has a griev;tnce. He visited Providence the other day, and, bent on a little trading, bought 100 cabbages at six cents-apiece. As he wanted to return in the cars he put his young son in charge of the wagon-load of produce, bidding him to drive home at his leisure. The boy. thinking agreeably to surprise his father, turned peddler and sold die cabbages one by one to chance pedestrians as the rate of three for ten cents, and finally turned over his whole stock to a huckster for two cents apiece. Mr. Clarkin’s dismay may be readily imagined when he learned what the zealous youth had done, and he is now seeking to recover his property through the medium of the law.