ing his friendships, his attachments to a familiar locality, his plans and hopes. It compels him, weakened and stunned, to gather up his household and to grope about for an opportunity to begin anew. We have our own way in so many little things that we acquire an unnatural appetite for victory. We lack the buffets and the knockouts that fighting men or lawyers, or traders, or those that deal with equals experience to toughen their fiber. It would be better if we learned to yield more gracefully in unimportant matters. We might well get into the habit of asking for more things, as Diogenes did, for the purpose of schooling ourselves in disappointment. It may be a bad thing for a schoolmaster to have an unbroken record of success and support. Perhaps when he finds some superior who dislikes him he ought to cross that person occasionally for the discipline of being turned down. It would prevent so low a drop of one's spirits when a great calamity comes. I know of a case of a new principal who prepared a luncheon for a visiting superintendent. The superintendent said, "I am not here for pleasantries. I came to see work." The schoolman moped and suffered for weeks afterward. It made a congestion in his throat, set him to tossing at night, and gave him a trembling of the hands. Lawyers and men in business would scoff at such sensitiveness. It is not uncommon among schoolmasters. Perhaps you know the effects of continued mental distress. A discomfort in the pit of the stomach (the ancients surmised the seat of the spirit was there), a dryness of mouth, a wandering of the mind thru the dark places of the future, conjuring into them many indefinite dreads of criticism, lack of sympathy, continued condemnation, and final dismissal. When you are not used to disappointment, you overdo your distress. Instead of awakening you to correction, it paralyzes every faculty except that of seeing black. A daily paper then saddens you with its parade of accidents, losses, weaknesses, dishonesties, hardness of heart, quarrels, crimes. Life seems cold and cruel. The wretchedness and dirt of streets, the stridency of noise, the ugliness of faces intensify themselves as never before. Then is the time to make use of such antidotes as are ready to hand. To sit in front of children who are singing, to join with them, to feed the eyes upon their faces, to entertain them with interesting and profitable talk, to feel that they are liking you and you are loving them; all this is said by those who try it to be specific. As old as literature itself, is the advice to read. Scott found solace in the trashiest novels, Stevenson's father found it in the New Testament. Howell Harris, that phenomenal preacher who regenerated drunken and dissolute Wales in the days of John Wesley, "would fall into such dejection accompanied by bodily weakness as to be unable to stand, but after the perusal of the Scripture and Cotton's Covenant of grace, instantaneous strength would come from it as from food when hungry and from fire when cold." The pure and gentle Kingsley recommended to a curate suffering from dejection, that he read Rabelais. Lecky thought most of the books of consolation full of sounding generalities impotent in the face of real sorrow. Others have not found it so. They name dozens of books that are sovereign tonics for low spirits. Such are Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, Carlyle and Emerson, the virile Whitman, and a consoling book of essays by a schoolmaster, Daniel Brinton, entitled The pursuit of happiness. Reading of the grief of others, of Hawthorne's wondering whether life may be worth the trouble of carrying it further, of Keats's sounding the depths of misery, of Rousseau's Father Cato dying of a broken heart-perusal of such literature while one is down in spirits arouses most temperaments. Reading of one's previous depression shows us, according to Emerson, how absurd it is to rate our present distress as the worst we ever had. One's own diary may be an evener of the spirits. 4.3 Dr. Hutchinson advises vaudeville to dispel low spirits. That is what these shows are for. The feature of them that cheers up a schoolmaster, especially, is that so many of the performers know what they want to do and know how to do it. Your juggler or acrobat finishes his stunt with adequate completeness and doesn't talk about it. If you have scruples about vaudeville you can get some of the same freshening by watching the men in the rolling mills run the red-hot iron rods out of the machine, or glass blowers make window panes. Any deft, successful work, if you watch it when you are deprest, suggests how well worth while it is to try your own again. A good ball-game or a lively lacrosse match or any trial of skill has this refreshing element in it. Ruskin's doctor took him to the theater to see the beautiful Flora Sanderson dance, and says it improved him remarkably. Longfellow, when as a teacher he didn't get along very well with his superiors, used to find notable relief from his distress in music. Jerome K. Jerome's book is on the solace of the pipe. Luther Gulick cured business men suffering from financiał reverses by putting them at setting-up exercises. The Chicago Record-Herald man puts it this way: 66 'Cheer up you that in sadness sit Robbed of the hope you had of rising, Grover Cleveland cured blues by fishing; Thomas Jefferson, by gardening; Oliver Optic, by sailing a boat; Dickens, by walking London streets; Thackeray, by drawing pictures; Pitt, by playing games with children; Mayor Strong, by drinking tea; Herbert Spencer, by lively dinner parties; Andrew D. White, by climbing a hill; Gladstone, by cutting down trees; Roosevelt, by a horseback ride; John Boyle O'Reilly, by a good swim; Homer, by sitting on the seashore. Kipling would have you get out among the woods and fields. The country, for the wounded heart," runs the old proverb. The gentle Benson, however, wonders whether there is a vis medicatrix in nature which can heal our grief and console our anxieties. But wise men have said and poets sung of the consoling power of nature, how its tranquil beauty steals away the sharpness ere we are aware. Emerson went daily to the woods, by preference in the morning and at sunset. Case 119. Mr. T. H., an Illinois teacher, brooding over a series of unfriendly criticisms by his principal, resolved to take his own life. He conceived the idea of drowning himself in a deep place in a forest river that he had made familiar to himself while on a canoe trip. In Chicago he bought a pair of handcuffs with the ingenious intention of filling his valise with stones, snapping one handcuff thru the handles of the bag, the other around his wrist and jumping overboard. a town about twenty miles above his chosen spot, he bought an old skiff for five dollars and set out down the river between the woods and fields. By the time he had floated all day under the blue sky with birds pee-winking and sweet perfumes floating over blooming meadows, he concluded that even old D., his school principal, couldn't blacken a whole world for him. When he reached the deep water place that was to have been his grave, he threw the stones and handcuffs in and continued on his way, soon sending a telegram that he had been suddenly called off on business and was on his way back. He was thereafter so cheerful and indifferent that the principal thought he had secured another place and began to see more worth in him. H. afterward truthfully said that he had considered another place but concluded to give it the go-by. Walking was Stevenson's prime way of getting away from "" those little black creatures that leer at one from the dark corners of life." Andrew D. White says his best of all medicine, when embittered and careworn, has been an excursion in the open air. Along with the remarkable spirits of St. Paul and the apostles springing from the divine inspiration within them, is the interesting fact that they were out-ofdoor folk. Postmen are proverbially merry. Professor Brinton whose Pursuit of happiness I spoke of, seemed perpetually cheerful but he said he had not only the blues but the deadliest of blacks. However, they never failed to yield to the homely remedy of good hard work, mental and especially physical. Pleasure is said to dote on idleness but pain grows fat on it. Case 86. W. lost his position as principal and immediately built a boat, after which he was in the proper mood to make the right impression while applying for another place. Visiting the sick or helping the unfortunate is unsurpassed as a lightener of one's own sorrow. It is when wounded that one realizes the value of encouragement and sympathy. Get some flowers, hunt up some family of your school parish where service is needed. The mere fact that you have been hurt or humiliated or turned out has not decreased a jot the sum of human woe requiring help. Those are some things to do while the acute stage of schoolman's trouble is upon you. They are the sorts of anesthetic to allay that mental pain that comes with the first shock of repudiation, hostility of those in power, or notice of disaster. The schoolman needs, however, none more than he, an extended self-treatment of mental hygiene to give him such fiber that the stabs peculiar to his work and government will not hurt him. For one thing he should learn not to talk about himself. Anglo-Saxon tradition requires that a man should not mention his trouble. Here is where the schoolman is weak. When any two of us get together the tune is likely to run to the minor. Hardly a schoolmaster ever talks to you ten minutes without complaining of something. You match his whine with a wail of your own. We don't take pains enough to tell people what a jolly good chance we have to do the world the kind of service we set out to do. What did Roosevelt say to the reporter who regretted the pounding the president was getting from his former supporters? "I'm having a corking good time here." We need to enumerate to others more frequently the delights of knowing children, their fresh young joyous life, and the pleasure of learning, and of teaching. That interests a listener more than the distress of red tape, of supervision, and of too hard work. If ever we do get into really deep trouble, it is disappointing to us to find that our friends are so used to hearing us complain that they can not give us any sympathy. It would not be a bad plan to write upon the blackboard Walt Whitman's Henceforth I whimper no more. It is surprizing how any man who has read biography can in his crisis complain that those whom he thought his friends and obligated to give him gratitude fail to show any. This is only one of the brands of foolish talk a schoolman in trouble gets out of his system. We exaggerate our services |