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dom, suddenly become stagnant? Did the persons you least wished to see, force themselves into your presence, and those you loved best remain absent? Did you labor with more than wonted zeal, yet accomplish nothing? Did it seem as though some evil genius walked in your steps, and flung stones in your path, and turned all your actions awry, and made all your efforts failures, until you grew crosser and crosser, and became quite unbearable to yourself, to say nothing of being unendurable to others? With your equilibrium destroyed, all your purposes defeated, your spirits not dampened merely, but drowned, did you not emphatically call the day black?

Such unbalanced days, when life seems all a game of cross purposes, will come to most of us, and how is their unholy spell to be broken? Truly a momentous question! Very often the presence of some being gifted with a strong heart, genial temperament, and sympathetic nature, will chase all the shadows, restore serenity to the ruffled temper, and evoke order out of confusion,—even as the voice, the look, of one single angel can put to flight a legion of evil spirits. But it is not always that visitants, happily endowed with this calming, cheering, demon-exorcising power, enter in, and tinge our overhanging clouds with the splendor of their own internal sunshine.

Oftener, far, if we would not succumb to the depressing influences that weigh upon us in these