THINGS SHE DID NOT WANT.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2651, 30 October 1906, Page 6

THINGS SHE DID NOT WANT.

Story That Suggests the Philosophy of the Negative as a Promoter of Happiness. Among the members of a certain family is a much-bcioved little woman whose philosophy of life furnishes no email amusement to her friends. "If you ever feel really forlorn and poverty-strici:en," cne of her nieces was overheard sayir.s to a schoolmate one day, "yea just ought to go downtown with my Aunt Mary." "The other day I went shopping with her, and I thought I'd keep count. Thirteen times she stopped and looked admiringly at things, and then walked on declaring that she didn't want them. The silver would need so much cleaning, and the glass would be such a constant anxiety; the fine clothes would be too fine to have good times in, and the handsome furniture would show every speck of dust. Even hooks could not make her waver, although she is an insatiable reader. " 'There'3 so many you don't want to read,' she says "Once I caught her, when she stopped before some 'American beauties' in a florist's window. " 'Wouldn't you like to have money enough to buy those, auntie?' I asked. /But she wasn't to be caught. " 'l'd so hate to sae them fade,' she said. "The only thing for which I've ever heard her wißh was more money with which to 'do things' for other people, and even that was only a half wish, 'for if you haven't money you have to think of something else, ar.d the something else is often so much better,' she says. I really think Aunt Mary is hap- : pier in discovering things she doesn't want than most people in getting what they do want." The pretty story, says the Youth's Companion, a query: Do we —the majority of us—make enough of the philosophy of the negative as a promoter of happiness? Wealth, whether of spirit or estate, must be reckoned not alone by the good possessed, but also by the undesirable avoided. Many a quiet flower of happiness grows beside the paths of those whose eyes are wise to see the things th«Jy do not want