The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-08-27

1 you rail at Fate or complain that you are forgotten in the great scheme of thingsI
 Of course you are not forgotten. Nobody ever isl
 We think it's kind of fosslized "old saw about it being "a long lane that has no turning" but be sure that there is a turn to EVERY LANE, and the drearier a promenade lane Is. in the early stages of the journey, the brighter things will loom up when you turn the corner.
 We are often called upon to comfort those who believe themselves to be the officially appointed victims of Fate.
 In proof of this, family troubles and business calamities, love affairs, and a varied sequence of misadventures of all sorts, are offered.
 When we listen to a tale of woe that covers, say twenty years of unrelieved sorrow, it DOES take something of an optmist to believe in the Eternal Justice of things, as they are-doesnt it.
 Tt must be very dark" an old Indian saying goes, before 1t can grow very bright"
 We've heard our own old Proverb about It being darkest just before dawn"
 You don't have 10 live more than half the life allotted to man. without sensing the truth of these old sayings.
 Things are always getting ready to turn," a very wise man, once wrote to comfort a woman in much trouble, "and in your case, since they cant turn for anything worse, than what you face, it is good reasoning to believe they must be better"
 Things DID turn the woman in ques- tion, and her life has grown steadily happier
 Now she declares that her happiness would mean absolutely nothing to her if she hadn't known what 1t was to touch the bottom of despair and un- happiness
 You don't appreciate how soft life is for you, unless you have known how hard its conditions may be, and how roughly Fate can deal with you. You are pretty likely to tip the "sil- yer lining" as matter of course, un- less you've been up against the "seamy
 
 cause you could sec no indication that things would ever grow better. The world is strange affair." again quoting Moliere-but one not all together uncheerful, when we consider the possibilities of good luck and a change of fortune that may come in to call upon us any old Tuesday after noon or Wednesday morning. Cinderella didn't dream that she was n "A "a nof- pa11 and that the Prince, divinely appointed, was waiting for her there We never pick up newspaper with out reading about some strange and wonderful piece of luck, that came out of the skies to this person or that one
 | The other day man was washing dishes in a Quick Lunch place when he was touched on the shoulder and told that a rich old uncle he didn't even know he owned, had died and left him S2O,000, 900.
 Bertha, the poor sewing girl, never knows when some rich and eccentric old customer is going to propose to adopt her as a daughter and take her to far away lands. And the trained nurse, who has worked and toiled with the sick and the moneyed, the halt and the blind, world without end, suddenly receives @ bequest from some rich old patient she'd forgotten long ago, making her independent and happy for life.
 When luck plays us so hard and fast and bad that it simply CAN'T play us another scurvy trick, then cheer up and be comforted; we're getting ready to turn the lane and things by the Eter- nal Law of Compensation must loom up and get better.
 Read MT. Emerson and get at the very bottom of things of this sort, if you haven't already done so.
 There's a darkness and light, the ebb and flow of the tide, loss and gain, depression followed by exhilaration; from the highest to the lowest the law of life teaches that for each height there is a corresponding depth, and vice versa.
 1t is up to us to take the DEPTHS bravely, for only in the depths do we learn to appreciate the heights when we reach them, and from sorrow and disappointment CHARACTER is formed n ha biQhpGt ha