You May Count That Day

A class of little settlement girls besought Mrs. George Herbert Palmer, one insufferable summer morning, to tell them how to be happy. "I'll give you three rules," she said, "and you must keep them every day for a week. First, commit something good to memory each day. Three or four words will do, just a pretty bit of poem, or a Bible verse. Do you understand?" A girl jumped up. "I know; you want us to learn something we'd be glad to remember if we went blind." Mrs. Palmer was relieved; these children understood. She gave the three rules--memorize something good each day, see something beautiful each day, do something helpful each day. When the children reported at the end of the week, not a single day had any of them lost. But hard put to it to obey her? Indeed they had been. One girl, kept for twenty-four hours within squalid home-walls by a rain, had nevertheless seen two beautiful things—a sparrow taking a bath in the gutter, and a gleam of sunlight on a baby's hair.

  If you sit down at set of sun

     And count the acts that you have done,

     And, counting, find

  One self-denying deed, one word

  That eased the heart of him who heard-

     One glance most kind,

  That fell like sunshine where it went-

  Then you may count that day well spent.

  But if, through all the livelong day,

  You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay-

     If, through it all

  You've nothing done that you can trace

  That brought the sunshine to one face-

     No act most small

  That helped some soul and nothing cost-

  Then count that day as worse than lost.

  

By George Eliot