You may rightly remark, "The Fates were kind to him. He had that most precious of natal gifts— a happy temperament. It was easy for him to get along." To be sure the man or woman who is born with a brave, cheerful, and energetic temperament has the start in life of the one in whom melancholy, negation, and timidity predominate; but thanks to the beneficent forces within us all a man or woman can conquer temperamental weaknesses.

A

CHAPTER VI.

TWO WHO CONQUERED.

GIRL, with a tendency to grumble at everything, made life a burden to her roommate at a fashionable boarding-school. The roommate turned upon her one day and said, "I would n't be you for all the money in the world, even if you are the first in all your classes. You always see the worst side of things. Nothing pleases you. Do you know I've been keeping an account of the things you 've grumbled at this morning? It is only eleven o'clock and you have scolded about twenty things.

If

you don't stop finding fault I 'll ask Mrs. Parsons to let Sally Ridge room with me. She's untidy, but she always has a good word for everybody and is not carping at everything." The girl who was arraigned had a sensitive, critical, and imaginative temperament. She was high-strung and idealistic and scarcely anything satisfied her lofty standards. She was wounded at many things one of less keen sensibility would not notice. Her sensitiveness, not being controlled, developed into mere touchiness, a disagreeable phase of vanity. She had never been taught to weigh all sides to get just values. Her schoolmate's denunciation, delivered with

the uncompromising manner of a candid girl, hurt her pride. She had not been conscious of her fault-findings, and honestly believed herself incapable of making herself so disagreeable, and would have believed herself sincere when she asserted "I judge people by their excellences not by their defects." But the list of her criticisms of her schoolmates, teachers, and the servant, her grumblings at her clothes, bed, in fact everything, so glibly read off by her observing companion convinced her that she was indisputably guilty. She resolved to check her inclination to find fault. It was difficult at first. The tendency to measure every

body and everything by her own standards was strong within her. She kept account of her criticisms of both people and things, and of the number of times she controlled her impulse to denounce.

She

tried to see her schoolmates as they really were, not as she thought

they ought to be. She persisted until she conquered the desire to find fault at all. She in the meantime had developed a power of keen discrimination and a justness of judgment that were remarkable and that came to be relied upon by older people. Her word in after life became one of authority. Her condemnation or praise of anybody was accepted in many