self right into the swim of things and try to take an active part, to have a real interest in what is going on around you. Associate with people as freely as possible. Just try to be glad and happy, and interest yourself in others. Keep your mind off yourself. Do not take a book and get into a corner alone, or go to your room and shut yourself in with your gloomy thoughts. Get away from yourself by entering with zest into the family plans or the plans and pleasures of those about you.

Do not dwell on your disappointments, your unfortunate surroundings, or harbor black pictures in your mind. This only aggravates your troubles. Do not brood over what you call your peculiarities. Hold to the belief that the Creator made you in His own image, a perfectly normal, healthy, happy and sensible human being, and that any other condition is the result of your abnormal thinking.

The very next time you get discouraged or think that you are a failure, that your work does not amount to much—turn about face. Resolve that you will go no further in that direction. Stop and face the other way, and go the other way. Every time you think you are a failure it helps you to become one, for your thought is your life pattern, and you can not get away from your ideals, the standard which you hold for yourself. If you acknowledge in your thought that you are a failure, that you can't do anything worth while, that luck is against you, that you don't have the same

opportunity that other people have, your convictions will control the result.

When we give expression either in thought or word to the enemies of our achievement and happiness; when we talk about our troubles, trials, or misfortunes, tell and re-tell them over and over again to others; when we constantly describe and picture them in our thought, and dwell on them to the exclusion of everything else, we are making more and more real the things we want to drive out of our lives. We are etching these hideous images deeper and deeper on our minds, making it more and more difficult to erase them.

There is only one thing to do with the enemies of our happiness and our success, and that is to strangle them, neutralize them with their natural antidotes. There is only one thing to do with disagreeable, discouraging, despondent thoughts, and that is to get rid of them, to erase them as quickly as possible by holding their opposites in the mind.

If you try to find or to analyze the causes of your melancholy instead of fighting it, you will throw your mental doors wide open to the whole blue family. It is thinking of yourself, brooding over your troubles, dwelling upon the things that make you unhappy, that feeds despondency. The blues thrive on this kind of fare.

On the other hand, if you take a positive, determined stand against them, resolutely closing the

doors of your mind against them, you will overcome all the legions of the blue devils. They will give right up instead of fighting.

What tortures many people suffer from melancholia, low spirits, mental depression, despondency, just because they do not apply the remedies which would easily kill their deadly poisons! The faces of these victims of mental depression look as though the real man or woman had moved out, had descended from the throne of his will and allowed its enemies to reign.

If we realized what havoc a fit of the blues plays in our delicate brain and nerve tissues, we would make a most strenuous effort to strangle it at the very outset. There is nothing whatever to prevent our doing this. If we live perfectly normal lives, if we hold the right attitude of mind, there is no more necessity of any one being blue or discouraged, of going about with a gloomy, pessimistic face, than there is of committing a crime.

I do not believe there is a person in the world who can not in a few months overcome the worst mood or thought habits if he sets about it scientifically. When you resolve that you are not going to give up to a set of whims, that you are not going to be a slave to any enemy mood, when you come to the understanding with yourself that you are going to run your own affairs, and not be dictated to by the enemies of your success, everything physical and mental will fall into line with your aim.

When you get up in the morning, and everything looks blue, and when you do not feel like doing anything, when life doesn't seem worth while, then is your opportunity to have it out with your enemy. Fight it out on the spot. Say to yourself; "No matter how I feel, I am going to look on the bright side of things. I shall not let gloomy thoughts rule me to-day. I shall show these little mental enemies of mine that I am going to run my own mental workshop. The king is going to rule to-day and every day hereafter." Brace yourself at the start, and whenever you feel the inclination to gloom throughout the day, by following the prescription of a well-known physician for depressed, nervous patients—"Keep the corners of your mouth turned up."

'There is

"Just try turning up the corners of your mouth, regardless of your mood, and see how it makes you feel; then draw them down, and note the effect, and you will be willing to declare, something in it,'" says this physician. He has his patients remain in his office and smile. If it is not the genuine article, it must at least be an upward curvature of the corners of the mouth, and the better feelings invariably follow.

He says that if people will turn down the corners of their mouths and use sufficient will power they can actually shed tears. On the other hand, if they will keep the corners of their mouths turned up, pleasant thoughts will take the place of gloomy

ones.

His remedy for the blues is the fruit of experience in his own home. His wife was of a morbid temperament, and when she was despondent, he would ask her to smile a little, until the saying came to be a household joke; but it brought good results.

I know a man who had long been a victim of despondency who cured himself by adopting the smile remedy. He said to himself, "I have been miserable long enough. I have been handicapped all my life by this miserable habit of the blues, and now I am going to quit. I'll keep the corners of my mouth turned up, and I'll grin, no matter how I feel." This resolution proved his salvation. He persisted in smiling until he actually changed his mental attitude and became quite happy and cheerful. His changed outlook reacted favorably upon his business, which improved wonderfully, together with his health.

A woman who has had great affliction says: "I have had nothing I could give but myself, and so I made the resolution that I would never sadden any one with my troubles. I have laughed and told jokes when I could have wept. I have smiled in the face of every misfortune. I have tried to let every one go away from my presence with a happy word and a bright thought to carry with them. Happiness makes happiness, and I myself am happier than I would have been had I sat down and bemoaned my fate."