The following is from the Christian Register:
A hospital is not generally supposed to be a very cheerful place, and yet some of the most cheerful people I have ever met have been in hospitals. The fact that they have had to suffer some severe physical subtraction, such as the loss of an arm, a hand, a foot, or a leg, did not seem to trouble them. They seemed to think, as Emerson did concerning the world, that they could get on very well without it. Last week at the hospital I came upon a pleasant group of cripples. One of them had a broken leg, another had two broken legs, the third had lost his right leg, and his right arm was badly damaged and was held in a sling. All the injuries were the result of different railroad accidents. The injured were all grateful for the Flower Mission workers and the singers who go to cheer them on Sunday. The jolliest man of them all was the one who had lost his leg, and whose arm on the same side was crippled. His only hope was that it would get well enough so that he might use a crutch; and, if hope and cheerfulness can bring this about, the crutch is pretty well assured. So regnant did the mind seem to be above the body that I felt that, after all, a leg or an arm is a small thing compared with a whole-souled man. I have seen half-souled or quarter-souled people living in great bodies with all their limbs and appurtenances, yet seeming to wobble about in their bodies because their souls were not big enough to fill them. And such people are often found among the chronic grumblers. It might be a good thing to send them to a hospital now and then, save that we ought not to subject the patients to any such infliction. I came away feeling that the true spirit of gratitude and the cheer that goes with it is one of the grandest endowments of life.
