"First our pleasures, die--and then
Our hopes, and then our fears--and when
These are dead, the debt is due
Dust claims dust--and we die too."

It is bitter mockery to say that the man who struggles for daily bread
is happy. He may do his work uncomplainingly, but he cannot be happy. He
gets to be but little better that a machine and does his work
mechanically, perhaps never looking into his own heart, to ask the
question, "Is this a happy life?" Some writer has said that there are
two classes of people, those who are driven to death and those who are
bored to death. There can be no sympathy between the rich and poor.
There is an impassible gulf that can never be crossed. The man who has
never known the want of money cannot know the sorrows and struggles of
the poor. Each must go his own way, the poor man to his pallet of straw;
the rich man to his bed of down.

In the world of dreams all are equal. It is an unreal world, true, but
to many it is the happiest. In it there are no distinctions. The woman
who is old and wrinkled and gray, who has known nothing but hard work
and sorrow in this world, in the land of dreams finds pleasure she has
never known. In spirit, she is in pleasant places, carried back perhaps
to scenes she loved in childhood, to the old home; sees pleasant faces
of the almost forgotten dead, is carried above and beyond the world of
reality into the dim shadowy land of dreams. Then comes the waking, and
with the waking the regret of what "might have been."

In this land of dreams the rich may travel with the poor, may revisit
the same old scenes, see the same faces of the dead, leave all that is
"earth earthy," and the spirit or soul wander abroad, over land and seas