Nor do I forget that the things I tell girls at home here to do, may not altogether apply to those in Australia or Africa. Never mind, I try to do my best. Who can do more?
And now, first and foremost, I must wish you all a very healthy New Year. This is from my heart. Dinna forget that. For, if you have health, you are bound to have happiness, so long as shocks of grief and real sorrow keep aloof. Even then, if you are strong, you will be better able to withstand these, than if you were chicken-hearted and weakly.
There is one symptom of weakness, by the way, that is often over-looked. A girl may be as fresh and bonnie as a thistle or a rose, yet if she is too sensitive and too sentimental she cannot be really well. Over-sensitiveness may be caused in a good many ways, but it is very apt to lead on to hysteria, and this is a very serious ailment.
I am not going to repeat to you all the various rules of health I have already, in these columns, laid down scores of times, for the very best of dishes may be served up once too often.
Just one thing, however, I must mention, and you may consider me talking figuratively or not, as you please.
I have a pet swift--the biggest kind of swallow that visits this country--but, being a pet, he never leaves me more than twelve hours at a time, and in that brief space he may have flown one thousand miles, and perhaps visited the rooms of more than one hundred of my girl readers. He can speak various languages almost as well as Rougemont, and a little nearer to the truth, and I sit up to listen to him sometimes till long past twelve at night.
Dinna forget to look out for my birdie. He can see you when you little know of it. But one thing which he has recently told me is that a very large number of you have given up your bath, to which I fondly fancied I had inured you. This vexed me a deal; but you will promise to begin it again very soon, won't you? It is the greatest invigorator of the muscles and nervous system in the world. So "dinna forget."
Dinna forget that colds and coughs are rampant about this time of the year. I am writing these lines long before Christmas, and I have been prophesying for England an open winter. But dinna forget that a green Yule makes a fat kirkyard, and colds are more easily caught from the green cold earth and the damp cold winds than even from frost and snow. The more you are out-of-doors in snow-time--which ought to be glow-time--the better you will be, provided you are not too warmly and heavily clad and do not wear india-rubber clothing in any shape or form.