printed tissue guard copy: “All you have to do to be happy is to make other folks happy”

This plate also reproduced as a photogravure: The Orchard, 1905 in Camera Work IX  (1905)

Essay: Happiness

“THE way to be happy-is just to be happy.
Happiness is a sort of mental radium that saturates the universe, and if you go far enough and deep enough you can find it everywhere. Happiness is as subtle and ethereal as the vapor on the mountain top, and it is as real and tangible as the granite boulder. A little child may hold it fast in his tiny arms, while it will escape from the grasp of a strong man as thin air runs through his fingers.
Happiness is mind-stuff. All you have to do to be happy is to make other folks happy, because there is a sort of double back-action to happiness-you can’t create it for some one else without having it return to you. It is the dove of human kindness-it always flutters back to the old ark. And, after all, happiness is made up of little things-a smile, a hand-clasp, a word, a look-they carry the message of happiness to many a weary traveler.
There is a house of happiness built by a few contented souls, on a road that runs through every quiet little town and bustling city, where every one passes and where every one can see it; and this house has a door which is never closed, so that all can enter who wish. But it is built of a peculiar material and has a strange color that fuses with other things, so that thousands pass it every day without seeing it. And yet the children and the newsboys and many a wanderer with his pack slip quietly through the doorway into this hospitable place.
And if you should chance upon it and should enter beneath its friendly roof to rest and sup, and to feel its strange spell of comfort and peace steal over you, you would find yourself-at your own fireside, of course! And that is the place, after all, where happiness finds its fullest expression-in the home.
And the foundation of many a home was begun the day the savings account was started. There is nothing that grows so surely as money, and there is no surer way to lay the foundation of happiness for to-day and to-morrow and for the years to come than the methodical saving from the daily income. And the best and safest way to save is to put your money in the Rochester Trust and Safe Deposit Company, where it will earn 4 per cent. interest. Money does not burn a hole in the Trust Company’s pocket, as it does in the pockets of some folks.”