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6
Worth Womans While
Grandmother Was Too Old.
She was a lovely young girl, -with face like a flow
er, cheeks of the soft,-delicate tint sometimes spoken
of as shell pink, and a sweet mouth that smiled
when she did not even know. She is a lovely girl—
we will pu it that way—for it is but a short time
since we saw her, and joyed in the beautiful uncon
sciousness of her innocent presence, and grieved at
the thoughtlessness which wounds as surely as the
most wilful intent. That her heart is as lovely as
her face we are sure, not only from the guilelessness
of her expression, but the utter absence of self-con
sciousness in manner, which more than anything in
the world attests the absence also of selfishness or
vanity that being on the inside we are apt to imag
ine hidden. For youth to be unaware of itself is
so unusual in this day of its usurpation that such
modesty is more than beautiful. We do not know
when we have been so attracted to a little girl, and
yet—it was what she said of her grandmother that
made us sad.
“I’m not going to live to be as old as my grand
mother—l just won’t do it!” she said. “Why,
she’s so funny!”
“But, my dear,” remonstrated an older person
present, “if we live long enough we will all be just
like her, only not so lovely; for old ladies like your
dear grandmother are of a kind that will soon be no
more. When you and I are old we will have her fun
ny ways but not her loveliness—by that time there
won’t be any old-fashioned ladies, so we can’t hope
to be as sweet as she is. Yet we will surely be old—
we must remember that! ’ ’
“Oh, but I won’t be as old as she is—l won’t do
it! Now, she’s so economical—all these things that
are left here” (we were seated at table) “she would
put away, everything on a separate dish. She won’t
throw out anything, and you can’t lift a dish cover
but there is a biscuit, sometimes so hard you’d have
to take a hammer to break it. It makes so many
soiled dishes—l wouldn’t do that for anything—if
I was very rich I wouldn’t save anything!”
“But when you have lived as long as your grand
mother,” pursued the friend gently, “and have
seen as much of the world as she has, you will feel
differently. She remembers the war times, when
people who hadn’t been very rich couldn’t get things
to eat. And she thinks of the poor, even very near
to her, who are actually hungry, and no one remem
bering these things could bear to waste even a mor
sel. Suppose you can’t send it directly away to the
hungry ones, still you cannot bring yourself to throw
away—to wilfully waste, when you know there are
those who would be grateful of the very things you
do not want. Don’t you recall the five hundred
thousand persons who died by starvation that Rus
kin speaks of in 1 Sesame and Lilies,’ though w>
don’t have to go so far away to find suffering and
even death from hunger? Your grandmother in her
long life has learned things and she thinks of them
and of all the wide world, and her individual life
is shaped not according to what she can afford
do, but with the thought in her mind of the needs
that she knows exist—not that she can hope to re
lieve them, but her conscience is of too high an or
der to let her forget them. You will understand
when you are older and have seen more of life, as
she has.”
“Grandmother is good,” conceded the girl, “and
just does everything she can for anybody who comes
to the house”—she is a sweet child, and only
thoughtless—“but I’m not going to be as old as
she is—l just told mamma I wouldn’t do it!”
Who could help smiling? ‘She just told mamma
she wouldn’t grow old like grandmother! What
could it be but thoughtlessness? Yet how heartless
it sounded. And old people can be wounded by the
most unthinking words of even young children, es
pecially the children whose love and filial duty they
have a right to expect.
The Golden Age for July 5, 1906.
By FLORENCE TUCKER
We heard the friend say in parting, “Give our
love to your grandmother, dear; and remember, she
would die if she could—she knows how you feel
about it, and it hurts her heart.”
The words sounded abrupt, almost harsh; but we
realized they were meant to make the child think,
and could only hope they would. The poor grand
mothers! They were just mothers once, and instead
of having a double mothers the double weed of af
fection it really seems they have taken away what
they had—what love their children once gave them
is diverted to their own offspring, and grandmother,
from appearances in too many instances, may be
described or defined to be or to mean, “She who is
not needed any longer, and were better out of the
way, because she is funny, but most of all because
she is old.”
It was such a simple thing that annoyed the girl—
“grandmother was so economical”—and her ways
were “funny,” so, from her point of view, she had
lived too long, and it were high time she left off.
God in Heaven! what can mothers be thinking of?
Experience the Only Way to Under
standing.
A little condition of circumstance is, when all is
said and done, the only way to an adequate under
standing of what another passes through. We are
not slow to see fault or error, and scarcely slower to
condemn, but it is safe to say that in many instances,
if not in most, censure would be far from us could
we understand through our own experience the
struggle and fall of him we criticise. What appears
wilful wrong on the outside is too often weakness
that was not able to cope with the circumstances
that finally bore it down, or—alas! for the fate
that permits it—the force of a stronger and an
overpowering personality. What we would have
done in his place we can only imagine unless we have
actually lived through it ourselves; and imagination
is not to be relied on, as we find when our own test
conies.
It is a question whether we do not most of us
mis-estimate ourselves. Where the lines have been
favorable to us we fancy that we are different from
some whose lot has withheld from them the things
which we take it have made for our broader and
higher development. Because opportunity has been
ours and we have not been called upon to suffer
certain deprivations or hardships, we imagine that
we are a different order of persons, not considering
whether the very advantages we accept as our bet
ter portion have made of us the beings we suppose
ourselves to be—whether we are in reality what we
appear to our own partial fancy.
The thing was brought to our consciousness very
forcibly a day or two ago in the comment of one
woman on another, both of whom have the misfor
tune to be married to men addicted to drink. One
considers herself ill-used, and imagining that her
rights can only be realized in what appears to her
the glory of “society,” she turns her back on her
husband whom she uses only as a means to forward
her purposes, and leaving her children to grow up as
best they may, plunges headlong into frivolities and
gayeties of a kind that brings upon her the stric
tures and condemnation of all who know her and
the unhappiness of the home of which she should
he the heart and center.
She looks with scorn upon this other woman who
has clung desperately to duty and hope, while the
fortunes of her little home have sunk deeper and
deeper, and the fountains of her life been drained
to the dregs—faithful to the man who has robbed
her of every hope, and even comfort, while she la
bored with her hands to support him and their
child. This other woman whom burdening care
and broken health and spirit have left no time for
the cultivation of thought through books and reading
and other channels, who is even denied the privilege
of the Sabbath and the sanctuary. She whose time
and thought have been given to her own person and
to social conquest, despises her neighbor with her
poor dress and her daily toil and her faithfulness
to duty. She fancies herself so far higher in the
scale that there can be no points of similarity in
their experience, let alone sympathy. Yet this is
what the other one said of her:
“I can sympathize with her. Nobody can under
stand except one who has a drunken husband. I
can see how she gradually came to where she is.
If you have no God, and haven’t got it in you to set
tle down at home and be useful, you are just led
into it, further and further before you know. Why,
sometimes when I go out, with my husband drunk
at home, I am ashamed to hold up my head—even
when I meet people who can’t possibly know it, I
feel cowed. I can understand—and nobody can un
derstand who hasn’t gone through it herself.”
Simple, homely words—yet what depth of com
prehension, what broad, deep charity! She had her
self been true, but she could see how the shallower
nature found it impossible to be so. Her trouble
bows her head while that of the other woman, empty
and giddy, is flaunted shamelessly before a world
that estimates her at her real worth. If she is
dazzled by the trappings in which she arrays her
self, and the small measure of whnt to her is social
success, no one else is—even her poorer neighbor
pities her, and hers is the better portion, after all,
for it has brought wisdom and charity. To think
of ourselves as we ought to think, and to strive
to learn charity, through what we ourselves would
do under like conditions—that is the secret of all
proper living. Happily we are not called on all
alike to suffer certain things. Yet when it is re
membered that experience is so much the same, the
difference is more in degree, it seem strange we
should so overshoot the mark in self-estimation or
the condemnation of another.
Physician Prescribed a Hobby.
We remember reading once of a physician who had
a patient come to him with a malady difficult to
locate, and after unsuccessful inquiry and diagno
sis, the great man asked this .question:
“Have you a hobby? Do you collect anything—
china, or anything at all?”
“No,” was the answer. “I have no hobby, no
collection of any sort, nor anything of the kind.
I don’t care for such things.”
“Well, ” said the physician, “get you a hobby.
It doesn’t matter what it is, but get a hobby col-
lect something, just anything, but have a hobby!”
And that was all the prescription he gave. What
the patient needed was interest, a live, active in
terest in something to waken her energies, and the
physician prescribed for the member affected—the
mind—rather than the stomach or head. We have
thought of it often, and the wisdom has become
moie and more apparent to us. We become worn
om with the humdrum of every-day routine, and
the apathy whch ensues cannot be reached by
dings. Instead of a tonic, it is a stimulus we need,
and it is perfectly immaterial what, so that it be
natuial ano wholesome—no artificial excitement,
nothing that leaves us with the shadow of mental
exhaustion or disappointment.
The baneful effects of monotony are as fateful
as indisputable, and it is wonderful the power that
a little pleasant interest has to dissipate these and
rouse us to new life. Hobbies are not for the idle
alone, as may sometimes be supposed—to none are
they so beneficial and so truly a blessing as to the
o\ei woi tied, either in body or mind. Anything to
which we can turn for relaxation, for a wholesome
recreation from sameness or tax, whether it be a
collection, ar Howers, or pets, or fancy work—any
thing that we do, and realize that we do, simply
for pleasure, is good for us,