What is good looking, as Horace Smith
remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,--generous in
your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my
word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration. Loving and
pleasant associations will gather about you. Never mind the ugly
reflection which your glass may give you. That mirror has no heart.
But quite another picture is yours on the retina of human sympathy.
There the beauty of holiness, of purity, of that inward grace which
passeth show, rests over it, softening and mellowing its features just
as the full calm moonlight melts those of a rough landscape into
harmonious loveliness. "Hold up your heads, girls!" I repeat after
Primrose. Why should you not? Every mother's daughter of you can be
beautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and
intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look
forth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the
cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women of
Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessities
with kindness and gentle words of compassion. Lovely to the homesick
heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and
simple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the white
stranger, who had "no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind him
corn.
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