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Show NewLightp -'-jbn Saint Some people are so unfortunate as to have gained their first Impressions of St. Patrick from the rollicking old song which bears his name. I was one of them, but I received a new light on St. Patrick from one of whose ancestral an-cestral country he was the patron saint, and now, whenever a flippant thought of the good saint comes to mind, there comes also a picture of the reverential face of a little Irish woman who kept a shop in an old Missouri Mis-souri town, a pleasant shop with a flower garden to the rear. On a certain spring day when the elm trees in the courthouse yard across from the shop had begun "a-wearin' "a-wearin' o' the green," and the shop windows were decorated with shamrocks, sham-rocks, some young people entered the shop seeking favors and games for a St. Patrick's day party. They especially espe-cially desired a comic head of St. Patrick, Pat-rick, the sort that has a wide-open mouth, into which blindfolded players attempt to toss potatoes. They found no such pictures In that shop, and after the other customers had left the proprietor said to me, with a sweet tone of tolerance softening the indignation indig-nation that was mirrored on her face: "Those girls are merely thoughtless. They do not realize their irreverence. But suppose someone should plan a party for Washington's birthday and should have a caricature of our great liberator and throw cherries into the mouth. Think what an uproar of condemnation con-demnation there would be ! It Is a great deed to bring civil liberty to a country, and likewise it is great, as St. Patrick did, to strike the shackles of paganism from the souls of a people and cause the truths of Christianity to shine upon them." Then for me was stripped from St. Patrick's name all the impossible stories sto-ries with which tradition has clustered it, and St. Patrick the man, human and. kindly, brave and gallant, a missionary mis-sionary of the very first order, stood out to view. B. E. P., in the Kansas City Star. |