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Show j THE IDEAL CIRL. She Cannot Help Hrloff a I.lfr llrlg-htener to the World. The ideal girl is God's sweet promise of a perfected womanhood. We all know her. There may be clouds without with-out and within, yet when her bright face looks in at the door it is like sunshine sun-shine after a summer rain. In some strange, sweet way she seems to bring with her the beauty of dew-laden flowers and the robbin's song of welcome wel-come to the returning sun. She sets us dreaming of the days when life's heaviest burden was the finding of pleasures to beguile the long midsummer mid-summer days. Again we sit by the brook in which, forgetful of maternal warnings, we converse with the sleepy-eyed sleepy-eyed violets and the wee finny people of the brook. Again flowers and birds have souls and wo understand their language all because this ideal girl, whose every word and look is instinct with the soul of nature, has come into our room and brought with her the child's soul and the child's happy faith that between it and every living thing there is a subtle bond of sisterhood. (ioing down Washington street the other day, says a writer in the Chicago Tribune. I saw the ideal girl. An old colored woman, bent with suffering and poverty, was walking painfully along the slippery sidewalk and suddenly lost her footing, and her basket and parcels were scattered beneath the feet of the hurrying pedestrians. Some men whose neckties were whiter than their hearts laughed as they stepped gingerly over the scattered parcels. Rut just then there came along one of my ideal girls, so young and beautiful that the white-cravatted men impudently turned around to look after her. She stopped beside the prostrate woman, wo-man, helped her to her feet and gathered gath-ered up her scattered parcels, and all so quietly and quickly that the woman stood looking after her in wonder as if she were an apparition. The old colored woman may have crooned out to her what she looked '-God bless you" or it may be even in this Christian Christ-ian city she had never heard tho name of God; but we may be sure that with her wearied and darkened soul there flashed a ray of divine light and love that warmed and quickened whatever germ of good were latent in her heart. |