A Beautiful Home-Life

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 28, 1902

A Beautiful Home-Life

A TEMPERANCE speaker relates, in Young People, a bit of experience that is as interesting as it is suggestive. She was to speak at a certain small town, where she arrived in the afternoon. At the station the visitor was met by the president of the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a soft-voiced woman with a young face beneath silver hair.

As the two ladies were riding along the shady street, pupils from the public school began to throng the sidewalks.

At a crossing a bright-faced boy stood waiting for the ladies to pass, and lifted his cap with a courteous gesture and sunny smile.

The hostess leaned from the carriage with a pleasant greeting, and the gray cap covered the brown curls again as they drove on. “One of your Sunday-school class?” ventured the speaker.

“No,” replied the hostess; “my only son, Harry.”

As they approached the home, they nearly overtook a young girl of about fourteen, and a middle-aged man, walking briskly. The man was listening in a deferential way to the girl’s merry chatter. At the gate they paused; the man lifted his hat in a parting salutation, as he held the gate for the girl to precede him; then bowing, he passed on.

“This is our home; that is my husband.”

“And you have another guest, or, is the young lady a caller?” asked the speaker.

“That is our Margaret, our eldest. She and her father are great chums.”

That evening, at the daintily appointed tea-table, the youngest child, a bashful girl of seven or eight years, had the misfortune to drop and break a fragile piece of china. Her face crimsoned with distress, and the violet eyes lifted to her mother’s face were large with gathering tears. The speaker winced, dreading discordant notes where all had been harmonious. “I hope they will not send her away in disgrace—poor little thing!” her thoughts ran. But even as she thought, with perfect

courtesy the mother spoke the same conventional words of reassurance which she would have used had the honored guest broken the cup. Seeing the quivering lip of her cherished child,—her guest from God,—she added softly, “Mother knows you are sorry, dearest. Just let it pass, and overcome it,” while the father, with ready tact, engaged the speaker in conversation.

The speaker was charmed. That evening, walking with another white-ribboner, she could not resist saying, “Your president seems wonderfully blest in her children.”

“Yes, but she has anxieties as well as the rest of us,” was the unexpected reply. “Margaret has grown so winning that even the college boys would walk round by the high school to walk and talk with her, until her father quietly happened to be returning from the courthouse to his office, past their house, every time. Yes, it does take his time; but he is queer. He thinks that is one of the things his time is for. He thinks it pays.”—Selected.