THE MOLE UPON THE NOSE

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 30, 1888

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 14, No. 13.

THE MOLE UPON THE NOSE.

A WELL-KNOWN clergyman in New York relates the following story of his visit in that city to a fashionable school for young ladies:—

One of the young ladies in the senior class had an unfortunate blemish in the shape of a mole on the tip of her nose. It could not be removed. It could not be put out of sight. There was nothing unclean or disgraceful about it; yet, trifle as it was, it forced itself on the notice of every stranger as the chief characteristic of the girl.

She was pretty, modest, and clever; but beauty, modesty, and wit were all obscured and subordinated by this one paltry defect. Her classmates expressed much sympathy in speaking of her to strangers, but were evidently quite confident that they had no such blemish.

Now, one of these young ladies prefaced every sentence with a sharp "Say!" like the

stroke of a gong: "Say! I think it is raining;" "Say! I know nothing about mathematics," etc.

Another of the girls stitched her sentences together by, "You know": "You know, I have such news to tell you! I was out yesterday at Laura's, and I met her brother, you know, and he says that his cousin, you know, is actually engaged to Isabel."

A third bit her nails, and at every pause in the conversation fell to devouring them as furiously as a famished dog a bone. The spectator felt an almost irresistible desire to bring her something to eat.

Still another young girl in the school interjected an utterly vacant laugh into every clause of a sentence. She sat next to the venerable clergyman at supper, and her conversation ran something in this wise: "Won't you have some jumbles, doctor? They're very nice, he, he. I heard you preach, once last summer, up in the Catskills. The sermon was on the sacrifice of St. Simeon, he, he. It made me cry, he, he, he, he!"

Now this poor girl had no wish to be irreverent, or even merry. She probably did not know that she laughed at all. Her inane giggle, like the catch-words used by her companions, had been adopted at first to cover a childish diffidence. No parent or friend had corrected the foolish, ill-bred habit, and a personal peculiarity of this kind is a matter of which no stranger will speak.

"Yet these little peculiarities," said the doctor, "like the mole on the nose, were impertinently obtrusive. These girls had good looks, scholarship, and lovable natures; yet the one vulgar, silly habit was the point which forced itself on a stranger, and it was that mainly by which they were remembered."

It would be a wise question for every young girl to ask of her nearest friend if she too has this mole upon her nose.—Youth's Companion.