THE HOME CIRCLE | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 7, 1878

THE HOME CIRCLE.

Pretty Ladies.

THREE young men, who, being on their summer vacation, had leisure to be a little silly, were standing in front of a country postoffice waiting for the opening of the mail.

Around them stood a group of young rustics, admiring, bashfully, their stylish hats, boots, and canes, and listening with suppressed smiles to their conversation.

But there was one little fellow of five years who was not abashed by their grandeur. With the independence of the genuine Yankee he stood close to them, making moulds of his little fat feet in the sand, and whistling merrily as he looked up at them through "His torn brim's jaunty grace."

At length, for want of a fresh topic one of the young strangers remarked, "There are a good many pretty ladies here!"

This touched a spring in the breast of the little boy; and he asked, "Do you like to look at pretty ladies?"

"Yes, sir, I do," was the reply of the young man, as he grasped the old palmleaf hat, and the hair under it, and gave the little fellow a playful shake.

"Well, then," said Sammy, "you just ought to come down to our house!"

Everybody in the little group laughed, and the young man asked, "have you got some pretty sisters?"

"I haint got any sisters at all," was the reply.

"Cousins?"

"Yes, but they're all boys."

"Oh, you keep city boarders?"

"No, we don't, neither! My mother won't be bothered with them, they're so fussy" said Sammy, innocently.

"Then who are these pretty ladies?" asked one of the gentlemen.

"Who? why, they are ma and grandma. You just ought to see them; they are just as pretty as they can be—ain't they now, Billy?" he asked of a big brother, whose face turned crimson at the question.

"Well, they are the prettiest ladies in this town," repeated Sammy.

If the city youths had accepted Sammy's challenge they would have found two plain women in cheap print gowns, one going her household ways and making her small cottage cheerful and tidy; and the other busily "seating and kneeing" coarse pants for four romping boys!

On each face sat that calm cheerfulness that gives beauty to the plainest features; and through eyes not beautiful there shone a gentle love that made them lovely to those who called that cottage "home."

Little Sam was right. These two were, for him, "the prettiest ladies in that town;" and in the days to come, when their "beauty" shall have vanished away, and when he sees what the world calls "beauty," he will look back and sigh for those patient eyes and those approving lips.

Boys, there are no faces in the world so beautiful, in the true sense of the word, as your mother's; no eyes that kindle like theirs, and no lips that wear such smiles at your coming and your well-doing.

One who never prized his mother's beauty till it had faded in the grave, wrote:— "I have been at the revel, In lordly halls at night; And lovely eyes have on me shone With youthful, brilliant light. But oh, to memory more divine Those pale, meek, weeping eyes of thine." —Watchman.