A Beautiful Picture by William A. McKeever

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 28, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 25.

A Beautiful Picture

By William A. McKeever

[From "Training the Girl to Help in the Home," by William A. McKeever, Professor of Philosophy at the Kansas State Agricultural College, Manhattan]

GO WHERE you will throughout the length and breadth of this fair land of ours, and I challenge you to find among the children of men a more pleasing aspect than that of a smiling, rosy-cheeked, twelve-year-old girl garbed in a neat, loose-fitting house dress and a dainty white apron, while with a snowy tea towel in her hand she is engaged in drying the dinner dishes.

It is much to be regretted that we do not give its just measure of honor and praise to this exalted home life. There is certainly need of a great poet, or painter, or artist, or all of these, who will, by means of their high art, divert the attention of many young girls from the airy phantoms which they are now chasing, and help them to fix their affections upon the things that make for more substantial character.

If our novel writers and magazine artists would cease painting so many pictures of precocious, love-sick debutantes and pampered, sentimental summer girls, and would give us more illustrations of such types as the sturdy, simply-clad young home maker and the rosy-cheeked, unpretentious country maid of the better sort, they would thus contribute not a little to the moral and spiritual uplift of the race.—The Industrialist.