The age-herald., 1901-04-21

| personally known to a multitude of those who heed these successive pleas for truth and goodness, who, after many years, still wears the black weeds of her death- less faith and love, and who was in the beginning and still remains better than any man whose faltering footsteps ever pursued the ways of this life outside the offices of Gods ministers. She is, in her wide humanity and in her superlative goodness of heart, in the abundant sweet l ness and the all-embracing charity of her pure and lofty soul, saint in the saint l ly virtues of truest womanhood; one who was pure of heart and unspotted from the l world in the beginning, who is so now, and who will remain so unto the end a woman whom afrliction has not embit- tered, who laughs and rejoices, and whom strong men of world-experience swear by as the best mother in the world. their own mothers gone to join the invisible choir | of heaven!
 l Whose gathers not love and experience from so blessed a mother; whose sees not in her the incarnation of human faith and loyalty and devotion and who re- ceives not from her holy example some- thing of the divine faith of wife and mother, he knows not and cannot know in this life anything of the angelic quail ity of womans purity and faith, and un- questioning, unasking devotion! l Listen!
 | Upon a sunlit place, an hour past high noon, a young maiden, one who had not | yet reached womanhood, was playing with and teasing a little child that was laughing in it's childish glee, it's first three or four white teeth gleaming white be- twixt the red lips of innocence. The child was cooing in it's gladness, offspring of a noble womanhood and true manhood. laughing and not afraid, in the divine abandon of infancy.
 In this world there cannot be anything more beautiful, nothing purer than that! To wayfaring man. long weary of the cheaper burdens of this life, the child cooed and shook it's little hand as if beck oning, and the maiden laughed and hailed in the confidence of trust that was sa- | cred.
 In the world we call ours there could not be presented to any man a scene more stood uncovered as if in the presence of something holy.
 The child represented to him the glory of a maidenhood he reverenced in the days that are dead; the maiden was to him the glory of the living present, which. too, shall pass and become part of splendid memories of pure women that constitute the unsurpassable riches of a life that has loved and has not asked. As he stood there observing every move ment of the maiden, and of the child of her to whom as maiden he had pended the knee of reverence in the years gone by, there was new song in his soul, a new prayer in his heart. The child, pure creation of pure hearts that love one an other. and the maiden, divine in maiden loveliness; these told a story heard around the world since the Christ-Child came to bless and to save!
 The child cooed; the maiden laughed; and, in her superlative loveliness as she, in innocence and purity and truth. bend ed in unsurpassabie loveliness above the cradle of one soul born of others, the wayfaring man crossed himself in ben ediction before the things of his own loves and unasking fdelityi With noth- ing to ask for himself, he adored the pos- sessions of others That often comes in this life, comes to those who loveth best aaG prayeth best.
 Loves old sweet song burst out and rung with glee when two of the blessed trinity, Faith and Charity, came together in the lamplight that gilded the tufted floor, some of their worshipers there.
 Faith, looking so like an old-world pie ture, seen long ago and far away, that the spirit of classic reverence of the class ical was aroused and made ten-fold stronger by the living presence of sur passing beauty in naidenly dignity and undiscoverable repose, Faith gave voice to laughter and earthly semblance to joy and whoso saw Faith swore by her glad ness, and by her unmelting purity of purpose and of actioni
 Charity was wide-eyed in her wonder ment and as true to that which was pure in the sight of maidenly modesty and sweetness as fidelity Is to faithfulness and her laughter there was the ring of a spirit that was without knowledge of any wrong, uttered or unexpressed. acted or dreamed of in the splendid reach of her dreams or her visions!
  ! To these types we call and by them