The evening Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1918-1920, 1919-02-25


Girl Socially
There's a girl in the office wants
a job!" announced Mr. Nimrod Briggs
compositor, returning to the back
room with his fingers full of proofs.
We went into the front office. A
girl in pitifully plain clothing and a
pale, pretty face, stood on the other
side of the battered counter.
1t was our first view of Mary
Wood. Many years have passed since
that far-off Spring forenoon. We
have seen Mary in many different
places, under many cruel Circumstance
cs, resolutely facing many hard stu
ations in life, mostly with a smile on
her face. But as we saw her in that
Office that morning, she was the Mary
Wood we have liked best to remen4-
ber-before care and anxiety and
had levied its price, taken its pound
of flesh from her heart and the soft
bloom from her features-before
disappointment and cruel suffering
and noble effort had changed her
from that gentle-faced blushing girl,
surprised in the presence of strang-
crs,-into the typical American wife
and mother.
A man remembers a woman, not
H by her hair or her eyes or her voice
alone, for all women possess these
things. A man remembers a woman
by the way she moves. The sweet
hearts of our boyhood,- we remem-
Der them as we saw them coming
down lane in the summer sunset
or along village street rooted with
maples-or we recollect the motion
of delicate fingers deity plying small
yellow old piano keys that produced
1 those haunting melodies of long ago.
The toss of head, the carriage of
shoulder, the motion of hand-so
they have remained with US, personal
4 tiles which the years have failed to
81 eradicate or dissolve with the passing
4 of familiar scenes or long-forgotten
Ii hours.
And we remember Mary Wood that
day, not so much for the soft brown
hair parted on the fair high forehead,
nor the lines of her graceful figure
nor the sweet patient frightened look
\ deep in her dark eyes but for the
s graceful way in which she came over
and begged for work and the chance
to earn living for herself.
She got it!
n Mary went to work for US immedi-
lately, "learning the case"
Sam got her a boarding place with
ono Mrs. Mathers, widowed lady,
who ran a boarding house on School
street
The first few days slipped away
8 by Saturday she could get up fairly
stable string of locals
And she tried to "fnd herself in
our community.
1t was something of Il novelty in
those days for women to be employ
cd in printing offices. Our news
napers of those years were produced
nj by iourneymen printers, popularity
Ed k1OWn as my WCIC
strange loveable souls, more or less
out of plumb with the world around
them, who drifted from place to place,
staying only long enough to earn the
wherewithal to finance them further
n their wanderlust Most of them
e drank to excess. They could thor
Hughly be relied upon to demand en-
ployrnent when there was no more
work than the regular staff could
handle and equally faithfully they laid
Town on the job or moved onward
lust when work was burying the office
bud they were needed most.
1t oceasioned some talk therefore
N the village when Sam Hold depart
I'd from the traditions of the profess
sion and sought local girls to do his
ivpesetting as being lenendabIe, all
the-year-rouud work-folk. This talk
was revived when it became known
that the Wood girl after humiliat-
ing experience with drunken step