hile the physician pried
open the set teeth and poured the liquid down his throat. Under these
circumstances it is probable that the remedy proved worse than the
disease.

I have not space to do more than touch upon the great influence of
early training on the future life. All my days I have been thankful
for the gentle but firm hand that, as a child, taught me moral
courage, self-denial and submission. The temptations of life have been
more easily resisted, the trials more lightly borne, because of the
years in which I was in training for the race set before me. We do not
want to enter our children on the course as unbroken, "soft" and wild
colts, whose spirits must be crushed before they will submit to the
work assigned them. They may be young, yet strong; spirited, yet
gentle; patient, yet resolute.

CHAPTER XXIV.

GETTING ALONG IN YEARS.

"Does your husband think a full beard becoming to him?" asked I of a
young wife.

Her twenty-three-year-old lord, whose good-looking face had been
adorned and made positively handsome by a sweeping brown moustache,
had, since our last meeting, "raised" an uneven crop of reddish
whiskers that shortened a face somewhat too round, and altogether
vulgarized what had been refined.

"No, indeed! He knows, as I do, that it disfigures him. It is a
business necessity to which he sacrificed vanity. The appearance of
maturity carries weight in the commercial world. His beard adds ten
years to his real age."

Being in an audience collected to hear an eminent clergyman last
summer, I heard an astonished gasp behind me, as the orator arose:

"Why he has shaved off his beard! How like a round oily man of God he
looks!"

"True," said another, "but fifteen years younger. He is getting along
in years, you see, and wants to hide the fact."

The last speaker sat opposite to me at the hotel table that day, and
in discussing the leader of the morning service, repeated the phrase
that had jarred upon my ear.

"It is fatal to a clergyman's popularity and to a woman's hopes to be
suspected of getting along in years."

I told the story of my bearded youth and asked:

"Where then is the safe ground? When is it altogether reputable for
one to declare his real age?"

"Oh, anywhere from thirty to forty-five! Before and after that term
life can hardly be said to be worth the living."

I smiled, as the rattler meant I should. But the words have stayed by
me, the more persistently tha