to be more beautiful. And because the trees of the
forest go forward toward October and death arrayed in their brightest
robes, we have a right to expect that man in his old age also will
reach the highest beauty and perfection.

But not so. Man's history has been a history of selfishness and sin,
and his body bears the marks thereof. His features are "seamed by
sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by
poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded by remorse." Men's bodies are
consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease,
dishonored by foul uses, until beholding the "marks" of character in
the natural face in a glass multitudes would fain forget what manner
of men they are. For the human face is a canvas, and nature's writing
goes ever on. But as the wrong act or foul deed sets its seal of
distortion on the features, so the right act or true thought sets its
stamp of beauty. There is no cosmetic for homely folks like character.
Even the plainest face becomes beautiful in noble and radiant moods.
He who ever beholds the vision of Christ's face will at last so take
on the likeness of his Master as to bear about in his body also "the
marks of the Lord Jesus."

Consider the habits and the unconscious desires as marks of character.
When Arnold of Rugby took his boys for a holiday to London he found
the revelators of personality in the objects which they first visited.
The youth who had spent each spare moment in sketching made his way
immediately to the gallery. Young Stanley, even then brooding upon
moral themes, turned his face toward the abbey, whose fame he was to
augment. The eager aspirant for political honors rushed toward the
houses of Parliament. Thus also the students of physiognomy try to
catch the subject off his guard, when the unconscious and habitual
lines appear in the face. The kind of books one loves to read, the
amusements one seeks, the friends he chooses, are all revelators.
Recently an English traveler published a volume of impressions
concerning America. Finding little to praise, the traveler finds much
to criticise and blame. During his two or three weeks' sojourn in our
cities, he tells us that he found sights and scenes that would shame
Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoans the fact that in this young, fresh
land things should be as bad as in London and Paris, whither the scum
and wrecks of society have drifted.

What a revelation! not of the city, but of the critic himse