aughter of the
great French preacher, Frederick Monod, and had an only brother who was
all in all to her. She knew enough of the evil of the world to know that
a medical student in Paris was exposed to great temptations; and she was
resolved, so far as she could, to make her womanhood a crystal shield
between him and them. She entered into all his pursuits; she took an
interest in all his friends and companions; she had always leisure for
sympathy and counsel in his difficulties and troubles. She had a little
room of her own to which she used to get him to come every evening and
talk over the day with her, so that she might keep herself heart to
heart with him in all that concerned him. She even overcame her girlish
reserve, and would get him to kneel down by her side and pour out her
sweet girlish heart in prayer that God would guide him in all his ways,
and keep him unspotted from the world. Years after, when he was a
married man, with boys of his own, he said to her: "You little know all
that you were to me as a young man. My temptations were so maddening
that I used sometimes to think that I must yield to them and do as other
young men did all round me. But then a vision of you used to rise up
before me, and I used to say to myself: 'No; if I do this thing, I can
never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into
her dear face again.'" And the thought of that young girl, the angel of
her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted
from the world through all the gutters of Paris life. Could not our
sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young
French girl was to hers?

But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, "What is the use of
making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls? They are so
taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure
of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded
that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at
God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious
eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they
would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I
have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our
English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three
kingdoms. Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me
stranded, stretc