ad tramped ten or fifteen miles since
breakfast.
Oh, how those college-fed boys and girls enjoyed these picnics, with
Julia Cloud as a kind of hovering angel to minister with word or smile
or in some more practical way, wherever there was need! They all
called her "Cloudy Jewel" now whenever they dared, and envied those
who got closest to her and told her their troubles. Many a lad or
lassie brought her his or her perplexities; and often as they sat
around the winter camp, perhaps on a rock brushed free from snow, she
gave them sage advice wrapped up in pleasant stories that were brought
in ever so incidentally. There was nothing ever like preaching about
Julia Cloud; she did not feel that she knew enough to preach. And
sometimes, as they walked homeward through the twilight of a long,
happy afternoon, and the streaks of crimson were beginning to glow in
the gray of the horizon, some one or two would lag behind and ask her
deep, sweet questions about life and its meaning and its hereafter.
Often they showed her their hearts as they had never shown them even
to their own people, and often a word with her sent some student back
to work harder and fight stronger against some subtle temptation. She
became a wholesome antidote to the spirit of doubt and atheism that
had crept stealthily into the college and was attacking so many and
undermining what little faith in religion they had when they came
there.
It came to be a great delight to many of the young college people to
spend an evening around the hearth at Cloudy Villa. There never had
been any trouble about that question of dancing, because they just did
not do it; and there was always something else going on, some lively
games, sometimes almost a "rough-house," as the boys called it, but
never anything really unpleasant. Julia Cloud was "a good sport," the
boys said; and the girls delighted in her. The evenings were filled
with impromptu programmes thought out carefully by Julia Cloud, but
proposed and exploited in the most casual manner.
"Allison, why wouldn't it be a good idea for you to act out that story
we were reading the other day the next time you have some of the young
people down? You and Leslie and Jane with the help of one or two
others could do it, and there wouldn't be much to learn. If you all
read it over once or twice more, you'd have it so you could easily
extemporize. Do you know, I think there's a hidden lesson in that
story that would do some
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