ng would he endure the insolence and the
flings of cruel and covert enemies because the children needed all he
could give them, and, only along the thorny road of continual
harassment and trial might he attain the earnings needed to render them
happy and comfortable? If a man is insulted he settles the insult with
a blow straight from the shoulder and that is the end of it; he would
never be able to endure, as some women do, a never-ending round of
persecution that would whiten the hairs on a sealskin jacket!

XLII.

A WARNING TO GIRLS.

There is one thing we sometimes see in the face of the young that is
sadder than the ravages of any disease or the disfigurement of any
deformity. Shall I tell you what it is? It is the mark that an impure
thought or an unclean jest leaves behind it. No serpent ever went
gliding through the grass and left the trail of defilement more
palpably in its wake than vulgarity marks the face. You may be ever so
secret in your enjoyment of a shady story, you may hide ever so
cunningly the fact that you carry something in your pocket which you
purpose to show only to a few and which will perhaps start the laugh
that, like a bird of carrion, waits upon impurity and moral corruption
for its choicest feeding, but the mark of what you tell, and what you
do, and what you laugh at, is left behind like a sketch traced in
indelible fluid. There is no beauty that can stand the disfigurement
of such a scar. However bright your eyes, and rosy-red your color, and
soft the contour of lip and cheek, when the relish of an impure jest
creeps in, the comeliness fades and perishes, as lilies in the languor
of a poisonous breath from off the marshes. I beg of you, dear girls,
shun the companion who seeks to foul your soul with an obscene story or
picture, as you would shun the contagion of smallpox. If I had a
daughter who went out into the world to earn her bread, as some of you
do, and any one should seek to corrupt her purity by insidious
advances, I would get down on my knees and pray God, to take her to
himself before her fair, sweet innocence should sully under the breath
of corruption and moral death. Nobody ever went to the devil yet by
one big bound, like a tiger out of a jungle or a trout to the fly; it
is an imperceptible passage down an easy slope, and the first step of
all is sometimes taken when a young girl lends her ears to a smutty
story or a questionable jest. Then let me say a