Alls For the Best | Page 9

of the young lady's face. It was proud and
haughty in expression, and her eyes had in them a cold glitter that
awoke in me a feeling of repulsion.
"I wish you were congenial," the lady said, speaking partly to herself.
"We are not, aunt," was Miss Harvey's reply; and she assumed the air
of one who felt herself far superior to another with whom she had been
brought into comparison.
"The gems do not correspond, I fear," said I to myself, as I moved to
another part of the room. "But who is Miss Gardiner?"
In the next moment, I was introduced to the young lady whose name
was in my thought. The face into which I looked was of that fine oval
which always pleases the eye, even where the countenance itself does
not light up well with the changes of thought. But, in this case, a pair of
calm, deep, living eyes, and lips of shape most exquisitely delicate and
feminine--giving warrant of a beautiful soul--caused the face of Miss
Gardiner to hold the vision as by a spell. Low and very musical was her
voice, and there was a discrimination in her words, that lifted whatever
she said above the common-place, even though the subjects were of the
hour.
I do not remember how long it was after my introduction to Miss
Gardiner, before I discovered that her only ornament was a small,
exquisitely cut cameo breast-pin, set in a circlet of pearls. There was no
obtrusive glitter about this. It lay more like an emblem than a jewel
against her bosom. It never drew your attention from her face, nor
dimmed, by contrast, the radiance of her soul-lit eyes. I was charmed,
from the beginning, with this young lady. Her thoughts were real gems,
rich and rare, and when she spoke there was the flash of diamonds in
her sentences; not the flash of mere brilliant sayings, like the gleaming

of a polished sword, but of living truths, that lit up with their own pure
radiance every mind that received them.
Two or three times during the evening, Miss Harvey, radiant in her
diamonds--they cost twenty-two hundred dollars--the price would
intrude itself--and Miss Gardiner, almost guiltless of foreign ornament,
were thrown into immediate contact. But Miss Gardiner was not
recognized by the haughty wearer of gems. It was the old farce of
pretence, seeking, by borrowed attractions, to outshine the imperishable
radiance of truth. I looked on, and read the lesson her conduct gave,
and wondered that any were deceived into even a transient admiration.
"Rich and rare were the gems she wore," but they had in them no
significance as applied to the wearer. It was Miss Gardiner who had the
real gems, beautiful as charity, and pure as eternal truth; and she wore
them with a simple grace, that charmed every beholder who had eyes
clear enough from earthy dust and smoke to see them.
I never meet Miss Harvey, that I do not think of the pure and heavenly
things of the mind to which diamonds correspond, nor without seeing
some new evidence that she wears no priceless jewels in her soul.

IV.
NOT AS A CHILD.

"I DO not know how that may be," said the mother, lifting her head,
and looking through almost blinding tears, into the face of her friend.
"The poet may be right, and, "Not as a child shall I again behold him,
but the thought brings no comfort. I have lost my child, and my heart
looks eagerly forward to a reunion with him in heaven; to the blessed
hour when I shall again hold him in my arms."
"As a babe?"
"Oh, yes. As a darling babe, pure, and beautiful as a cherub."
"But would you have him linger in babyhood forever?" asked the
friend.
The mother did not reply.
"Did you expect him always to remain a child here? Would perpetual
infancy have satisfied your maternal heart? Had you not already begun
to look forward to the period when intellectual manhood would come

with its crowning honors?"
"It is true," sighed the mother.
"As it would have been here, so will it be there. Here, the growth of his
body would have been parallel, if I may so speak, with the growth of
his mind. The natural and the visible would have developed in harmony
with the spiritual and the invisible. Your child would have grown to
manhood intellectually, as well as bodily. And you would not have had
it otherwise. Growth--development--the going on to perfection, are the
laws of life; and more emphatically so as appertaining to the life of the
human soul. That life, in all its high activities, burns still in the soul of
your lost darling, and he will grow,