Acting on a sudden impulse, an elderly woman, the widow of a soldier who
had been killed in the Civil War, went into a photographer's to have her
picture taken. She was seated before the camera wearing the same stern,
hard, forbidding look that had made her an object of fear to the
children living in the neighborhood, when the photographer, thrusting
his head out from the black cloth, said suddenly, "Brighten the eyes a
little."
She tried, but the dull and heavy look still lingered.
"Look a little pleasanter," said the photographer, in an unimpassioned
but confident and commanding voice.
"See here," the woman retorted sharply, "if you think that an old woman
who is dull can look bright, that one who feels cross can become
pleasant every time she is told to, you don't know anything about human
nature. It takes something from the outside to brighten the eye and
illuminate the face."
"Oh, no, it doesn't! _It's something to be worked from the inside._ Try
it again," said the photographer good-naturedly.
Something in his manner inspired faith, and she tried again, this time
with better success.
"That's good! That's fine! You look twenty years younger," exclaimed the
artist, as he caught the transient glow that illuminated the faded face.
She went home with a queer feeling in her heart. It was the first
compliment she had received since her husband had passed away, and it
left a pleasant memory behind. When she reached her little cottage, she
looked long in the glass and said, "There may be something in it. But
I'll wait and see the picture."
When the picture came, it was like a resurrection. The face seemed alive
with the lost fires of youth. She gazed long and earnestly, then said in
a clear, firm voice, "If I could do it once, I can do it again."
Approaching the little mirror above her bureau, she said, "Brighten up,
Catherine," and the old light flashed up once more.
"Look a little pleasanter!" she commanded; and a calm and radiant smile
diffused itself over the face.
Her neighbors, as the writer of this story has said, soon remarked the
change that had come over her face: "Why, Mrs. A., you are getting
young. How do you manage it?"
"_It is almost all done from the inside. You just brighten up inside and
feel pleasant._"
"Fate served me meanly, but I looked at her and laughed,
That none might know how bitter was the cup I quaffed.
Along came Joy and paused beside me where I sat,
Saying, 'I came to see what you were laughing at.'"
_Every emotion tends to sculpture the body into beauty or into
ugliness._ Worrying, fretting, unbridled passions, petulance,
discontent, every dishonest act, every falsehood, every feeling of envy,
jealousy, fear,--each has its effect on the system, and acts
deleteriously like a poison or a deformer of the body. Professor James
of Harvard, an expert in the mental sciences, says, "Every small stroke
of virtue or vice leaves its ever so little scar. Nothing we ever do is,
in strict literalness, wiped out." _The way to be beautiful without is
to be beautiful within._