NOW, I am afraid you will laugh over the matter which appeared next to Ruth Burnham in the shape of a trial. Yet, if you have not lived long enough in this world to be in sympathy with the little trials, which, in certain states of mind, look large, either your experience is not extensive or your sympathies not large. It was no greater matter than the hair which belonged to Judge Burnham’s daughters. But really if you could have seen the trying way in which they managed to disfigure their heads with this part of their adorning, you would have felt that some action was demanded. Ruth knew exactly how each head ought to be dressed; she could almost see the effect that would be produced by a skillful and easily attainable arrangement. Then where the trial? Why, perhaps, if you are not made up of that cruelly sensitive type of women—and I am sure I hope you are not—it will be difficult to make plain to you how Ruth shrank from touching that hair! Human hair, other than her own was a thing which she desired to keep at a respectful distance. She could admire it, when well cared for, and she did most heartily. But to care for it, to comb and brush and fondle over any person’s hair, was to Ruth, or would have been had she ever been called upon to suffer in that line, a positive martyrdom. Now add to this the fact that this shrinking from the work increased tenfold when it had to do with any person who was not very dear and precious, and possibly you can comprehend why she wore so troubled a face that Saturday evening, and gazed at those hopeless heads opposite her, and wondered how a transformation was to be brought about. She was hopeless as regarded teaching the intricacies of any becoming twist or curl. In time, with patience and with often taking hold and obliging the refractory hairs to lie in their place, it might be accomplished; and here poor Ruth shivered over the horrors of a possible future experience. But to get them ready to appear at church the next morning, without a personal encounter, was not to be hoped for.

This Saturday evening, although the family had been three weeks in their new home, was the first in which they were planning for church. The little church in the village had been closed for a longer space of time than that, undergoing repairs, and the first Sabbath after their marriage Ruth had contrived to plan and work herself into an exhaustive headache that had to be succumbed to and petted all day. The next they had been forced to spend in the city, by reason of having missed the last train out on Saturday. Now here they were on the eve of the third, and Ruth at least had been planning toward the little stone church around the corner. Everything was in readiness. The new dresses and the new bonnets and the new gloves, and all the new and bewildering paraphernalia of the toilet had arrived from the city, the last package only the evening before, and but for that dreadful hair Ruth would have been happy over the thought of the effect to be produced by the next morning’s toilet.

It was Susan who at last, and in an unexpected manner, came to the rescue, just as she had stepped in and rescued Ruth from a hundred trials, both seen and unseen, during the experiences of the last three weeks. She did her part so naturally, too, as one who simply happened along at the right moment, without having understood any special need for it. Perhaps there is no rarer or more perfect way of bearing one another’s burdens than this apparently unconscious one.

They sat in the cheery sitting-room—Ruth would not have it called a parlor—and in no part of the house had the transformation been more complete than in that square, rag-carpeted, paper-curtained, and unhome-like room. Judge Burnham was reading certain business letters that seemed to perplex him. The girls were wishing that they could invent some excuse for escaping early from the room to their own, that they might have another look at all the beauties of their wardrobe, and Ruth was gazing at them with a distressed air and manner, and thinking of hair! Susan, glancing up from her glove-mending, followed the direction of Ruth’s eyes for a moment, then she spoke her thoughts.

“I just long to get hold of your hair.”

The remark seemed to be addressed to the two girls, and was so in keeping with Ruth’s thoughts that she started and flushed, wondering for an instant whether it were possible for Susan to know what they were. The girls laughed, and looked pleased at her interest.

“Your hair would curl beautifully,” Susan added, addressing the elder sister. “And those wide braids in which heavy hair is arranged now would just fit Minta’s face. Don’t you think so, Ruth?”

“Yes,” said Ruth, promptly, “I am sure of it. But I don’t know that she could get them looped right.”

“Oh yes, she could. It is very easy after one knows how. Girls, I am an excellent barber. Suppose we go up-stairs and try my skill? I can show you so that you can arrange that part of your toilet in the morning in less time than it usually takes.”

This plan was immediately carried out, the three going up-stairs with merry voices, Susan’s cheery one being heard to say:

“Oh, you don’t understand half my accomplishments yet; there are ever so many things I can do.”

“That is a fact,” said Judge Burnham, with emphasis. “She is a very treasure in the house. I used to pity you, Ruth, but, upon my word, so far as she is concerned, I am not sure that there was any room for pity.”

“There was not,” Ruth said, heartily. “It took me a long time to realize it, but she has been from the first day of her coming to our home a blessing to me.”

And so strange are these hearts of ours, touched oftentimes by words or deeds apparently so slight, Ruth felt the little episode of the hair-dressing as something that called forth very tender feeling for her sister. She began to have a dim idea of what a blessing might be hidden in a simple, quiet life, constantly unselfish in so-called little things.

So it came to pass that, on a lovely Sabbath morning, the Burnham family were one and all making ready to appear as a family in the little stone church. The girls had been there, more or less, on Sabbaths, during their lives. Years ago Judge Burnham used to go occasionally, when he felt like it. But it had been many a year since he had been seen inside the unpretending little building. Ruth, of course, had never been, and the circumstances surrounding them all were so new and strange that it was almost like a company of strangers being introduced into home-life together.

The two girls came down a trifle earlier than the others, and were in the hall near the doorway, where the soft, yellow sunlight rested on them, when Judge Burnham descended the stairs. Half-way down he paused, with a surprised, irresolute air, as his eyes rested on the two apparent strangers, and then, as one of them turned suddenly, and he caught a glimpse of her face, the surprise deepened into bewilderment. Who were these young ladies who were so at home in his house in the privacy of a Sabbath morning? This was the first thought. And the second, “It is not—can it be possible that they are my daughters!” Then, it is almost surprising that he did not at once feel humiliated over the fact that outward adornings had power so to transform!

It was certainly a transformation! Rich, quiet-toned silks, just the right tint to accord well with skin and eyes, made in that indescribable manner which marks the finished workman, to those eyes skilled in translating it, and to other eyes it simply says, “The effect is perfect.” Wraps, and hats, and gloves, and handkerchiefs—everything in keeping. And, in place of the stretched-back hair, were soft, smooth, rolling auburn curls, completely changing the expression of the wearer’s face. Also, that unbecoming mass of shortish hair which had hung in such untidy uncouthness, was gone, and in its place wide, smooth braids, tastefully looped here and there with knots of ribbon of just the right shade.

Ruth should have been there at that moment to see the two, and to see Judge Burnham as he looked at them. She would have felt rewarded for her work. It certainly was strange what a different manner the hitherto awkward girls now assumed. A sense of conscious becomingness, if it were nothing more, had fallen upon them, and in the effort to do justice to their new selves they almost unconsciously drew the stooping shoulders straight and stood with heads erect.

“Well, upon my word!” said Judge Burnham, recovering himself at last, and advancing toward them, “I didn’t know you. I wondered what strange ladies we had here. Your fall suits are certainly very becoming.”

He chose to ignore the fact that fall suits were new experiences to them. Perhaps he really did not yet understand to what a new world they had been introduced. The two laughed, not unpleasantly, and the flush on their cheeks, toned, as it was, by the billows of soft ruchings about the throat, was certainly not unbecoming. They had taken long looks at themselves in their mirror, that morning, and it was not unpleasant to them to think that their father did not recognize them. They had already reached the place where they had no desire to have their past recognized. Some seed takes root promptly and grows rapidly.

You may imagine that the entrance of the Burnham party to the little stone church was an event in the eyes of the congregation. They had known the Burnham girls all their lives; but these “young ladies” they never saw before. It would have been curious to a student of human nature to have studied the effect which their changed appearance made on the different characters present. Certain ones looked unaffected and unconcealed amazement; others gazed up at them, and returned their nods of recognition with respectful bows, seeming to look upon them as people who had moved to an immense distance from themselves; and there were those who resented the removal, and tossed their heads and said, with their eyes, and the shape of their mouths, that they “considered themselves quite as good as those Burnham girls, if they were all decked out like peacocks!”

As for Judge Burnham, the shade of satisfied pride, in place of the mortification which he had schooled himself to feel, repaid his wife for her three weeks of effort.

Then she tried to turn away from the question of personal appearance, and give herself to the service; but she was both surprised and pained to find that, in her well-meant efforts to place these girls in their proper position before others, she had, someway, lost ground spiritually. It was all very well to resolve to turn her thoughts away from the girls, and their dresses, and their bonnets, and their hair, and their manners, but it was another thing to accomplish it. She found what, possibly, we have each discovered by experience, that it was not easy to get away on Sabbath, in church, from that which had absorbed us during the week, and indeed, a fair share of the early Sabbath itself. Try as she would to join in hymn, or Bible-reading, or even prayers, she found her mind wandering to such trivial questions as whether, after all, a shade lighter of the silk would have fitted Minta’s peculiar complexion better, or whether those gloves were not a trifle large. These thoughts were very hateful to her. She struggled hard to get away from them, and was amazed and distressed beyond measure to find that they held her captive. She waited eagerly for the sermon, hoping that it would be such an one as would hold her attention for her, since she was not able to control it herself; and behold, the text announced was one which, indeed, helped her wandering thoughts, but threw her back into the very midst of the gloom which had pressed her heart the last time she heard those words: “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?” Again her answering conscience said that was what she had been doing. Money and time and strength freely given for that which was not bread!

It had not fed her soul; on the contrary, it, or something else, had starved her. Well, what was the trouble? She had surely done that which was her duty? Yes, but did a revealing spirit whisper the words in her ear, just then?—“These ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone.” She had been absorbed in her labor; she had put these things first. She had risen and gone about the day, too hurried for other than a word of prayer—too hurried for any private reading. She had retired at night, too wearied in mind and body for any prayer at all! She was starved! much time gone, and no bread for her hungry soul! Also, having not fed herself, how could she have been expected to feed others? Even yet she had said almost nothing, to these daughters of hers, about the all-important matter. She had talked with them, often and long. All the details of the toilet had been gone over carefully, exhaustively, and she and they, and Judge Burnham himself, were satisfied with the results of her words in that direction. What about the direction which “satisfieth?”

How was Ruth to get away from her heart?

No, I must do her justice; that was not her cry. She did not want to get away from the awakening voice. She was distressed, she was humiliated, she was unhappy; but she wanted to find rest only through the love and patience of Jesus. She felt like a sheep who had wandered outside, even while doing work that she surely thought was set for her—as, indeed, it was; but her eyes were just opening to the fact that one can do work that the Master has set, so vigorously as to forget the resting-places which he has marked for the soul to pause and commune with him, and gather strength. She had been working, but not resting. And then, again, it was most painfully true that, because of her lack of spiritual strength, she had done but half her work. The important human side she had held to its important place, and worked faithfully for it. But the forever-more important spiritual side she had allowed to sink almost out of sight of her vision; and even, when roused by His Spirit, as He had spoken to her through that very verse, but a little time before, she had allowed her roused heart to slip back and absorb itself in the cares of this world and the adornments of fleshly bodies, while the souls waited.

Truth to tell, Ruth was not troubled any more that morning, by wandering thoughts; neither did she hear much of the earnest sermon which was preached; but, if the preacher had but known how the Holy Spirit took his text and preached to one soul for him, he would have gone home to his closet, on his knees, and thanked God for using his lips that day, in reading to that soul that questioning word.