“Tell her what? you old, old, OLD thing!”
Kathie Dysart loved her Sunday-school teacher, and now she was in a rage. She couldn’t begin to scowl as fiercely as she felt; her cheeks sunk in, her lips drew down, her nose grew sharp and long in the effort. And, all at once, as the children say, her face “froze” so. Oh! it was perfectly horrid, that which happened to the two little dears, it was indeed. They could not possibly look away from each other, and they grew older and uglier each moment! Why, their 033very sun-bonnets—those fresh little pink sun-bonnets—shriveled into old women’s caps, and even in the hearts of the poor little old crones the hardening process was going on, a fierce fire of hate scorching the last central drop of dew, until nothing would ever, ever grow and bloom again.
It was all over with Lu and Kathie forever and ever.
All this was long ago, of course—indeed, it happened “once upon a time.” It would be difficult now to verify each point in the account. On the contrary, I suppose it just possible that there may be a mistake as to the transformation of the children’s clothes—the change of the sun-bonnets into caps, for instance.
But, as a whole, I see no reason to doubt the story. Often, and quite recently, too, I have seen little faces in danger of a similar transformation.
Where anger, envy, spite, and some others of the ill-tempers, gain control of the nerves and muscles of the human countenance, they pull and twitch and knot and tie these nerves and muscles, until it is almost impossible to recognize the face.
Sometimes this change has passed off in a minute; but at other times it has lasted for hours, and there is always danger that the face will fail to recover its 034pleasantness wholly, that traces will remain, like wrinkles in a ribbon that has been tied, and that, at last, the transformation will be final and fatal, and the fair child become and remain “a horrid old witch.”
Of one thing we all are certain—that the most gossiping and malicious person now living was once a fair and innocent child; so who shall say that this which I have related did not happen to Lu and Kathie?
