Almost a hundred years ago, there was born into a staid Quaker household a child whose very physique set at defiance all the rules of the orderly family.
The father, Daniel, and the mother, Lucretia Chester, were fair, colorless persons, and the brown hair of the latter was severely banded beneath her clear muslin cap. One can imagine the tinge of dismay that must have clouded the fatherly affection for his firstborn, when Daniel perceived that the babe was a dimpled, dark-eyed daughter, whose wealth of raven locks fell into soft rings about her brow.
As she grew into recognition of her immediate surroundings, her abounding vivacity made her singularly attractive. Her great eyes sparkled as she cooed in sympathy with the soft-toned stroke of the tall clock that had rung out the hour of her mother’s birth, and the play of the firelight on the pale wall inspired her to feverish exhibitions of delight. At such times Daniel laid his hand tenderly on the refractory curls, and vainly smoothing away their pretty curves, he said, “Alas, Lucretia, a very worldling has been given to our charge. It behooves thee and me to keep an untiring watch over the little one.” “She is the Lord’s own, is she not?” was the gentle reply. But to guide and to guard her after the fashion of the stern orthodox rule was the unrelenting training that the father practiced. More than once as the years went on, he took the scissors from the hand of his wife, with a strange misgiving lest she harbored a secret pleasure in the child’s ringlets, and severely he cut away so much of the crowning glory as scissors could cut, only to find an immediate renewal of nature’s willfulness, and it was with something like reproach that he spoke of her brilliant color.
“I wish, Dorcas, thee had more of the mother’s tint about thee,” he said, emphasizing the plain Quaker name they had given the girl, as if to counteract the impression of her brilliant beauty which increased with time.
One day as she sat at dinner, flushed by a wild scamper across the lawn with her playfellow, a soft-eyed collie, straight before her hung a looking-glass which served her father in his frequent shaving trials, and the child, catching the reflection of her bright face, cried out:
“I do not see, dear father, why thee should wish me to be pale like mother. Mine is far the prettier color. She is a snowdrop, but I am the rose.”
The pain Daniel felt darkened his brow. “Dorcas,” he said, “thee speaks as the daughter of sin; thy words reveal the wiles of the devil.”
The sensitive girl trembled, then her brave spirit rose and despite her tears she had answer:
“Did not our Heavenly Father make us all, and why may I not admire myself, if I am his handiwork, as much as thee admires dear mother?”