Looking for a change in her life and acting on a sudden impulse, an elderly woman, the widow of a soldier who had been killed in the Civil War, went to a photographer 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.

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 at changing her expression. "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.

The elderly woman 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 about the change that had come over her face: "Why, Mrs. A., you are getting younger. How do you manage it?" "It is almost all done from the inside. You just brighten up inside and feel pleasant," she replied.

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.

We can change the course of our lives by starting each day before a mirror and commanding our inner soul to shine through by putting a smile on our face and a gleam in our eye.

Submitted by Amelia Johnson