Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1910 — REFORM IN ORPHAN ASYLUM. [ARTICLE]

REFORM IN ORPHAN ASYLUM.

■Social Barrier in Versailles (Ky.) Institute Palled Down. From the beginning Mrs. Kate Van Der Veer, head of the Cleveland Orphan asylum at Versailles, Ky., determined there should be no harrier to set her girls apart from the rest of the community as charity children, says Mabel Potter Daggett in the Delineator. So she took off their uniforms and sent them to the public school. Versailles was aghast at first. But she insisted: "Why not? My girls are as nice and sweet as yours!” This month, she told me with pride, there were fifteen of them on the honor roll that is,, published in the Versailles newspaper. As they go along to school together you would not know Mrs. Van Der Veer’s "daughters” from the others, unless by the fact that their percales are a trifle daintier and their butterfly hair ribbons a trifle fresher. I have seen her as she critically looks them over before starting for school. A loving hand pushes back soft waves of hair and kindly eyes scan scrutinizingly for any small area of demarcation. - “Oh, Marie,” she says, "you will have to wash your neck again.” “Louise, here’s a button coming off. Hurry, dear, and you’ll just about have time to sew it on.” “Jennie, I believe you’d better get a fresh handkerchief.” Meanwhile she is deftly pulling out a little starched skirt here and tilting a hat there at a more becoming angle for the bright face beneath. At last they are all off in order. At the gate they turn with a flutter of waving hands and across the morning a carol of fresh young voices is calling goodby. The lady on the piazza waves back. Then she stands with her hand shading her eyes, to watch them as far as she can see up the street to the town. "Arn’t they just dears?” she asks, turning with a smiling face. “I expect I have to be a little more particular with mine than most mothers are. Every little while I ask them, ‘Tell me, dears, are your dresses just as pretty as the other girls?’ And when there are new’textbooks to be bought I promptly see to it that they have theirs on timte. I’m not going to have any one point to them and say, ‘Because they are orphans.’ I don’t even like any one to call them that. We had a preacher in this town who from the pulpit once prayed the Lord to bless ‘the orphans.’ They never would go inside his church after that, and I was glad they wouldn’t.”