Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 243, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1917 — WHICH WAY ARE YOU FACING? [ARTICLE]

WHICH WAY ARE YOU FACING?

Can You Distinguish Between th 9 Grgnd or Commonplace, the Noble or Contemptible? At a popular seaside resort two rows of seats stood back to back. One of these faced the ocean. A silver moon threw a luminous .path across the water, and touched with strange radiance the breakers as they broke in foam on the sand. A red signal light in the distance blinked its warning. Overhead the stars looked down silently. Seated there one forgot the the noisy jostle of the busy world, and felt life’s beauty and majesty. The adjacent seats faced in the opposite direction. The occupants looked on a merry-go-round and a screen on which moving pictures were being thrown. This bench was crowded. The young people who sat there saw many colored electric lights, in place-of the moon and the stars, and listened to the boisterous music of a steam piano, rather than to the thundering melody of the waves. They laughed over the fantastic pictures on the screen, unmindful of the sublime scene over their shoulders.— These young people, so close that their garments touched, carried very different impressions away from their evening. They had been together, but they had been facing different ways. Some had seen the petty and belittling, others had looked on the majestic and uplifting and beautiful; and the life of neither could be quite the same after that evening. The seaside episode has its counterpart in everyday life.' We can see the grand or the commonplace, the noble , or the contemptible, the uplifting or the degrading. Which way are we facing?—Girts’ Companion.