Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1891 — THE SECRET OF YOUTH. [ARTICLE]

THE SECRET OF YOUTH.

Why Certain .Women Are Always Fresh and Beautil'jl. People are apt to attribute haggard looks to mental activity, and to counsel repose, and. tranquility as a cosmetic. To the thoughtful traveler the fals ity of this theory is obvious. It is in the country village, where—the church meeting is the theater, the mail the excitement, the days weeks, and one can heai 4 the cows breathe in the deathly stillness, that the greatest number of sunken cheeks, wrinkled brows, leaden complexions and lifeless expressions are to be seen among the women yet in their thirties. In the seething metropolis, living three lives and enjoying two, are to be found scores of women--mothers or perhaps grandmothers—possessing all the vitality, freshness and much of the bloom of early youth!

The fact is, it is not activity, but drowsiness, the presence of sleeping or dead thought in the soul, that is aging. Unvaried scenes, the repetition to-morrow of to-day, to-day ol yesterday, this week of the preceding one, the ability to calculate exactly what each neighbor is doing at each hSiir of each day—the inevitable, clock-like routine of conception, the monotony of existence, the utter weariness of an empty think-tank, that saps the vernal springs of life and creates decay in the face. Past grief, old augers, revenges, even past pleas u es constantly dwelt upon—all dead, decaying or decayed thought .make a sepulcher- of tho soul, a cemetery of the body and a weather-beaten monumont' of the face. This is age. The women who never grow old are the student women—those whe daily drink in new chyle through memorizing, thoroughly analyzing and perfectly assimilating subjects apart from themselves. Study is development—is eternal, youth. The student woman who makes wise use of her acquisition has no time to corrugate her brow with dread thought of the beauty-destroyer leaping fast behind her. Not considered or invited, old age keeps his distance, * Brain culture based on noble motive means sympathy, heart gentleness. charity, graciousness, enlargement of sense, feeling, power. Such a being cannot become a fossil. She has found the elixir of the fountain of eternal youth,—Fannie Edgar Thomas. ,