THE SUMMER ANGEL.

Everybody knows what the funny man in the daily newspapers means by the "summer girl."

She is supposed to be a giddy and frivolous creature who wears mannish or boyish clothes. She is not a fine young woman. If she has noble and womanly traits, she is supposed to pack them away carefully in tar-paper and camphor with her furs for winter use at home.

Sometimes she is amusing. Often she is pretty and bright. She is always stylish.

It was such a description that happened to fall into the hands of a real summer girl who sat leaning against a rock basking in the sun at a mountain resort, and it set her to thinking.

She had been coming to this same place ever since she could remember, and the people of the little village on the mountain-side had seen her growing, like a tall rare flower of the conservatory, taller and handsomer each year. They had watched her pass their doors, but they had not known her.

It happened that she had been reading a description of the summer girl as wearing just such a hat and gown as hers—"nobby," and "fetching," and "chic." She had the same piquant face, and was said to pass like an annual vision of beauty before the delighted eyes of the poor mountain folk whom she had seen all her life and did not know.

This was all, but it startled her. It was as if the writer had known her—from the outside. Of course he didn't know her true heart and her refined inward nature, else he wouldn't have made her talk slang and paint her face. No, it was only an accidental likeness. But it set her to thinking, and while she thought her eyes happened to fall upon the door of a log cabin upon the mountain-side beneath her. The cabin was unpainted, poor, and shabby.

An old woman sat at the door sewing. A lame boy was coming up the walk from the village of the summer cottagers. He carried two empty pails in his hands, and he limped. He had been carrying milk to the summer people—probably to her own home.

She suddenly realized that she had always seen this boy here, and that he seemed never to have grown. He looked now as he had looked certainly for seven years. For the first time in her life this pathetic little crippled figure stood out before her as a real living, human person; not only a part of the summer landscape, like a gnarled and stunted tree, but a living, breathing, suffering, human creature, who was patiently living his poor life, carrying buckets of milk down the mountain, and trudging slowly back, day after day, year after year.

What was his name, his story? How came the ugly hump upon his narrow back? Were the people in the log cabin his own kindred? Were they good to him?

Why had she never wondered before, and found out? So in the breast of a real, sweet womanly summer girl awoke a new interest in the humble people of the mountain.

When she finally rose and started homeward she took the long foot-path leading past the mountaineer's door. She paid the old woman, who still sat patching, a real visit, and when she left she was asked to call again. So began the first of a number of humble friendships.

The "boy" with the hump she discovered to be forty years old, but he was still a child, for the illness that had deformed his body had laid a blight upon his mind too. Ho could carry the milk-buckets and bring the cows, and he could sing. He could even remember from summer to summer, and after a while he knew who it was who sent him pictures of beautiful things and a warm coat, and had been teaching him slowly to learn to read. Indeed, it was he who first called her the "summer angel," but he only half knew what he was saying. She looked like his ideal of an angel, and she came every summer. And the name, once given, clung to her.

So, in one instance, began to develop one of the sweetest types of the summer girl. She is not the one the funny man likes to describe, but there are many of her, and her number is growing.

In many poor little country villages the coming of the sweet, healthy, and helpful summer girl means the coming of new life and new interests to the village folk, who know the great world only through its summer representatives. There are more girls than boys who go to summer towns, because many boys have duties in the city.

If every summer-girl would resolve that to some one, at least, she would come as a summer angel, brightening and helping, what joy would the season bring? Her helpfulness may be of any kind whatever. It may be lending books or papers to such people as scarcely ever have them, or reading to some old person in a busy household.

A dozen wide-awake clever girls who are banded together can accomplish wonders. They can get up tableaux in the hotel parlor or farm-house sitting-room, charging from ten to twenty-five cents admittance to raise money to buy a horse for the old coachman, whose horse has just died. They might even help to cure a lame horse or dog on his own account, if they are real summer angels. They can send magazines all the year round to special "shut-in" people whom they discover.

They can have a very good time among themselves too. They can compare and exchange specimens of pressed wild flowers or sea-weeds or shells. They can write to the Round Table, and tell what they are doing, and perhaps their letters, if they are fairly well written, and show a serious purpose, will be printed. Then others may join the "summer sisterhood," and form small circles in out-of-the-way places.

Ruth McEnery Stuart.