DUST ON YOUR GLASSES.
I DON'T often put on my glasses to examine Katy's work; In one morning, not long since, I did so upon entering a room she had been sweeping. "Did you forget to open the window when you swept, Katy?" I inquired.
"This room is very dusty."
"I think there is dust on your eye-glasses, ma'am," she said modestly.
And sure enough, the eye-glasses were at fault, and not Katy. I rubbed it off, and everything looked bright and clean, the carpet like new, and Katy's face said
"I am glad it was the glasses, and not me, this time."
"This has taught me a good lesson," I said to myself, upon leaving the room, "and one that I shall remember through life."
In the evening, Katy came to me, with some kitchen trouble. The cook had done so and so, and she had said so and so. When her story was finished, I said, smilingly, "There is dust on your glasses, Katy. Rub it off; you will see better."
She understood me, and left the room. I told the incident to the children, and it is quite common to hear them say to each other,
"Oh, there is dust on your glasses."
Sometimes I am referred to: "Mamma, Harry has dust on his glasses. Can't he rub it off?"
When I hear a person criticizing another, condemning, perhaps, a course of action he knows nothing about, drawing inferences prejudicial to the persons, I think, "There's dust on your glasses. Rub it off." The truth is, everybody wears these very same glasses.
I said this to John one day, some little matter coming up that called forth the remark. "There are some people I wish would begin ‘to rub’, then," said he. "There is Mr. So-and-so, and Mrs. So-and-so; they are always ready to pick at some one, to slur, to hint; I don't like them." "I think my son John has a wee bit on his glasses just now," I replied.
He laughed, and asked, "What is a boy to do?"
"Keep your own well rubbed up, and you will not know whether others need it or not."
"I will," he replied. -
I think, as a family, we are all profiting by that little incident, and through life will never forget the meaning of "There is dust on your glasses."
Observer.