What Do The Wrinkles Mean?

        I often wonder when I look in the faces of a large congregation of men and women, and see the furrows and wrinkles on the brows of the people before me, what has wrought these scars on the various faces. Sometimes I can see, plainly enough, that the man is a money-getter, and has worshiped day and night, through many years, before the altar of Mammon. I know that man got his scars in the service of gold. On another face there are certain indications of the worship of fashion ; and the scars, however it may be sought to cover them up, are unmistakably there. On other faces there are the lines of dissipation that tell of the gross worship of lust and appetite. But I see other wrinkles that warm my heart. They seem to me like the scars I saw on a sugar-maple in New Hampshire. It was an old tree, and every year for a hundred years somebody had been tapping it for the sweet sap in the springtime, and it had been giving its sugar to sweeten the world. The old tree's scars seemed beautiful to me, and I said to myself: "They are like the wrinkles on the face of a good man, or a noble woman; they are signs of age and burden-bearing, and are the scars that show where they have been tapped for sweetness."