The Abandoned Girl.

White Ribbon, Volume 18, Issue 210, 18 December 1912, Page 11

The Abandoned Girl.

(By Marv Wood-Allen, M.D.) Once there blossomed in a beautiful home a perfect flower of maidenhood. Care-Iree and joyous, slm lilted! her pure eyes to the bright skies bending above her. The singing birds were e< hoed by her voice, and her merry song was heard from morning until night. Her gladsome presence made light and joy in the home, and the world seemed brighter and more beautiful because she lived in it. Kind friends removed everv stone from her pathway, and led her in a blissful ignorance of lile-s realities, through a world that seemed to her to blossom only with the fairest flowers, under whose leaves no serpent lurked and whose perfume could not be poisonous. There were some who loved her that feared her lack of knowledge might lead her into wrong, but when they hinted of clouds and storms she answered onlv witn a laugh

Into this world of innocence came one with a regal presence. To her he seemed indeed a very demigod. His voice thrilled her, his touch commanded her, and in all the blissful abandonment of her ignorant voung heart she loved him. She listened to his words of evil

persuasion, forgetting the counsel which in the past she had so carelessly received. I'he words, so obscure in their import to her Christlike understanding, were forgotten in the torrent of his ardent plea, and when he called on God to witness to his truth, she could not longer harbor a mistrust, and she gave him her heart’s richest treasure. She gave herself, and believed that she did no wrong. For a little while the world seemed all the brighter. And then there came a change. Friendly eyes began to look askance at her, and unfriendly tongues grew busy with a rumor of her shame. Taere were bitter words in the once happy home. Angry words from the father, heart-broken cries from the mother, and when at last the door of home was closed against her and she turned for consolation to him who had wrought her woe, she found herself alone, betrayed, deserted, abandoned. Oh, friends', we talk of the abandoned woman as one who has abandoned honour and purity, but she has been abandoned bv the Christian world, and no shipwrecked traveller on a desert island is more helpless than she is in this cruel abandonment.