When she was twenty her mother withdrew her objections, and the daughter became a Salvationist, her mother coming to feel thoroughly in sympathy with her during the remaining years she lived.
This is the story of one of the Salvation Army lassies who has been giving herself to the work in the huts over in France. She is still young and lovely, and there is something about her delicate features and slender grace that makes one think of a young saint. No wonder the soldiers almost worshipped her! No wonder these lassies were as safe over there ten miles from any other woman or any other civilian alone among ten thousand soldiers, as if they had been in their own homes. They breathed the spirit of God as they worked, as well as when they sang and prayed. To such a girl a man may open his heart and find true help and strength.
[Illustration: A letter of inspiration from the commander]
[Illustration: The Salvation Army boy truck driver who calmly went to sleep in his truck in a shell hole under fire]
It was no uncommon thing for our boys who were so afraid of anything like religion or anything personal over here, to talk to these lassies about their souls, to ask them what certain verses in the Bible meant, and to kneel with them in some quiet corner behind the chocolate boxes and be prayed with, yes, and _pray!_ It is because these girls have let the Christ into their lives so completely that He lives and speaks through them, and the boys cannot help but recognize it.
Not every boy who was in a Salvation hut meeting has given himself to Christ, of course, but every one of them recognizes this wonderful something in these girls. Ask them. They will tell you "She is the real thing!" They won't tell you more than that, perhaps, unless they have really grown in the Christian life, but they mean that they have recognized in her spirit a likeness to the spirit of Christ.
Now and then, of course, there was a thick-headed one who took some minutes to recognize holiness. Such would enter a hut with an oath upon his lips, or an unclean story, and straightway all the men who were sitting at the tables writing or standing about the room would come to attention with one of those little noisy silences that mean, so much; pencils would click down on the table like a challenge, and the newcomer would look up to find the cold glances of his fellows upon him.