The Youth's Companion/July 19, 1860/The Force of Example

The Force of Example.

A boy, who went to a school, by the advice and assistance of his teacher, had his face washed. When he came home, his neighbors looked at him with astonishment. They said, “that looks like Tom Rogers, and yet it can’t be, for he’s so clean.”" Presently his mother looked at him; finding his face so clean, she fancied her face dirty, and washed it. The father soon came home, and seeing his wife so clean, thought his face dirty, and soon followed their example. Father, mother and son all being clean, the mother began to think the room looked dirty, and down she went on her knees, and scrubbed that clean. There was a female lodger in the house, who, seeing such a change in her neighbors, thought her face and room very dirty, and she speedily betook to the cleansing operation likewise. And very soon the whole house was, as it were, transformed and made tidy and comfortable, simply by the cleaning of one ragged school-boy.

Can’t there be a reformation of this kind among some of our news-boys? Would they not set the example and thus carry cleanliness to the classic shades of Pigville? Water is plenty in the city, and might be applied. We should think from appearances that the example was rather followed of the old Scotch proverb, “the clartier, the cosier”—(the dirtier, the more comfortable.)

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