I suppose every person of middle age wears a mask. It is his face, and as the years go by it settles into an expression of the man’s chief aim in life, if he can be said to have one. That is why a shrewd observer can usually tell much of a man’s character by looking keenly in his face and observing him under excitement. One of the most observing dairymen I know of says he can tell the quality of a cow by looking at her face. I notice that the expert hen men who select birds for the contest spend considerable time looking at the hen’s eye and face! There she seems to show whether she is a bad egg or a good one! Lady Macbeth put it well when she said to her terrified husband:  
“Your face, my thane, is as a book
Where men may read strange matters.”
We all go about wearing a mask, and those who care how they look may well ask how the mask is made.
 
I once roomed with a young man who used to get before a mirror and practise a smile and a laugh. He was a commercial traveler, and thought it paid him to laugh at the jokes and smile as he talked. So he trained the muscles of his face and throat into a machine-made twist and noise which represented his stock in trade! He wore a mask. I have heard people say that the face powders and and tricks of rolling the eyes about gave them a mask of beauty. Not long ago I talked with a great business man who had simply given his life up to the accumulation of property. He had succeeded, but this success had stamped his face with a mask as hard and flinty as steel. This man sat and told me that a good share of his money had been made by his ability to read character in the face. When he found a man showing indecision or fear in his features this man knew he could handle him as he saw fit. He claimed that thought or sentiment had little to do with it; it was simply what a man did or did not do which made the mask of life. As for this theory that character or sentiment “light a candle behind the face and it,” he said that was simply “poetic nonsense.” “If a woman wanted to be thought beautiful after she got to be forty she must rub the beauty in from the outside.”
 
This seemed to me a theory, for the most beautiful women I know of are over fifty and never use anything but soap and water to “rub the beauty in.” They wear a mask which seems like concentrated sunshine, and it comes from within. Yet my friend sat there and with all the conviction of a man who has only to write his name on a piece of paper to bring a million dollars to support his word. And he had come to think that is about the only support worth having. I asked him if he had ever read Hawthorne’s story of “The Old Stone Face.” No, he had never heard of it before—had no time for fiction or dreaming. So I told him the story ; of the boy who grew up among the hills, within sight of the “old stone face.” This was a great rock on the side of a high mountain. The wind and the storm had slowly eaten it away until, when viewed from a certain angle, it bore a rude resemblance to a human face. It was a stern, gloomy, thoughtful face, and it seemed to this boy to have been carved out of the rock by the very hand of God to show the world an ideal of power and on the human . To most of the neighbors it was merely “the old man of the mountain”—merely a common rock with an accidental shape. But this boy grew up to manhood believing in his heart that God had put on the lonely mountain his ideal of the mask of noble human character. And the boy went through life thinking that if he could only find a human being with a face like that on the mountain he would find a great man—one carrying in his life a great message to mankind. And so, whenever he heard of any great statesman or poet or preacher appearing anywhere within reach this man traveled to see him in the hope of finding the mask of the “stone face” upon the . He was always disappointed. These great men all showed on their faces the marks of dissipation or pride or some weakness of character, along with their power. He would come back and look up at the face on the mountain—always showing the same calm dignity and strength whether the happy June sunshine played over it, or whether the January storm bit at its rude features. So this man lived his simple life and died—disappointed because he had never been able to find God’s ideal character worked out in a human face! One by one men who were considered great came to the valley, only to disappoint him, but finally, after long years of waiting and searching, the neighbors suddenly found that their friend, who had carried the ideal so long in his heart, also carried on his face the nobility and of the figure on the mountain. Search for the ideal in others had brought it home to his own life.
 
To my surprise, the rich and strong man who, I supposed, had no poetry or sentiment in his heart, listened and nodded his head.
 
“I have seen that stone face in the White Mountains. Your story of course is a fancy. There might have been some idle dreamer to whom that happened. I will not deny it, because I know of a case which is somewhat in the same line. I confess that I would not believe it had I not seen it myself.”
 
So he told his story, and I give it as nearly as possible in his own words:
 
“It must have been fifteen years ago that I was returning from a business trip to Europe. On the boat I met a college man from my city, an expert in modern languages. We were much together on the trip, and one day we went down into the steerage to look over the immigrants. My friend figured that this group of strange human beings talked with him in fifteen different languages or dialects. One family in particular interested me. They were from the south of Poland; a man and woman of perhaps thirty-five, with two little boys. They were of the dull, heavy, ox-like type—mere beasts of burden in their own country. The woman seemed to me just about the plainest, homeliest creature I had ever seen. Low forehead, flat features, small eyes and great mouth, with huge hands and feet, she seemed, beside the dainty women of our own party,............