that God ever gives us!" I knew an aged woman, who interested me very
greatly in tales of "her boy"--that good son who had so often proven his
gratitude for her long love. One day, chancing to consider her great
number of years, I inquired how old "her boy" was, and found that he had
been a grandfather for twenty-three years, and had lately had the
satisfaction of holding a great grandson in his arms. Still he was her
curly haired-boy--she could remember him in no other condition of life
with so much satisfaction.
"I WOULD DESIRE FOR A FRIEND,"
says Lacretelle, "the son who never resisted the tears of his mother."
"Love droops, youth fades, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's
secret hope outlives them all," sings Oliver Wendell Holmes. "At first,"
says Beecher, "babies feed on the mother's bosom, but always on her
heart." "Stories first heard at a mother's knee," affirms Ruffini, "are
never wholly forgotten--a little spring that never quite dries up in our
journey through scorching years."
"AN OUNCE OF MOTHER,"
says the Spanish proverb, "is a pound of clergy." "The mother's heart is
the child's schoolroom," says another writer. "Men are what their
mothers made them," says Emerson, in study of Napoleon's idea; "you may
as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere,
as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that
jobber." "It is generally admitted," says Theodore Hook, "and frequently
proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which
men possess, are derived from their mothers." "It is well for us," says
Bishop Hare, "that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand
half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with