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.
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