From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which,
in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our plates
at breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read or
discussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence. She
has always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker.
If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added the
appliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers would
have been absolutely the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I have
ever seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold. I
do not know whether she is living or not. But, as I see house after house
in which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives in
a hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, I
always think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, and
of the woman who was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of many
men and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspaper
columns of "Personals," "Wanted,--a home.
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