for the cases where the consequences were not confined to ourselves, or were of too serious a nature.
The one mistake made by my mother was in the physical management of her children. Like many mothers whose bodies and minds are kept at the highest tension, she failed to give vital strength to her children. The most promising of these died in early childhood, "by the will of God," as we say in our blindness. One of them especially, the "little king," as he was called, being a magnificent child, both in mental and moral development. Of those who came to maturity, one died at the age of twenty-seven, one has been an invalid for years, one has fair health, and one only rejoices in a vigorous physique. This boy was born in my grandmother's house, near the sea, where my mother had spent, as she expressed it, "the laziest year of her whole life." These children have all had a keen love of study, an energy which carried them far beyond their strength, and she failed sufficiently to curb them. But in other respects, our mother has done to the uttermost. Her children had strong propensities both for good and ill. She has, so far as is possible, strengthened the virtues and repressed the faults of every child given into her keeping.
"The sun shines," is a sentence simple and short, but how infinite is its meaning; myriads of unfolding blossoms flash 't back in vivid coloring; myriads of stalwart trees whisper it; myriads of breathing things revel in it; myriads of men thank God for it. So is it with the influence of a good mother. It is not given us to follow each tiny shaft of light in its endless. searchings, neither do we note how the riot of the waste places within us is pruned by deft hands into a tenuous symmetry, nor how, in the midst of this life's growth, is laid the foundation of the kingdom of Heaven, by the silent masonry of a mother's constant endeavor.
Mothers, all over this broad land, heavy-laden with the puerile details of daily living, fling off your shrouding cares, and lift your worn faces that you may see with a broad outlook how full-fruited is the vineyard in which you are toiling; the thorns are irritating; the glebe is rough; your spirit faints in the heat of the toilsome day. Look up! the lengthening shadows are falling like dew upon you! tired hearts, look up! purple-red hangs the clustering fruit of your life-long work; the vintage has come, the freest from blight that can ever come — the vintage of a faithful mother!
The name of Mary Owen was not written upon the brains of men, but it is graven upon the hearts of these her children; so long as they live, the blessed memory of that home shall abide with them, a
