s. It is a great thing to have the
memory of such a self-sacrificing mother, but it would be a greater
thing to have your mother live out her days; and then, too, we are
thinking of the "seven" she buried. That seems like a wicked and
unnecessary waste of young life, of which we should feel profoundly
ashamed. Poor little people, who came into life, tired and weak,
fretfully complaining, burdened already with the cares of the world and
its unending labor--

Your old earth, they say, is very weary;
Our young feet, they say, are very weak,

and when the measles or whooping-cough assails them they have no
strength to battle with it, and so they pass out, and again the Lord is
blamed!

It is very desirable for the world that people should be born and
brought up in the country with its honest, wholesome ways learned in
the open; its habits of meditation, which have grown on the people as
they have gone about their work in the quiet places. Thought currents
in the country are strong and virile, and flow freely. There is an
honesty of purpose in the man who strikes out the long furrow, and
turns over every inch of the sod, painstakingly and without pretense;
for he knows that he cannot cheat nature; he will get back what he puts
in; he will reap what he sows--for Nature has no favorites, and no
short-cuts, nor can she be deceived, fooled, cajoled or flattered.

We need the unaffected honesty and sterling qualities which the country
teaches her children in the hard, but successful, school of experience,
to offset the flashy supercilious lessons which the city teaches hers;
for the city is a careless nurse and teacher, who thinks more of the
cut of a coat than of the habit of mind; who feeds her children on
colored candy and popcorn, despising the more wholesome porridge and
milk; a slatternly nurse, who would rather buy perfume than soap; who
allows her children to powder their necks instead of washing them; who
decks them out in imitation lace collars, and cheap jewelry, with bows
on their hair, but holes in their stockings; who dazzles their eyes
with bright lights and commercial signs, and fills their ears with
blatant music, until their eyes are too dull to see the pastel beauty
of common things, and their ears are holden to the still small voices
of God; who lures her children on with many glittering promises of ease
and wealth, which she never intends to keep, and all the time whispers
to them that this is l