t stayed there. She had forgotten
her surroundings, she had forgotten herself. Poor indeed must have been
the soul that would not have been touched by the spectacle of her,
thrilled by her as by a great vision.

There was silence in the room of young workers. Before them, on the face
of the unknown, was the only look that the whole world knows--the love
and self-sacrifice of the mother; perhaps the only element of our better
humanity that never once in the history of mankind has been misunderstood
and ridiculed or envied and reviled.

Some of them worked with faces brightened by thoughts of devoted mothers
at home; the eyes of a few were shadowed by memories of mothers
alienated or dead.

II

That morning on the ledge of rock at the rear of the cathedral Nature
hinted to passers what they would more abundantly see if fortunate
enough to be with her where she was entirely at home--out in the
country.

The young grass along the foot of this slope was thick and green;
imagination missed from the picture rural sheep, their fleeces wet with
April rain. Along the summit of the slope trees of oak and ash and maple
and chestnut and poplar lifted against the sky their united forest
strength. Between the trees above and the grass below, the embankment
spread before the eye the enchantment of a spring landscape, with late
bare boughs and early green boughs and other boughs in blossom.

The earliest blossoms on our part of the earth's surface are nearly
always white. They have forced their way to the sun along a frozen path
and look akin to the perils of their road: the snow-threatened lily of
the valley, the chill snowdrop, the frosty snowball, the bleak hawtree,
the wintry wild cherry, the wintry dogwood. As the eye swept the park
expanse this morning, here and there some of these were as the last
tokens of winter's mantle instead of the first tokens of summer's.

There were flushes of color also, as where in deep soil, on a projection
of rock, a pink hawthorn stood studded to the tips of its branches with
leaf and flower. But such flushes of color were as false notes of the
earth, as harmonies of summer thrust into the wrong places and become
discords. The time for them was not yet. The hour called for hardy
adventurous things, awakened out of their cold sleep on the rocks. The
blue of the firmament was not dark summer blue but seemed the sky's
first pale response to the sun. The sun was not rich summer gold but
f