breathed the wish that my boys may
live such clean, wholesome, upright, temperate lives that no child or
grandchild may ever have occasion to reproach them, or point the
finger of scorn at them, and that no mother may ever pray for death
to come to her baby because of a taint in their blood.

CHAPTER XXIII

GRANDMOTHER

My grandmother was about the nicest grandmother that a boy ever had,
and in memory of her, I am quite partial to all the grandmothers. I
like Whistler's portrait of his mother there in the Luxembourg--the
serene face, the cap and strings, and the folded hands--because it
takes me back to the days and to the presence of my grandmother. She
got into my heart when I was a boy, and she is there yet; and there
she will stay. The bread and butter that she somehow contrived to
get to us boys between meals made us feel that she could read our
minds. I attended a banquet the other night, but they had no such
bread and butter as we boys had there in the shade of that
apple-tree. It was real bread and real butter, and the appetite was
real, too, and that helped to invest grandmother with a halo.
Sometimes she would add jelly, and that caused our cup of joy to run
over. She just could not bear a hungry look on the face of a boy,
and when such a look appeared she exorcised it in the way that a boy
likes. What I liked about her was that she never attached any
conditions to her bread and butter--no, not even when she added
jelly, but her gifts were as free as salvation. The more I think of
the matter, the more I am convinced that her gifts were salvation,
for I know, by experience, that a hungry boy is never a good boy, at
least, not to excess.

Whatever the vicissitudes of life might be to me, I knew that I had a
city of refuge beside grandmother's big armchair, and when trouble
came I instinctively sought that haven, often with rare celerity. In
that hallowed place there could be no hunger, nor thirst, nor
persecution. In that place there was peace and plenty, whatever
there might be elsewhere. I often used to wonder how she could know
a boy so well. I would be aching to go over to play with Tom, and
the first thing I knew grandmother was sending me over there on some
errand, telling me there was no special hurry about coming back. My
father might set his foot down upon some plan of mine ever so firmly,
but grandmother had only to smile at him and he was reduced to a
degree of limpness that c