eat,
and owed his sudden downfall to none of her teachings. She was noted for
her sagacity and prudence, but possibly it required more than human
sagacity and prudence to balance the mighty impulses which moved
Napoleon Bonaparte. "A father may turn his back on his child," says
Washington Irving, "brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies,
husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother's
love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of
the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that
her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still

SHE REMEMBERS THE INFANT SMILES

that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful
shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can
never be brought to think him all unworthy." "There is in all this cold
and hollow world," says Mrs. Hemans, "no fount of deep, strong,
deathless love, save that within a mother's heart." "Even He that died
for us upon the cross," says Longfellow, "in the last hour, in the
unutterable agony of death, was mindful of his mother, as if to teach us
that this holy love should be our last worldly thought--the last point
of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven." Who
ever saw

A MOTHER ROMPING WITH HER THREE-YEAR-OLD

that did not look upon her as one of the happiest, therefore,
necessarily, one of the best of God's creatures? O, in that peek-a-boo,
that capturing of that last squealing "pig," the little toe, that
paddy-cake opera, is there not the one great bliss of life, to be happy
in making others happy? And how the laughter rings through the house!
And then the toil and self-denial for the stocking and the tree

AT CHRISTMAS!

Is it any wonder that the child is so easily deceived, and credits all
his joys to unseen ministers? It would not be hard to convince the
philosopher himself of the dual earthly character of the mother, visibly
a woman, invisibly but not the less really to her child, an ethereal
spirit of mercy and goodness! What gnaws her cheek and cheats Death into
the belief a flag of truce summons him to the final parley? Has not her
babe, her hope, been fevered and in pain, and should she sleep lest it
should leave her on this world behind, that then would need her not?
"Canst bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" No more can her
anxiety be

FETTERED INTO SLEEP;

no more can her quick