nd that he had
been a grandfather for twenty-three years, and had lately had the
satisfaction of holding a great grandson in his arms. Still he was her
curly haired-boy--she could remember him in no other condition of life
with so much satisfaction.

"I WOULD DESIRE FOR A FRIEND,"

says Lacretelle, "the son who never resisted the tears of his mother."
"Love droops, youth fades, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's
secret hope outlives them all," sings Oliver Wendell Holmes. "At first,"
says Beecher, "babies feed on the mother's bosom, but always on her
heart." "Stories first heard at a mother's knee," affirms Ruffini, "are
never wholly forgotten--a little spring that never quite dries up in our
journey through scorching years."

"AN OUNCE OF MOTHER,"

says the Spanish proverb, "is a pound of clergy." "The mother's heart is
the child's schoolroom," says another writer. "Men are what their
mothers made them," says Emerson, in study of Napoleon's idea; "you may
as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere,
as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that
jobber." "It is generally admitted," says Theodore Hook, "and frequently
proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which
men possess, are derived from their mothers." "It is well for us," says
Bishop Hare, "that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand
half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with

A CONCEIT OF OUR OWN IMPORTANCE

which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose
mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to
know the sense of it." Perhaps the praises of our mothers tarry in our
brains too long anyway. It may be a provision of nature that woman shall
inspire her child with sufficient self-esteem to take him through the
world with a first-class ticket, a cabin passage, that he may escape the
poor accommodations of excessive humility, the steerage of the ship of
life. It seems incredible that our mother was mistaken in thinking her
boys the brightest, best, and most creditable in all the region
roundabout! Let us by our lives, marvel rather at the correctness of her
vision than the blindness of her love.

"SHE WHO HAS LOST AN INFANT,"

says Leigh Hunt, "is never, as it were, without an infant child. Her
other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the
changes of mo