his
wanderings to do the work reserved for him in the broad field not of his
own choosing. The birth of the only child, a son, preceded the death of
its mother by but a few days, and Howard was again alone. To the end of
his life he remained a sincere and constant mourner for the wife to whom
he owed the happiest, if not the most useful, seven years of his life.
It is said by some of his biographers that he always kept the
anniversary of her death as a solemn day of fasting and prayer.

Come we now to the point in his career where, all unknown to himself,
Howard took up the work which was to startle the whole civilized world,
and place his name in the roll of those whose memories die not.

But first let us remember the son whose life began where his mother's
ended, and ended where it was well his mother had not lived to see it.

It would seem that the loss of his beloved wife and the sad recollection
of his own motherless unloved boyhood, would have made of John Howard a
tender and pitiful, as well as devoted father. Such was not the case, if
we may judge from the vehemence with which some of his biographers deny
the charges of undue severity to the infant, and forgetfulness and
neglect of the growing-up boy, and the silence of others on the same
subject.

The real truth probably was, so far as we can judge, that the man had
nothing in his stiff nature and puritanical education, certainly nothing
in his own early life, to make him respond to the uninteresting
helplessness of infancy.

So we find him doing his duty by the crying infant of a few months, in a
manner which would be amusing if it were not pathetic. He takes him from
the nurse, lays him across his knees, and sits unmoved and unmovable
until the tempest exhausts itself, and the child is silent from
exhaustion, when he hands him solemnly back to the nurse, and feels
that, by so much at least, has he cast out of the young child the spice
of Old Adam, which is the birthright of us all! A few such experiences,
we are told, and the child would at once cease its struggles and be
silent. One would surely think it would!

But the silent, lonely man, bereft of the loving companionship of the
gentle wife, who would so differently have soothed and silenced the
crying infant, could not long bear the solitude of his broken home, and
so began the years of wanderings, which lasted as long as his life, and
through which he seems so largely to have lost sight of his you