or something by way of tribute to
the achievement of one of those rare women of the elder time whose
gifts forced her out, but whose heart held her in.

I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must
write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot
remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find
her.

My first distinct vision of this kind of a mother gives her by the
nursery lamp, reading to us her own stories, written for ourselves,
never meant to go beyond that little public of two, and illustrated in
colored crayons by her own pencil. For her gift in this direction was
of an original quality, and had she not been a writer she must have
achieved something as an artist.

Perhaps it was to keep the standards up, and a little girl's filial
adoration down, that these readings ended with some classic--Wordsworth,
I remember most often--"We are Seven," or "Lucy Gray."

[Illustration: ELM ARCH, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]

It is certain that I very early had the conviction that a mother was a
being of power and importance to the world; but that the world had no
business with her when we wanted her. In a word, she was a strong and
lovely symmetry--a woman whose heart had not enfeebled her head, but
whose head could never freeze her heart.

I hardly know which of those charming ways in which I learned to spell
the word motherhood impressed me most. All seemed to go on together
side by side and step by step. Now she sits correcting proof-sheets,
and now she is painting apostles for the baby's first Bible lesson.
Now she is writing her new book, and now she is dyeing things
canary-yellow in the white-oak dye--for the professor's salary is
small, and a crushing economy was in those days one of the conditions
of faculty life on Andover Hill. Now--for her practical ingenuity was
unlimited--she is whittling little wooden feet to stretch the
children's stockings on, to save them from shrinking; and now she is
reading to us from the old, red copy of Hazlitt's "British Poets," by
the register, upon a winter night. Now she is a popular writer,
incredulous of her first success, with her future flashing before her;
and now she is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child, while
the MS. lies unprinted on the table, and the publishers are wishing
their professor's wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able
to send copy as fast as it is wanted. The struggle kille