own mouth!  The autocrat who sweeps whole communities into Siberia with a stroke of his pen was ill when his mother was alarmed, was in agony when she was indiscreet with her food!  She cannot forget this.  It is but yesterday she dried his flesh to keep it sound.  It is but yesterday she let him bite his aching gum upon her finger, wishing the ache might go from him to her—­hoping that if he gave her pain he would have less.  One can well pardon the vanity that would lead a son to insist that his mother should accompany him to

THE EXECUTIVE MANSION OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC,

that she might behold him enter upon the Chief Magistracy of fifty millions of freemen, gained by the first choice of a majority of those freemen, yea, by the unanimous first and second choice, for none so ready to fight for his right to rule as he who yesterday voted for an honored opponent—­the very summit of true political ambition—­the apex of the mother’s boldest hope!  “The mother’s love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to old age,” says Bovee; “and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the gentle chidings, of

THE BEST FRIEND

that God ever gives us!” I knew an aged woman, who interested me very greatly in tales of “her boy”—­that good son who had so often proven his gratitude for her long love.  One day, chancing to consider her great number of years, I inquired how old “her boy” was, and found 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