My mother, all that is good and pure in me has come of thee!  If the allurements of vice have tempted, and frail nature has threatened to yield, the morning’s admonition, the evening’s counsel in our long walks, would strengthen me to forbearance.  These bright memories have lived and remained with me a guide and salvation; and now they are the morning’s memory, the evening’s thought.  As I have remembered and loved thee, I have been guided and governed by these.  Surely there can be no loss to the child like the loss of the mother!  How those are to be pitied!  They go through life without the holy influences for good coming from a mother; they stumble on, and learn here and there, as time progresses, the moral lessons only taught to childhood from a mother’s lips:  they stumble and fall for the want of these; and, by experience, too often bitter experience, learn in youth what in childhood should be taught, which should grow up with them as a part of their being, to be the guides and comforts of life.  And oh, how many never learn this!

Go, and converse with the wise and good, and they will tell you of their mothers’ teachings; go to the condemned criminal, whose crimes have cast him from society, and ask him why he is thus—­and he will tell you he disregarded the teachings of his mother; or, ’I had a wicked and vicious mother, who taught me evil instead of good;’ or, ’I had no mother, to plant in my childhood’s heart the fear of God and the love of virtue.’

Here, to me, to-night, in grateful memory, comes the Sabbath morning in the garden at the home of my childhood, more than sixty years ago, when this dead mother here sleeping pointed to the drunken man passing on the highway, and, kindly looking up into my face, asked me to look at him, and, when he had passed out of sight, said:  “My child, will you here, this beautiful morning of God’s day, promise your mother that you will not drink one drop of ardent spirits until you are twenty-one years of age?  You are so full of animal spirits, I fear, should you touch it at all, that you will come to drink to excess, and fill a drunkard’s grave before you shall have passed half the days allotted to man’s life.”  I see that pleading face, those soft brown eyes to-night, as they looked from where she was seated into my face; I see the soft smile of satisfaction, as it came up from her heart and illumined her features, when I lifted up my hand and made the promise!  And, oh, shall I ever forget the thrill which gladdened my heart when she rose up and kissed me, and murmured so gently, so tenderly, so full of hope and confidence:  “I know you will keep it, my child.”  That promise is a holy memory!  It was kept with sacred fidelity.

Angel of love and light—­my mother—­look down upon thy child here to-night, and for the last time by thy grave, with whitened head and tottering step, and see if I have ever departed from the way you taught me to go!  Soon I shall be with you.