clergyman's high calling that he does come in contact with them--why go
on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism--the
commonest, and yet the least remembered of all--namely, the heroism of an
average mother? Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hope
again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseased
world looks wholesome to me once more--because, whatever else it is or is
not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at
the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by
chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to
draw--would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she, would find some more
chivalrous employment for his or her pen--for were they not, too, born of
woman?--I only say to myself--having had always a secret fondness for
poor Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob--Let the poor thing
alone. With pain she brought these girls into the world. With pain she
educated them according to her light. With pain she is trying to obtain
for them the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely,
to be well married; and if in doing that last, she manoeuvres a little,
commits a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all that
come to, save this--that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-
sacrifice, she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience
and her own credit? We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven
soul when we meet her in society: our duty, both as Christians and ladies
and gentlemen, seems to me to be--to do for her something very different
indeed.

But to return. Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are
being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to
say, what we are all tempted to say at times--"How can I be heroic? This
is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples. We are growing more and
more comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and
more utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals,
in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and
more of loss and gain. I am born into an unheroic time. You must not
ask me to become heroic in it."

I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while circumstances
are unheroic round us. We are all too apt to be the p