John Wanamaker.

"When you marry," said John Wanamaker, to a young men's Bible class,
"remember that your mother-in-law is your wife's mother. Never allow a
so-called 'mother-in-law joke' to make you forget that you are reading a
reflection on some one's mother. My own mother I reverenced. Her maxims
taught me forbearance, tolerance, and the homely lesson of live and let
live."

The mother of Henry O. Havemeyer, the "Sugar King," urged her son to don
overalls and go to work in his father's refinery--though the family was
even then very rich.

"So my mother taught me," says Mr. Havemeyer, "to know the joy of work at
a time when I might have slipped into a life of idleness."

The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known New York clergyman,
says:

"My father was a farmer, and my mother, with four children on her hands,
and no servant, did all the work of a farmer's wife. Her days were long,
for she also devoted herself to her children, to their character and
education, declining to farm us out to the supervision of nurses or
school-teachers. My mother had the old-fashioned notion that children were
born of mothers in order that they might have mothers to bring them up."

David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University, was asked
what great man or woman most influenced him as a boy.

He replied, in writing:

"I was far more influenced by my mother than by any other person I ever
knew or heard of."

Fulton, Franklin, and Astor.

Robert Fulton was only three years old when his father died. "So that," he
said, "I grew up under the care of my blessed mother. She developed my
early talent for drawing and encouraged me in my visits to the
machine-shops of the town."

Robert was a dull pupil at school, however, and the teacher complained to
his mother. Whereupon Mrs. Fulton replied proudly:

"My boy's head, sir, is so full of original notions that there is no
vacant chamber in which to store the contents of your musty books."

"I was only ten years old at that time," said Fulton, "and my mother
seemed to be the only human being who understood my natural bent for
mechanics."

The fact that Fulton's mother let the boy have his own way in his
"original notions" had its direct result later in the building of the
first steamboat.

Benjamin Franklin many times, in his own story of his life, mentions the
powerful influence which his mother had over him, referring to her always
with peculiar af