ry of a family of
starving children, but as my mother's experienced eye assured her she
had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor
always got. "Why did you tell me you had children," mother asked her,
"when you came to me yesterday?" "It was not true," said the dying
woman, "but I was starving, and I thought you would be more willing to
help me if you thought I had children." But from that day no beggar
was turned from our door without food. Silently and in secret she did
what good works came to her to be done, letting not her right hand
know what her left hand was doing, but all the poor knew her and her
works.

Silent too and undemonstrative in all her domestic relations she
always was, and I question if to any other of her family than myself
she ever confided her secret hopes or fears. And to me even she was so
undemonstrative that I never remember her kissing me from a passing
warmth; only when I went away on a journey or returned from one did
she offer to kiss me, and this was the manner of the family. And her
maintenance of family discipline was on the same rigorous level,
dispassionate as the law. If I transgressed the commands of herself or
of my father the punishment was inevitable, never in wrath, generally
on the day after the offense, but inexorable; she never meant to spoil
the child by sparing the rod, but flogged with tears in her eyes and
an aching heart, often giving the punishment herself, to prevent my
father from giving it, as he always flogged mercilessly and in anger,
though if I could keep out of his sight till the next day he forgot
all about it; she never forgot, and though the flogging might not come
for a week, it was never omitted when promised. And her worst severity
never raised a feeling of resentment in me, for I recognized it as
deserved, while my father's floggings, inflicted in the unreasoning
severity of anger, always made me rebellious. I remember only one
occasion on which I was punished unjustly by my mother.

A neighboring farmer had asked me to go to his field and shake down
the fruit from two apple-trees. It was in the hour before dinner, and
the regulations of the family were very severe about being at meals,
and unfortunately I had, in my glee at having a job of paying work to
do, infringed on the dinnertime. In payment for my services I received
from the farmer two huge pumpkins, charged with which I hastened home,
looking forward to my mother's pr