e
years later, "that you are writing the poetry that always lived in
an unexpressed state here in my breast?"

"No, Marmee," answered the girl, who was beginning to mount the
ladder of literature, "I never knew you wanted to _write_ poetry,
although I knew you loved it."

"Indeed, I did," answered the mother, "but I never could find
expression for it. I was made just to sing, I often think, but I
never had the courage to sing in public. But I did want to write
poetry, and now you, dear, are doing it for me. How proud your
father would have been of you!"

"Oh, he knows! I'm sure he knows all that I have written," answered
the girl, with the sublime faith that youth has in its own
convictions. "And if you like my verses, Marmee, I am sure he does,
for he knows."

"Perhaps," murmured the older woman. "I often feel that he is very
near to us. I never have felt that he is really gone very far away
from me."

"Poor little Marmee!" the girl would say to herself. "She misses him
yet. I believe she will always miss him."

Which was the truth. She saw constantly his likeness in all her
children, bits of his character, shades of his disposition,
reflections of his gifts and talents, hints of his bravery, and she
always spoke of these with a commending air, as though they were
characteristics to be cultivated, to be valued and fostered.

At first her fear of leaving her children, even to join him, was
evident, she so believed in a mother's care and love being a
necessity to a child. She had sadly missed it all out of her own
strange life, and she felt she _must_ live until this youngest
daughter grew to be a woman. Perhaps this desire, this mother-love,
kept her longer beside her children than she would have stayed
without it, for the years rolled on, and her hair whitened, her
once springing step halted a little, the glorious blue of her
English eyes grew very dreamy, and tender, and wistful. Was she
seeing the great Hereafter unfold itself before her as her steps
drew nearer and nearer?

And one night the Great Messenger knocked softly at her door,
and with a sweet, gentle sigh she turned and followed where he
led--joining gladly the father of her children in the land that
holds both whites and Indians as one.

And the daughter who writes the verses her mother always felt, but
found no words to express, never puts a last line to a story, or a
sweet cadence into a poem, but she says to herself as she holds her
mothe