NCE.

Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you,
Many a Summer the grass has grown green,
Blossomed and faded, our faces between;
Yet with strong yearning and passionate pain,
Long I to-night for your presence again.
--_Elizabeth Akers Allen._

A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
--_Coleridge._

There is none,
In all this cold and hollow world, no fount
Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within
A mother's heart.
--_Mrs. Hemans._

And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.
--_Shakespeare._

1. HER INFLUENCE.--It is true to nature, although it be expressed in
a figurative form, that a mother is both the morning and the evening
star of life. The light of her eye is always the first to rise, and
often the last to set upon man's day of trial. She wields a power more
decisive far than syllogisms in argument or courts of last appeal in
authority.

2. HER LOVE.--Mother! ecstatic sound so twined round our hearts that
they must cease to throb ere we forget it; 'tis our first love; 'tis
part of religion. Nature has set the mother upon such a pinnacle that
our infant eyes and arms are first uplifted to it; we cling to it in
manhood; we almost worship it in old age.

3. HER TENDERNESS.--Alas! how little do we appreciate a mother's
tenderness while living. How heedless are we in youth of all her
anxieties and kindness! But when she is dead and gone, when the
cares and coldness of the world come withering to our hearts, when we
experience for ourselves how hard it is to find true sympathy, how few
to love us, how few will befriend us in misfortune, then it is that we
think of the mother we have lost.

4. HER CONTROLLING POWER.--The mother can take man's whole nature
under her control. She becomes what she has been called "The Divinity
of Infancy." Her smile is its sunshine, her word its mildest law,
until sin and the world have steeled the heart.

[Illustration: A PRAYERFUL AND DEVOTED MOTHER.]

5. THE LAST TIE.--The young man who has forsaken the advice and
influence of his mother has broken the last cable and severed the last
tie that binds him to an honorable and upright life. He has forsaken
his best friend, and every hope for his future welfare may be
abandoned, for he is lost forever, if he is faithless to mother, he
will have but little respect for wife and children.

6. HOME TIES.--The young man or young woman who love