friends, which were forgotten on my lap! The little aches and
pains that were slept away in my arms! How full my life was then! What
a blessed boy you were! And then those half-lonely years, when everyone
frightened me--by saying you would be spoiled--into sending you away to
school. I begrudge those months I spent without you yet. But how we
enjoyed the vacations! That's when we began reading together again real
stories, not those of the younger days. Do you remember your favorite
when a very small boy? We always read it when you weren't feeling very
well, or after you'd been punished for being naughty, sitting together
in the great big old rocking-chair. It was about two poor little
fatherless boys whose mother died in a garret, and they were so
terribly poor they had to beg a coffin for her, and they alone followed
it to the grave. There was a very trying and sad woodcut of the two
little orphans doing this, and we always cried together over it. It
wasn't a healthy story for a small boy, and I don't know how we got
hold of it. Oh yes, I do! It was published by the Tract Society, and
had a moral. It was your aunt sent it to you, but I have forgotten the
moral. The football period began in the school vacations, and went all
through college; but still I think you were always more fond of books
and music than athletics; and I was never good at outdoor sports; I
only managed to master tennis so as to be able to play with you.

The four years of college had some loneliness in them, too; but I
enjoyed my visits to Williamstown, and then is when I began going into
"society" a good deal again, for I said when Rob comes out he will want
to go. He will have at least three cotillon years, and I want him to go
in the best society we have. Besides, there is sure to be a wife; let
her be a girl of our own position and class. But the dearest parts of
your college life were our four trips abroad during the summer. And
then it was that I began to turn the tables, and when _I_ was tired to
lean on _you_, and when disagreeable things happened to let you take
mother in your arms and hold her there till she promised to forget
them. Then it was when your judgment began to mature, and I found it so
clear and good, and have been guided by it ever since. Oh, those
perfect years between the day you graduated and now! How proud I was of
you, too, in society. It seemed to me no one was so brilliant a talker
at a dinner table. It was all I could e