thing in the account that I hear concerning them, but what is easily
explained. For the cause of their present degradation and ruin, I have
no occasion to go outside of the dwelling in which they were reared. I
am glad to put on record, for the benefit of both mothers and their
children, two of the cases which now occur to me, as illustrative of
different kinds of maternal influence.

One of the boys who attended the same school with me, and whose father's
residence was very near my father's, was, even at that early period,
both vulgar and profane in his talk. He seemed destitute of all sense
and propriety, caring nothing for what was due from him to others, and
equally regardless of the good-will of his teacher and of his
companions. When I returned to the place, after a few years' absence,
and inquired for him, I was told that he was growing up, or rather had
grown up, in habits of vice, which seemed likely to render him an outlaw
from all decent society: that even then he had no associates except from
the very dregs of the community. In my visits to my native place ever
since, I have kept my eye upon him, as a sad illustration of the
progress of sin. He has been for many years--I cannot say an absolute
sot--but yet an intemperate drinker. He has always been shockingly
profane; not only using the profane expressions that are commonly heard
in the haunts of wickedness, but actually putting his invention to the
rack to originate expressions more revolting, if possible, than anything
to be found in the acknowledged vocabulary of blasphemy. He has been
through life an avowed infidel--not merely a deist, but a professed
atheist,--laughing at the idea both of a God and a hereafter; though his
skepticism, instead of being the result of inquiry or reflection, or
being in any way connected with it, is evidently the product of
unrestrained vicious indulgence. His domestic relations have been a
channel of grief and mortification to those who have been so unfortunate
as to be associated with him. His wife, if she is still living, lives
with a broken heart, and the time has been when she has dreaded the
sound of his footsteps. His children, notwithstanding the brutalizing
influence to which they have been subjected, have, by no means, sunk
down to _his_ standard of corruption; and some of them at least would
seem ready to hang their heads when they call him "father." I cannot at
this moment think of a more loathsome example of mora