supply her necessities she is satisfied. Just think, you prosperous
business men, how you would feel if the conditions were reversed, if
you were obliged to take the dependent, humiliating position of your
mother!

Whatever else you are obliged to neglect, take no chances of giving
your mother pain by neglecting her, and of thus making yourself
miserable in the future.

The time may come when you will stand by her bedside, in her last
sickness, or by her coffin, and wish that you had exchanged a little of
your money for more visits and more attentions and more little presents
to your mother; when you will wish that you had cultivated her more,
even at the cost of making a little less money.

There is no one else in this world who can take your mother's place in
your life. And there is no remorse like that which comes from the
remembrance of ill-treating, abusing, or being unkind to one's mother.
These things stand out with awful vividness and terrible clearness when
the mother is gone forever from sight, and you have time to contrast
your treatment with her long suffering, tenderness, and love, and her
years of sacrifice for you.

One of the most painful things I have ever witnessed was the anguish of
a son who had become wealthy and in his prosperity neglected the
mother, whose sacrifices alone had made his success possible. He did
not take the time to write to her more than twice a year, and then only
brief letters. He was too busy to send a good long letter to the poor
old lonely mother back in the country, who had risked her life and
toiled and sacrificed for years for him! Finally, when he was summoned
to her bedside in the country, in her last sickness, and realized that
his mother had been for years without the ordinary comforts of life,
while he had been living in luxury, he broke down completely. And
while he did everything possible to alleviate her suffering, in the few
last days that remained to her on earth, and gave her an imposing
burial, what torture he must have suffered, at this pitiful picture of
his mother who had sacrificed everything for him!

"The regrets for thoughtless acts and indifference to admonitions now
felt and expressed by many living sons of dead mothers will, in time,
be felt and expressed by the living sons of living mothers," says
Richard L. Metcalfe, in the "Commoner." "The boys of to-day who do not
understand the value of the mother's companionship will yet sing--with