oke the curly hair
of Mrs. Hackett's little guide. "Give me back my boy. I am an old
woman, going on seventy-nine, and I cannot be here long. I know I am
standing with one foot in the grave, and I do want to hear my boy, my
baby, say to me, 'Ma, I'm free.' Let me go down on my knees to you and
beg that you have mercy on a mother's breaking heart. During the last
month I picked five hundred pounds of cotton and made two dollars to
get here to see you. I got here without a cent, and this little angel
gave me a dollar--her all. I don't care if I have to walk back home,
for I've seen you and told you of my boy."

With unsteady voice the governor told her the law, and referred her
gently to the prison commission, assuring her that they would give her
petition the most considerate attention. I am told that when the books
were examined the crime was found to be one of the blackest on the
calendar, and yet the mother loved him.

Her love always stimulates love. It lasts when everything else fails.
A man cannot wander so far from God as to forget his mother, or go so
deep in sin as to be unmindful of her sweet influence.

The following is a sketch, full of touching interest, of a little
ragged newsboy who had lost his mother. In the tenderness of his
affection for her he was determined that he would raise a stone to her
memory. His mother and he had kept house together and they had been
all to each other, but now she was taken, and the little fellow's loss
was irreparable. Getting a stone was no easy task, for his earnings
were small; but love is strong. Going to a cutter's yard and finding
that even the cheaper class of stones was far too expensive for him, he
at length fixed upon a broken shaft of marble, part of the remains of
an accident in the yard, and which the proprietor kindly named at such
a low figure that it came within his means. There was much yet to be
done, but the brave little chap was equal to it.

The next day he conveyed the stone away on a little four-wheeled cart,
and managed to have it put in position. The narrator, curious to know
the last of the stone, visited the cemetery one afternoon, and he thus
describes what he saw and learned:

"Here it is," said the man in charge, and, sure enough, there was our
monument, at the head of one of the newer graves. I knew it at once.
Just as it was when it left our yard, I was going to say, until I got a
little nearer to it and saw what the littl