clutched
the arms of the old rocking chair in which she sat.

"I will!" she said, regarding him with a look which seemed to devour him
with yearning love. "This world whose voices thee hears calling is a
fiction of thine own brain. That which thee thinks thee beholds of glory
and beauty thee hast conjured up from the depths of a youthful and
disordered fancy, and projected into an unreal realm. That world which
thee has thus beheld in thy dreams will burst like a pin-pricked bubble
when thee tries to enter it. It is not the real world, my son. How shall
I tell thee what that real world is? It is a snare, a pit-fall. It is a
flame into which young moths are ever plunging. It promises, only to
deceive; it beckons, only to betray; its smiles are ambushes; it is
sunlight on the surface, but ice at the heart; it offers life, but it
confers death. I bid thee fear it, shun it, hate it!"

She leaned far forward in her chair, and her face upon which the youth
had never seen any other look but that of an almost unearthly calm, was
glowing with excitement and passion.

"Mother," he exclaimed, "what does thee know of this world, thee who has
passed thy life in lonely places and amongst a quiet people?"

She rose and paced the floor as if to permit some of her excitement to
escape in physical activity, and pausing before him, said: "My only and
well-beloved son, thee does not know thy mother. A veil has been drawn
over that portion of her life which preceded thy birth, and its secrets
are hidden in her own heart. She has prayed God that she might never
have to bring them forth into the light; but he has imposed upon her the
necessity of opening the grave in which they are buried, in order that,
seeing them, thee may abandon thy desires to taste those pleasures which
once lured thy mother along the flower-strewn pathway to her sin and
sorrow."

Her solemnity and her suffering produced in the bosom of her son a
nameless fear. He could not speak. He could only look and listen.

"Thee sees before thee," she continued, "the faded form and features of
a woman once young and beautiful. Can thee believe it?"

He did not answer, for she had seemed to him as mothers always do to
children, to have been always what he had found her upon awakening to
consciousness. He could not remember when her hair was not gray.

Something in her manner revealed to the startled soul of the young
Quaker that he was about to come upon a discovery that wo