er to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched suddenly
through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn gradually
off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike! She
had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance--repugnance which
no man can conquer--towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty of the
earlier stage. She had spent her best and happiest years in tending,
watching, and learning to love like a mother this child, with which she
has no connection and to which she has no tie. Perhaps she refused some
sweetheart (such things have been), or put him off and off, until he
lost heart and turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving this
creature that had wound itself about her heart. And the end of it
all,--her month's warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the
life to vain regret. Or, worse still, to see the child gradually
forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect and neglect on the
plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning to treat her as a
servant whom he had treated a few years before as a mother. She sees the
Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness and love unutterable in her
heart she had bought for him years ago out of her slender savings,
neglected for some newer gift of his father, lying in dust in the
lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and the act applauded for its
unfeeling charity. Little wonder if she becomes hurt and angry, and
attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her old power back again. We are not
all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but the most of us human beings
with feelings and tempers of our own.

And so in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely
and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of
thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the
children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she
gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late
charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short
visit. How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them on her
lonely bed! How unsatisfactory their realisation, when the forgetful
child, half wondering, checks with every word and action the outpouring
of her maternal love! How bitter and restless the memories that they
leave behind! And for the rest, what else has she?--to watch them with
eager eyes as they go to school, to sit in church wher