of desire, to struggle toward her
aspirations for him, to make good, to repay her for all the
privations she had endured. A lump came in his throat when he saw
her place the little sketch under his father's picture, where her
eyes could open upon it the first thing in the morning, and close to
it at night.

"Ah, my dear! God's will be done--I'm not complaining--but I wish,
oh, how I wish you could be here to see what our dear child can do!"
she told the smiling crayon portrait. "Some of these days the little
son you've never seen is going to be a great man with a great
name--_your_ name, my dear, _your_ name!"

Her face kindled into a sort of exaltation. Two large tears ran down
her cheeks, and two larger ones rolled down Peter's. His heart
swelled, and again he felt in his breast the flutter as of wings.
Far, far away, on the dim and distant horizon, something glimmered,
like sunlight upon airy peaks.

Peter's mother wasn't at all beautiful--just a little, thin, sallow
woman with mild brown eyes and graying hair, and a sensitive mouth,
and dressed in a worn black skirt and a plain white shirt-waist. Her
fingers were needle-pricked, and she stooped from bending so
constantly over her sewing-machine. She had been a pretty girl; now
she was thirty-five years old and looked fifty. She wasn't in the
least intellectual; she hadn't even the gift of humor, or she
wouldn't have thought herself a sinner and besought Heaven to
forgive sins she never committed. She used to weep over the
Fifty-first Psalm, take courage from the Thirty-seventh, and when
she hadn't enough food for her body feed her spirit on the
Twenty-third. She didn't know that it is women like her who manage
to make and keep the earth worth while. This timid and modest soul
had the courage of a soldier and the patience of a martyr under the
daily scourgings inflicted upon the sensitive by biting poverty.
Peter might very well have received far less from a brilliant and
beautiful mother than he received from the woman whose only gifts
and graces were such as spring from a loving, unselfish, and pure
heart.

For Peter's sake she fought while she had strength to fight,
enduring all things, hoping all things. She didn't even know she was
sacrificing herself, because, as Emma Campbell said, "Miss Maria's
jes' natchelly all mother." But of a sudden, the winter that Peter
was turning twelve, the tide of battle went against her. The
needle-pricked, patient fingers