r earnest study: evenings in merry party or quiet home-life, one as
delightful as the other. Archery and croquet had in me a most devoted
disciple, and the "pomps and vanities" of the ballroom found the happiest
of votaries. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far as were
concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed a trouble
of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries should fall on
her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed then, that her life
was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my brother's school and
college-life pressed on her constantly, and her need of money was often
serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely cheated her systematically,
using for his own purposes the remittances she made for payment of
liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant drain. Yet for me all that
was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to which we were going? I need
never think of what I would wear till the time for dressing arrived, and
there laid out ready for me was all I wanted, every detail complete from
top to toe. No hand but hers must dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in
dense curly masses nearly to my knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress
and deck with flowers, and if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might
not help by sewing in laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would
kiss me and bid me run to my books or my play, telling me that her only
pleasure in life was caring for her "treasure". Alas! how lightly we take
the self-denying labor that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
what life means when the protecting mother-wing is withdrawn. So guarded
and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch of pain and
anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed that life might
be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was sent to help; all
the joy of those happy years I took, not ungratefully I hope, but
certainly with as glad unconsciousness of anything rare in it as I took
the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I gave to my darling, but I never
knew all I owed her till I passed out of her tender guardianship, till I
left my mother's home. Is such training wise? I am not sure. It makes the
ordinary roughnesses of life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes
out into the world, that one is apt to question whether some earlier
initiation into life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the
young. Yet it is a fai