mamma, and her care and tenderness for me were
such that the remembrance of them fills my heart to overflowing with
gratitude." Another woman told me with a moved smile that she was "so
fortunate a woman as to have two mothers," while a man I know openly
declares that his mother-in-law is "the best mother in the
world,--next to his own mother."

One elderly woman, who has been a mother-in-law five times, informed
me the other day that in her heart she knew little difference between
her own daughters and sons and their respective husbands and wives.
"You see," she said, "they are all my dear children."

I cite these instances merely to prove how happily harmonious this
oft-abused state may be, and what a pity it is that it should ever be
otherwise.

If you, my reader, do not enjoy the relationship, allow me to suggest
a cure for the trouble. Put your own mother--or daughter--in the place
of the offender, and act according to the light thrown upon the
subject by this shifting of positions. Say to yourself--"This woman
means well, but she does not know me yet well enough to understand
just how to put things in the way to which I have been accustomed. She
loves John so well that she seems unjust or inconsiderate to me. She
could not, in the eyes of John's wife, have a better excuse for hasty
speech or harsh action."

The love you both bear this same oft-perplexed John should be at once
solvent and cement, melting hardness, and uniting seemingly
antagonistic elements.

Above all things, as John's wife, never criticise his mother to him.
If he sympathizes with you, he is disloyal to his mother; if not, you
consider him unfeeling, and immediately accuse him of "taking sides"
against you. Think for one moment of your own boy, perhaps still a
mere baby. Does it not, even now, grieve you to the heart to think
that the day will come when he will discuss and acknowledge your
faults to anyone, albeit his listener is only his wife? If John is the
man he should be, he fancies that his mother is "a creature all too
bright and good" to be criticised, and, as you want your son to have
the same opinion of his mother, uphold John in his fealty, and scorn
to destroy such blessed love and faith. Make the effort to see John's
mother with his eyes, and by so doing make him love you better, and
prove yourself worthy to be the wife of a true man and the mother of a
son who will be as leal and steadfast as his father.

CHAPTER XVII.