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Show A Mother s Love. Mothers live for their children, make self sacrifices for them, and manifest their tenderness and love so freely that the name mother is the sweetest in the human language; and yet sons, youthful and aged, know but little of the anxiety, the nights of sleepless and painful solitude, which their mothers have spent over their thoughtless waywardness. Those loving hearts go down to their graves with those horrors of secret agony untold, as the mother watches by night or prays in the privacy of her closet. She weighs well the words which she addresses to her son in order to lead him to a manhood of honor and usefulness. She will not tell him all the griefs and deadly fears which beset her soul. She warns him with trembling, lest she say overmuch. She tries to charm him with cheering love, while her own heart is bleeding. No worthy and successful man ever yet knew the breadth and depth of the great obligations which he is under to the mother who guided his heedless steps at the time when his character for virtue and purity was so narrowly balanced against a course of vice and ignominy. Let the dutiful son do his utmost to smooth his mother s pathway; let him obey as implicitly as he can his mother s wishes and advice; let him omit nothing that will contribute to her peace and happiness- and yet he will part from her at the tomb with a debt to her not half paid. |