“Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven itself.” In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that story or hear it read without crying. But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.