"'_Oh! mon Dieu!_' she cried, dropping her work in her lap and clasping her hands, 'my tears rust them.' "'And why do you let so many fall, mother?' I asked. 'Where do they all come from?' "'From a breaking heart,' she answered, and I never forgot her looks or her words. The breaking heart became an image in my mind, almost as distinct as the rusted steel. For a long time I was afraid to jump or bound about the room, lest the fracture in my mother's heart should be made wider, and more tears come gushing through. "But she did not always weep. She taught me to read, while she toiled with her needle, and she told me tales of the genii and of fairy-land, at twilight hour, or as she used to say, '_entre le loup et le chien_,' in her own expressive, idiomatic language. She told me, too, stories from the Bible, before I was able to read them, of Isaac bound on the sacrificial pyre, with his father kneeling by him, ready to plunge the knife in his young heart, when the angels called to him out of heaven to stay his uplifted hand; of Joseph's wondrous history, from his coat of many colors, fatal cause of fraternal jealousy, to the royal robes and golden chain with which Pharaoh invested him; of David, the shepherd-boy, the minstrel monarch, the conqueror of Philistia's giant chief. It was thus she employed the dim hours between the setting sun and the rising stars; but the moment she lighted her lonely lamp she again plied her busy needle, though alas! too often rusted with her tears. "Thus my early childhood passed,--and every day my heart twined more closely round my mother's heart, and I began to form great plans of future achievements to be wrought for her. I would be a second Joseph and go to some distant land and win fame, and honors, and wealth, and send for her that I might lay them all at her feet. She would not, at first, recognize her boy in the purple and fine linen of his sumptuous attire; but I would fall on her neck, and lift up my voice and weep aloud, and then she would know her child. A mother's tears, Gabriella, nurture great aspirations in a child. "I used to accompany her to the shop when she carried home her work. It was there she first met the gentleman whose name I bear. Their acquaintance commenced through me, to whom he seemed peculiarly attracted, and he won my admiring gratitude by the gifts he lavished upon me. He came often to see my mother, and though at first she shrunk from his visits, she gradually came to welcome him as a friend and a benefactor.