Home Scenes and Home Influence; a series of tales and sketchesArthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
General
Home Scenes and Home Influence; a series of tales and sketches
Arthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
Didactic fiction; Domestic fiction; Family life -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
While talking over this incident with her husband, Mrs. Hartley
said--"Were not all these impressions so light, I would feel
encouraged. The boy has warm and tender feelings, but I fear that
his passionate temper and selfishness will, like evil weeds,
completely check their growth."
"The case is bad enough, Anna, but not so bad, I hope, as you fear.
These good affections are never active in vain. They impress the
mind with an indelible impression. In after years the remembrance of
them will revive the states they produced, and give strength to good
desires and intentions. Amid all his irregularities and wanderings
from good, in after-life, the thoughts of his mother will restore
the feelings he had to-day, and draw him back from evil with cords
of love that cannot be broken. The good now implanted will remain,
and, like ten just men, save the city. In most instances where men
abandon themselves finally to evil courses, it will be found that
the impressions made in childhood were not of the right kind; that
the mother's influence was not what it should have been. For myself,
I am sure that a different mother would have made me a different
man. When a boy, I was too much like Clarence; but the tenderness
with which my mother always treated me, and the unimpassioned but
earnest manner in which she reproved and corrected my faults,
subdued my unruly temper. When I became restless or impatient, she
always had a book to read to me, or a story to tell, or had some
device to save me from myself. My father was neither harsh nor
indulgent towards me; I cherish his memory with respect and love;
but I have different feelings when I think of my mother. I often
feel, even now, as if she were near me--as if her cheek were laid to
mine. My father would place his hand upon my head caressingly, but
my mother would lay her cheek against mine. I did not expect my
father to do more--I do not know that I would have loved him had he
done more; for him it was a natural expression of affection; but no
act is too tender for a mother. Her kiss upon my cheek, her warm
embrace, are all felt now; and the older I grow, the more holy seem
the influences that surrounded me in childhood."
THE POWER OF PATIENCE.
I HAVE a very excellent friend, who married some ten years ago, and
now has her own cares and troubles in a domestic establishment
consisting of her husband and herself, five children, and two
servants. Like a large majority of those similarly situated, Mrs.
Martinet finds her natural stock of patience altogether inadequate
to the demand therefor; and that there is an extensive demand will
be at once inferred when I mention that four of her five children
are boys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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