To expose and regularly set forth the whole state of his affairs was not the work of a moment. This business, therefore, was postponed till the following day. In the mean time Markham’s mother made her appearance, wearing a much more composed aspect than the young gentleman had expected, judging from the language which his father had used. Mrs. Markham has little to do in our history; but the mother of an amiable, well-conducted, and intelligent young man is almost always an object of respect. The direction and moral habits of the youthful mind depend much on the practical wisdom of a mother. She does not indeed create the mind, but she gives its energies their first impulse. For when the infant first wakes to consciousness, and commences its converse with the world, the first ray of knowledge, and the earliest of its discriminations, beam from a mother’s eye; and the emotions of its little heart receive their modulation from the melody of a mother’s voice. And is there not an undefinable, but powerfully apprehensible difference between the voice of inanity, selfishness, and grossness, and the voice of intelligence, generosity, and purity? Is there not also as great a difference between an eye which indicates mind, and one which is but a cold glassy inlet of uninterpreted light? We have before professed not to philosophise, and we restrain ourselves from farther digression here. But when there stands beside the path of our narrative a character so truly respectable as that of Mrs. Markham, we cannot resist the inclination to notice and eulogise it. Much talk has been made of the dignity of females in the higher walks of life, and many fine and interesting specimens have been handed up to the world of rustic purity and simplicity; but the character of Markham’s mother belongs not to either of these classes. Hers was a moral, natural, essential dignity: it was not stateliness and pomp, for in her situation these would have been ridiculous, and of consequence undignified. Nature often gives to individuals in every rank of life a species of inalienable nobility, and sometimes denies even to some in the highest walks that nobility of character, by which alone the artificial nobility of civilised society can be properly upheld in its dignity. All this our readers know as well as we do; and we have not mentioned it by way of instruction or discovery, but simply to let them understand the character of Markham’s mind as having been in its earliest developments under the guidance of a mother of this description, and as having received no ordinary portion of the same spirit. The meeting of the mother and the son was not quite so painful as had been the meeting of the father and the son; for the agitation which Mr. Markham had attributed to her had been more in his own feelings than in hers.