And there was sobbing and crying in the outer room. My old mother was heartbroken at the parting and my older brother was trying to console her. When the catbird flew away, followed by the blue one—the bumble bee found the raised window and flew away. Then I turned to the bed—father had likewise gone away. Only the cold clay remained. Standing on the ruins of the old home I recalled it all once more as vividly as though it happened but yesterday. How strangely we live, how strangely we die, how strangely we live on after loved ones have gone from us. How strangely we recall the old scenes when they are suggested to us by a chain of memories passing through our mind. Ah, many of my old hopes and ambitions lie now in ruins more complete than the old walls of my childhood’s home. Many of the people I met in this old home were closely connected with those old hopes that have crumbled into gloomy dreams. Still I live on and hope on—new hopes and a new life. THE WAYWARD BOY Today I want to talk to the boys who neglect their mother. They are not all bad boys, but all are careless and thoughtless boys. At an early age these wayward boys go away from home and leave a fond mother to worry and fret and grieve over their absence. Some times they neglect to write home for years and years, leaving the dear old mother to nurse her lonely and hungry heart and hug the old, old memories when her boy was but a child. If any wayward and wandering young man should chance to read these lines—any wayward boy who knows of a mother waiting at home—won’t he sit down this very day and write her a few lines? I have for a neighbor a loving mother who is wasting her life in grieving for her wayward son. He went away two years ago, and has never written her a single line. He is a wanderer on the earth, working a few weeks at one place, then jumps a freight train and rides to new scenes. About a year ago the mother dreamed an awful dream about her boy. In that vision she was in a strange land sitting under a large tree on a sloping hill, around whose base a railroad curved and stretched out for miles on either side. She looked away to the east, and saw the smoke of an approaching train. It was coming like the wind. Then she heard the whistles of a locomotive in the west, and looking in that direction she beheld another train sweeping down the track to meet the one coming from the east.