"So my mother taught me," says Mr. Havemeyer, "to know the joy of work at a time when I might have slipped into a life of idleness." The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known New York clergyman, says: "My father was a farmer, and my mother, with four children on her hands, and no servant, did all the work of a farmer's wife. Her days were long, for she also devoted herself to her children, to their character and education, declining to farm us out to the supervision of nurses or school-teachers. My mother had the old-fashioned notion that children were born of mothers in order that they might have mothers to bring them up." David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University, was asked what great man or woman most influenced him as a boy. He replied, in writing: "I was far more influenced by my mother than by any other person I ever knew or heard of." Fulton, Franklin, and Astor. Robert Fulton was only three years old when his father died. "So that," he said, "I grew up under the care of my blessed mother. She developed my early talent for drawing and encouraged me in my visits to the machine-shops of the town." Robert was a dull pupil at school, however, and the teacher complained to his mother. Whereupon Mrs. Fulton replied proudly: "My boy's head, sir, is so full of original notions that there is no vacant chamber in which to store the contents of your musty books." "I was only ten years old at that time," said Fulton, "and my mother seemed to be the only human being who understood my natural bent for mechanics." The fact that Fulton's mother let the boy have his own way in his "original notions" had its direct result later in the building of the first steamboat. Benjamin Franklin many times, in his own story of his life, mentions the powerful influence which his mother had over him, referring to her always with peculiar affection. "My son," said that mother, "is endowed with more than ordinary talent, and he shall enter one of the professions, perhaps the ministry." The family was then very poor, the elder Franklin having no ambition beyond that of making a bare competence as a ship-chandler. Encouraged by his mother, however, young Benjamin "took to books" with such ardor that before he was ten years old his mother spoke of him as "our little professor," and added: "He shall serve either humanity or his country; the one as a minister of the Gospel, the other as a diplomat." The first John Jacob Astor said: "Whatever I have accomplished through thrift is due to the teachings of my mother. She trained me to the habit of early rising; she made me devote the first waking hours to reading the Bible. Those habits have continued through my life, and have been to me a source of unfailing comfort. Her death was the greatest grief of my existence." WHEN THACKERAY WENT ON STRIKE.