The father was an amiable, inefficient, illiterate, temperate man; a waster of other people’s time; an interminable talker of nothings. The mother, an amiable, industrious, capable woman, who patched and knitted and made a few dollars by nursing, at the call of the village doctor--a most tender and devoted mother, a too generous neighbor. Passing the unfinished habitation one day, I stopped to admire the double hollyhocks and breathe the perfume from the beds of herbs. At the same moment I heard a loud cry for help, and the old lady came hurriedly round the corner of the house, followed by her son, with a hoe in his hand upraised to strike her. Seeing me, he flung the hoe aside and walked sullenly out of the gate. Sitting on the doorstep wiping her tears away with the corner of her apron, the unhappy woman apologized for her evil son in this wise: “We were always poor, living from hand to mouth. My husband never had any faculty for making a living. I strove and strove to keep my children from want, and keep them looking decent. There were now six of them, and I was nearly distracted when I found I was going to have another. At this point, late in the fall, my husband went off and stayed four months with a well-to-do uncle of his, leaving me and the six children without food or fire-wood. I had endured all patiently till then, but this made me full of bitterness and anger. I was just raving--quite beside myself all the time. A neighbor helped me, and trusted me a little, so that we kept from starving; but this did not prevent me from feeling indignation, almost _hatred_, toward a father who could be so unfatherly. Thomas showed the same disposition from a child.” “MY CONSOLATION.” Here is a counterpart to the preceding narrative. We had gone to visit an invalid friend who himself had climbed these mountain heights to escape the fogs below on the sea-shore. Here, cosily sheltered by the summit, surrounded by peach and cherry-trees, and looking down on wooded heights and gorges, we found a most excellent hotel. The host, a mild, intelligent man, was himself quite delicate; his wife, on the contrary, was one of those rarely met with, magnetic, generous-natured women, whose coming affects one like the ocean breezes. She had, so she told us, nine children living and one dead. Only such a brave, bounteous creature could have been equal to this, and never in one instance bring reproach on her motherhood. It is of the tenth I would speak, now a lad of sixteen, observing whom the invalid remarked: “I shall get well just looking at that boy. What a manly, affectionate fellow!”