But I am not going to dilate upon the merits of mothers generally. I only want to tell you what manner of mother mine is, and how happy I am to be able to say _is_ and not _was_, like so many poor bachelors of my acquaintance. For a man who is growing old, with neither wife nor child to bring him loving greetings on his birthday, I can conceive nothing more awful than to have no mother who shall say, “Bless you, my son!” while in so doing she happily remembers, in a gentle autumn mood of love, all that full flowering summer love with which she greeted him on that first birthday of his. In a man’s youth, when all the world is opening before him, with its exuberant growth of possibilities tempting him in all directions, and when the gaudy butterflies of passion are leading him a chase through brakes and brambles with their deep wounding prickles and nettles that sting, his mother ceases for a time to be the guiding star of his life as she had been in his childhood, for there are so many other lights that flash across his way, and one serves as well as another to illuminate his onward course. But when he retraces his steps, wounded and weary, and longing for rest, he seeks again the steady starlight of a mother’s love. A man who has known any sorrow or disappointment or disillusioning, turns childlike, by instinct to the repose and the solace of his mother’s bosom, where there is always a fount of love as fresh as in the days when he would come to her to stop his floods of childish tears with those caresses that only a mother can give to her child. [Illustration]