Yes, it is my birthday, and I am happy; but last night I was in a melancholy mood, and wandered aimlessly through green lanes and over a bridge, while across the moonlit river, which looked so peacefully beautiful, there came from a riverside house, whose lights gleaming through the grey leafy curtains of the willows gave it the appearance of some enchanted palace, sounds of jovial choruses. And these jarred upon me, for I was lonely, and I was mourning the dead years and their buried opportunities. Then I wandered on till I came to the wall of a graveyard, and large trees stood on either side of the road and darkened my way with their shadows, and I would not walk onwards, for those black shadows seemed to me like the ghosts of future years, and I was alone among them, quite alone. So I retraced my steps, and the moonlight was over the churchyard, and I stopped and gazed at the tombs, all mystic in the moonlight, and they seemed to look at me so piteously and enviously, for they were the records of dead lives and dead hopes, and I was still living, I still had love and hope. Then I looked up into the starry heavens, and they were very sweet, and I fancied the stars were so disposed as to spell the word “mother.” And then a pure and gentle joy stole through my soul, and I felt that I was not alone, that though many a mother lay cold and dead in that churchyard, my own dear little mother lived, lived cheerful, happy, and full of love. So last night’s melancholy passed away at the thought of her, and to-day I feel in the mood to bless all the world and everything in it that I have a mother, and such a mother, too. And still, you will say, I have not described her to you. Well, how can a man describe his own mother? She is just—my mother, and that is all I can tell you. That must convey to you a picture of ideal goodness, common sense, and unselfish love—in fact, as I said before, motherhood in perfection. Somebody told me the other day that a woman cannot possibly devote herself equally to her husband and her children; that one must give way to the other, and she—it was a woman who said this—instanced the cases of several devotedly domestic women of our mutual acquaintance. And, when we came to examine facts, I was bound to admit that she was right in every case she had cited; but this did not convince me that her argument held good invariably. I refuted it at one fell swoop with my mother.