I am absolutely certain that my father—God bless him!—would bear me out in this, after all his forty odd years of wedded life, and I can confidently count upon the confirmatory evidence of my brothers and sisters. Never have we or my father had the slightest reason to be jealous of one another on account of my mother’s attention to the other. She has the most marvellous power of dividing her devotion equally between her husband and her children, and this supremely womanly virtue has enabled her always to preserve an equilibrium of happiness between her husband, her children, and herself. It makes me so angry to hear cynics sneering at the possibility of enduring happiness in married life, when I think of my father and mother sitting together in their old age as cheerfully as when the romance of life was still fresh for them, and urging folks to matrimony because it is the happier state. To see him at his piano, pouring out in melodious reverie the emotions that are ever fresh in him, while she sits close by in her armchair, revelling in love stories that would set the hearts of romantic schoolgirls aflame, is, I think, one of the most beautiful sights in the world, and it makes one feel that a burden of seventy or eighty years may be borne lightly and easily if only love be there to keep the heart young. In childhood one’s mother seems always such a distance off in the matter of age, but when one has reached middle life, and the wheels of existence need oiling with the encouragement of affection, one’s mother comes nearer, and seems younger and less sophisticated than ourselves. For instance, to-day I feel a kind of Methuselah, and, as I think of my mother and all her little ways, I can scarcely believe that she is so much older than I. I think of her now as she was when we were all children; I recall the fairy stories she used to tell us to keep us good and quiet, while my father was busily occupied with his music, and quiet was absolutely necessary for him to produce work that satisfied him. So did she maintain a practical sympathy with his pursuits, while she rejoiced our young minds. So has she ever been; in sickness or in health she has never sacrificed her husband or her children for each other, but considered them equally.