At the root of the tree, buried in unambitious silence, lie the life-forces, that elaborate and evolve all the pillared and ramified glories above. In the bosom of the family live the feminine instincts and harmonies which send forth the masculine majesty of deeds and doctrines which rule the universe. Tears that have wet the floor of solitary dungeons, still more bitter but for the consciousness of the deathless sympathy of one faithful bosom somewhere; crimes, arrested by the persuasive voice of woman; wrongs, goaded to madness but for her soothing whispers; poverty, pitiless and intolerable, but for her acts and her patient labours; darkness, unpierced, but by the light of one heaven-kindled smile; hopes, kept alive only by the eloquence of feminine truth; strength, born of the weakness of never-vanquished faith; despair, scattered by the words of one God-inspired bosom, stand forth and testify to the unproclaimed achievements of the mother-half of mankind! Great Mother! not only of men and women, but of the energies, hopes, virtues and triumphs that bloom out of them and their generations, stand forth! Be the herald of that immortal recognition of this great truth, which shall have its fullest acknowledgement in that region of perfect recompense, where sits our Divine Master on the crystalline throne of immaculate justice, and says to every advancing hero and heroine who has— Done good by stealth and blushed to find it fame— “For as much as thou hast done it to the very least of these little ones, thou hast done it unto Me. Enter into the joy of thy Lord!” CHAPTER IX. THE LONG LINE AND THIS BOOK END.