John Wanamaker.
"When you marry," said John Wanamaker, to a young men's Bible class, "remember that your mother-in-law is your wife's mother. Never allow a so-called 'mother-in-law joke' to make you forget that you are reading a reflection on some one's mother. My own mother I reverenced. Her maxims taught me forbearance, tolerance, and the homely lesson of live and let live."
The mother of Henry O. Havemeyer, the "Sugar King," urged her son to don overalls and go to work in his father's refinery—though the family was even then very rich.
"So my mother taught me," says Mr. Havemeyer, "to know the joy of work at a time when I might have slipped into a life of idleness."
The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known New York clergyman, says:
"My father was a farmer, and my mother, with four children on her hands, and no servant, did all the work of a farmer's wife. Her days were long, for she also devoted herself to her children, to their character and education, declining to farm us out to the supervision of nurses or school-teachers. My mother had the old-fashioned notion that children were born of mothers in order that they might have mothers to bring them up."
David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University, was asked what great man or woman most influenced him as a boy.
He replied, in writing:
"I was far more influenced by my mother than by any other person I ever knew or heard of."