"After my father's death my mother was very poor. When she looked into the drawer there were only sixty cents in money. Of course, he had some personal property, but it was not immediately available like money, but through the help of kind friends she was enabled to give him a respectable funeral. Like many other women in her condition of life, she had been brought up in entire ignorance of managing any other business, than that which belonged to her household. For years she had been shielded in the warm clasp of loving arms, but now she had to bare her breast to the storm and be father and mother both to her little ones. My father as you know died in debt, and he was hardly in his grave when his creditors were upon her track. I have often heard her speak in the most grateful manner of your forbearance and kindness to her in her hour of trouble. My mother went to see my father's principal creditor and asked him only to give her a little time to straighten out the tangled threads of her business, but he was inexorable, and said that he had waited and lost by it. Very soon he had an administrator appointed by the court, who in about two months took the business in his hands; and my mother was left to struggle along with her little ones, and face an uncertain future. These were dark days but we managed to live through them. I have often heard her say that she lived by faith and not sight, that poverty had its compensations, that there was something very sweet in a life of simple trust, to her, God was not some far off and unapproachable force in the universe, the unconscious Creator of all consciousness, the unperceiving author of all perception, but a Friend and a Father coming near to her in sorrows, taking cognizance of her grief, and gently smoothing her path in life. But it was not only by precept that she taught us; her life was a living epistle. One morning as the winter was advancing I heard her say she hoped she would be able to get a nice woolen shawl, as hers was getting worse for wear. Shortly after I went out into the street and found a roll of money lying at my feet. Oh I remember it as well as if it had just occurred. How my heart bounded with joy. 'Here,' I said to myself, 'is money enough to buy mother a shawl and bonnet. Oh I am so glad,' and hurrying home I laid it in her lap and said with boyish glee, 'Hurrah for your new shawl; look what I found in the street.'"
"What is it my son?" she said.
"Why here is money enough to buy you a new shawl and bonnet too." It seems as if I see her now, as she looked, when she laid it aside, and said——
"But James, it is not ours?"
"Not ours, mother, why I found it in the street!"
"Still it is not ours."
"Why mother ain`t you going to keep it?"
"No my son, I shall go down to the Clarion office and advertise it."
"But mother why not wait till it is advertised?"
"And what then?"