My shadow-wife grew up by my side under my mother's creative touch. It was for her I studied, for her I should toil. The thought of providing for her took the sordid element out of economy and made it unselfish. She was to be to me adviser, friend, inspirer, charmer. She was to be my companion, not alone in one faculty, but through all the range of my being—there should be nothing wherein she and I could not by appreciative sympathy commune together. As I thought of her, she seemed higher than I. I must love up and not down, I said. She must stand on a height and I must climb to her—she must be a princess worthy of many toils and many labors. Gradually she became to me a controlling power.
The thought, of what she would think, closed for me many a book that I felt she and I could not read together—her fair image barred the way to many a door and avenue, which if a young man enters, he must leave his good angel behind,—for her sake I abjured intimacies that I felt she could not approve, and it was my ambition to keep the inner temple of my heart and thoughts so pure, that it might be a worthy resting place for her at last.
CHAPTER V.
I START FOR COLLEGE AND MY UNCLE JACOB ADVISES ME.
The time came at last when the sacred habit of intimacy with my mother was broken, and I was to leave her for college.
It was the more painful to her, as only a year before, my father had died, leaving her more than ever dependent on the society of her children.
My father died as he had lived, rejoicing in his work and feeling that if he had a hundred lives to live, he would devote them to the same object for which he had spent that one—the preaching of the Gospel. He left to my mother the homestead and a small farm, which was under the care of one of my brothers, so that the event of his death made no change in our family home center, and I was to go to college and fulfill the hope of his heart and the desire of my mother's life, in consecrating myself to the work of the Christian ministry.