The sunlight and the robins wakened us. It was one of my best days—that of my return. So much of it has come along up the road with me! Especially I remember its glad faces and the touch of its loving hands, and the sound of its gentle voices and its peace. Who can estimate the value of such a day save one who has been blessed with it? True, the moments go like falling water, but they return and are never quite ended, after all.
The cascade seemed to sing a welcome with its big, hearty voice. The garden flowers expressed my happiness in color, and sent their perfume to bid me welcome at the gate.
The Pearl and the hand-made gentleman turned away while I went up the old stair with my arms around my mother and sister, now dearer than ever to me. We sat down upon the old sofa, and I began to ravel out my follies. They rose to prepare breakfast, and I looked about me. There were the familiar three commandments of my mother hanging on the wall:
BE TRUTHFUL. BE KIND. BE HAPPY.
“If I had told the truth to Mr. Weatherby I would never have gone away,” was my remark.
“The more truth the less trouble,” said my mother. “It keeps you in the right road. If you're going to tell the truth you've got to make it worth telling, or, at least, good enough so that you will not be ashamed of it.”
While we had learned those three commandments, not until now had I begun to feel the power in them.
I looked about me at all the familiar things: the pictures—especially a crayon portrait of my father—the mottos, wrought in colored yam. Wisdom was more available than art those days in the north country, and the walls of many a simple home were decorated with the sayings of bard or prophet, each neatly framed. My mother's mottos were all her own, however. She was a daughter of the pioneers who had learned much in a hard school of experience. The best of it all had come down to her, and was a bit refined by her own thought. There was a kind of history in those mottos that hung on the walls of the Mill House—the heart history of men who had had to think for themselves. I read them anew and thoughtfully:
The kindly will never want a friend;
The mean will never lack an enemy.