There is something unnatural in the weeping of the aged. Youth is the seed-time of the harvest, and hath its sunshine and clouds. But age is the garnered fruit, the sere and the yellow leaf of all that was beautiful. When age weeps, ’tis for youth, not for itself. I gazed on the heart-broken woman before me, and thought of her many nights and days of anguish. I thought of all her bright visions of hope and joy which shone through her son and lighted the path of her future. They were all vanished, and here she lay in utter darkness and desolation.
I spoke to her: she looked up. I told her if she would leave her address I would send a letter, as soon as it came, to her home.
“Home!” she exclaimed; “I have none! Yes, yes, I have!” Reader, it was the poor-house!
Week after week elapsed: no letter came for the aged widow. One day I accidentally took up a New Orleans paper. Curiosity prompted me to read it more carefully than usual: the paper fell from my hand; my worst apprehensions for Mary Williams were realized.
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I stood at the bedside of the widow,—she lay on one of straw, beside which stood a table containing sundry bottles of medicine, and near her a Bible, upon which were a pair of common steel spectacles, black and rusted with age. She instantly recognized me.
“Ah! you have brought me a letter from my dear boy. I knew he would not, could not, desert his poor mother. How is he? where is he?”
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Reader, here I close my sketch, the remembrance of which haunts me still, and the last sigh, the last pang of the heart-broken widow will be as the monitor to prompt me to deeds of charity, with a heart alive to the cries of the suffering, and a feeling of joy at their alleviation which I could not previously have experienced.