It wuz called “The Mother’s Sacrifice,” and wuz the picter of a Eastern mother, who wuz a-throwin’ her child under the wheels of a juggernaut to insure its everlastin’ salvation.
Her face wuz torn with love and duty. It wuz a impressive picter. He gin twenty thousand dollars for it, for he told me so.
Sez Martin as we looked at it, full of the rich Oriental glow of forest and landscape, and the dark, frenzied beauty of the mother’s face and the innocent beauty of the child, who trusts to her love and care and don’t mistrust its impendin’ doom—
Sez Martin, “What a struggle is going on in that woman’s breast! how her heart is torn between her love for the child and her religious belief! What a masterly handling of the subject!” sez he.
“Yes,” sez I; “but what of the hearts of the mothers who see their children crushed down under jest as murderous wheels, and don’t have her religious zeal to hold ’em up? That Eastern mother thinks that this will insure her child’s eternal well-bein’—she thinks the wheels move on in the cause of eternal good. What would she think if she wuz a American mother, and knew these wheels murdered her child jest to save a little money—jest out of wicked, graspin’ avarice?”
Sez Martin coldly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Sez I, “Yes you do, Martin; I mean your trolley cars, that move on and crush down childhood and age, when a little bit of money you spend for this ficticious woe would relieve the real agony which is goin’ on right before your front gate through your own neglect.”
I would gin him some sech little delicate hints, whether he liked it or lumped it, as the sayin’ is. Agin he sez in that dretful dignified way of hisen, “I don’t know what you mean,” and turned away.
But jest as I wuz withdrawin’ myself from the seen, for I felt that these little blind hits I gin him wuz enough for the present, Adrian come in, and Martin called out—
“Well, dear little Partner, what do you want?”