Speak gently to the young,

For they will have enough to bear;

Pass through life as best they may,

'T is full of anxious care.

David Bates

APRIL FOURTEENTH

My Mother's voice! how often creeps

Its cadence on my lonely hours!

Like healing sent on wings of sleep,

Or dew to the unconscious flowers.

I can forget her melting prayer

While leaping pulses madly fly,

But in the still unbroken air

Her gentle tone comes stealing by,

And years and sin and manhood flee

And leave me at my mother's knee.

N. P. Willis

APRIL FIFTEENTH

And then her heart would warm with hope, perhaps,

of what might be to come, of the overwhelming

possibilities—how many of them, to her, lay in

the warm clasp of the child's hand that came pushing

into hers!

Anne Thackeray Ritchie

APRIL SIXTEENTH

The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is

this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

Olive Schreiner

APRIL SEVENTEENTH

Like happy children in their play,

Whose hearts run over into song.

Lowell

APRIL EIGHTEENTH