The loon, or great northern diver, is reported to have displayed her mother love and anxiety to a sportsman fishing in Sebago Lake in Maine: He surprized the mother with one young one near his canoe. She was employing every artifice to call the little one away, but the infant swam so near the boat that the fisherman took him aboard in his landing-net, and, holding him on his knee, gently stroked his downy coat, to the evident satisfaction of the youngster. Meanwhile the mother was in an agony of distress. At first, forgetting her native wildness and timidity in her mother love, she boldly approached the canoe, and, rising in the water till she appeared to stand upon it, furiously flapped her wings, uttering menacing cries. Finding this of no avail, she pretended that she was wounded, rolling over in the water and finally lying still as if dead, evidently to attract attention to herself and away from the young one. The fisherman, touched by these displays of motherly affection, put the young loon into the water, upon which the mother instantly came to life and again tried to entice her little one to go with her. (Text.)—Olive Thorne Miller, “The Bird Our Brother.”
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MOTHER, MEMORY OF
Lamar Fontaine, looking back after a long life of adventure, writes thus of a parting with his mother:
Those long-ago days now rise before me in all their vividness. As I pen these lines, nearing the seventy-seventh milestone in life’s rugged pathway, I feel the loving kiss yet burning on my lips where she prest it as she bade me “good-by.” There are some things in our life that time does not efface, and this is one of them. They are like the brand of red-hot iron that sears the tender hide of the bleating calf; once burned in, it lasts as long as life. I can see the last wave of her hand as she watched us move off across the prairie, and the picture is branded in my brain.—“My Life and My Lectures.”
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MOTHER, PRAYER OF A
John Wesley might well be expected to become, as he did, the great religious leader of his day with such a mother behind him.
“His mother, with the finer prescience that love gives to a mother, saw in her second son the hint of some great, unguessed future, and she writes in her diary under the head of ‘Evening, May 17, 1717, Son John:
“‘What shall I render to the Lord for all His mercies? I would offer myself and all that Thou hast given me; and I would resolve—oh, give me grace to do it!—that the residue of my life shall be all devoted to Thy service. And I do intend to be more particularly careful with the soul of this child, that Thou hast so mercifully provided for, than ever I have been; that I may instil into his mind the principles of true religion and virtue. Lord give me grace to do it sincerely and prudently.’”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”