"That's my philosophy of life," says Mr. White, "as my mother taught it to me. Every young man should copy those lines and put the copy in the finest frame he can afford. For those lines I owe my mother much; it was she who made me repeat them over and over."
Edwin Markham, "The Man with the Hoe," says:
"It was the influence of my mother—my father having died—that dominated me. She was an extraordinary woman. She kept a general store in Oregon City, and conducted the business with remarkable energy. She was known as the 'Woman Poet of Oregon.'
"It was from her that I got my poetical bent. Her poems were full of feeling and of the earnestness of a strong religious spirit. They were published only in newspapers—and to-day my scrap book containing poems written by my mother is my most precious possession."
John Wanamaker.
"When you marry," said John Wanamaker, to a young men's Bible class, "remember that your mother-in-law is your wife's mother. Never allow a so-called 'mother-in-law joke' to make you forget that you are reading a reflection on some one's mother. My own mother I reverenced. Her maxims taught me forbearance, tolerance, and the homely lesson of live and let live."
The mother of Henry O. Havemeyer, the "Sugar King," urged her son to don overalls and go to work in his father's refinery—though the family was even then very rich.
"So my mother taught me," says Mr. Havemeyer, "to know the joy of work at a time when I might have slipped into a life of idleness."
The Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known New York clergyman, says:
"My father was a farmer, and my mother, with four children on her hands, and no servant, did all the work of a farmer's wife. Her days were long, for she also devoted herself to her children, to their character and education, declining to farm us out to the supervision of nurses or school-teachers. My mother had the old-fashioned notion that children were born of mothers in order that they might have mothers to bring them up."