“‘Then why didn’t you go home to your friends?’
“‘I ain’t got no home and no friends.’
“Whereupon Theodoric burst into a loud boohoo. Some of the boys began to titter; and I think I was just beginning to despise him, a little, as a cry-baby, when his mother, who stood near, threw her arms around him, and said, with brimming eyes and choking voice, ‘God will remember these tears one day, my precious boy!’”
Alice rose, and, stealing softly to her baby, bent over and kissed him.
“You said, just now, that you hoped our boy would not resemble his namesake.”
“I take that back.”
“You will say so all the more when I have shown you what kind of a son he was to that mother.
“I believe that the English race surpasses all others in respect for woman; and I think that, of the English race, the Americans are superior to their brethren across the water in this regard. And I believe, too, that it will hardly be denied that, among Americans, Southerners are conspicuous for this virtue. And it seems to me that of respect for woman, the love for one’s mother is the very crown, and blossom, and glory. It means manliness, it means soul, it means a grateful heart. It is unwritten poetry; and if that be so, then the life of the boy after whom we have named our boy was one beautiful lyric.
“His mother had a great fund of fairy-tales and other stories, which she used to tell us after supper. I can see him now, sitting on a low stool at her feet,—he would never sit anywhere else,—with hands clasped over her knees, drinking in the story, while his eyes clung to the gentle face of the story-teller with a kind of rapt adoration. And such eyes! now flashing with fierce indignation at one turn of the story, now melting with tenderness at another!
“And she could never pass him without his throwing his arms around her and tip-toeing for a kiss. ‘Another! another! another!’ he kept pleading. ‘Go away, you silly boy!’ she would say; but more than once I caught her, behind the door, after one of these little scenes, wiping her eyes with her apron. And once, when Theodoric had left the room, and I, in my simplicity, asked her what was the matter, she burst into a sob. ‘Nothing, my child,’ she said; ‘only, I am too happy.’