"Have you been industrious?" their mother would ask, but in tones so
sweet and so kindly that she seemed ready to pity laziness as a
misfortune, and to glance through tears at the child who was satisfied
with himself.

She knew that the thought of pleasing her put energy into the
children's work; and they knew that their mother lived for them, and
that all her thoughts and her time were given to them. A wonderful
instinct, neither selfishness nor reason, perhaps the first innocent
beginnings of sentiment teaches children to know whether or not they
are the first and sole thought, to find out those who love to think of
them and for them. If you really love children, the dear little ones,
with open hearts and unerring sense of justice, are marvelously ready
to respond to love. Their love knows passion and jealousy and the most
gracious delicacy of feeling; they find the tenderest words of
expression; they trust you--put an entire belief in you. Perhaps there
are no undutiful children without undutiful mothers, for a child's
affection is always in proportion to the affection that it receives
--in early care, in the first words that it hears, in the response of
the eyes to which a child first looks for love and life. All these
things draw them closer to the mother or drive them apart. God lays
the child under the mother's heart, that she may learn that for a long
time to come her heart must be its home. And yet--there are mothers
cruelly slighted, mothers whose sublime, pathetic tenderness meets
only a harsh return, a hideous ingratitude which shows how difficult
it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.

Here, not one of all the thousand heart ties that bind child and
mother had been broken. The three were alone in the world; they lived