responsibilities. Her utmost wish was that in years to come, when he
should look back upon his childhood, he would always remember with
pride his evenings with his mother. During the day he must see her
drudge, and many a picture of herself on a plane of life below her own
she knew to be fastened to his growing brain; but as nearly as possible
blotting these out, daily blotting them out one by one, must be the
evening pictures when the day's work was done, its disguises dropped,
its humiliations over, and she, a serving-woman of fate, reappeared
before him in the lineaments of his mother, to remain with him
throughout his life as the supreme woman of the human race, his idol
until death, his mother.

She now looked worthy of such an ideal. But it was upon him that her
heart lavished every possible extravagance when nightly he had laid
aside the coarse half-ragged fighting clothes of the streets. In those
after years when he was to gaze backward across a long distance, he must
be made to realize that when he was a little fellow, it was his mother
who first had seen his star while it was still low on the horizon; and
that from the beginning she had so reared him that there would be
stamped upon his attention the gentleness of his birth and a mother's
resolve to rear him in keeping with this through the neediest hours.

While he was in his bath, she, as though she were his valet, had laid
out trim house shoes and black stockings; and as the spring-night had a
breath of summer warmth, of almost Southern summer warmth, she had put
out also a suit of white linen knickerbockers. Under his broad sailor
collar she herself had tied a big, soft, flowing black ribbon of the
finest silk. Above this rose the solid head looking like a sphere on a
column of triumph, with its lustrous bronzed hair, which, as she brushed
it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed