She told me also that posthumous children were always Fortune's
favorites, and in her wise, loving way strove to make me early familiar
with the thought that God always held in his special keeping those
children whose fathers he had taken before their birth. This confidence
accompanied me through all my after life.

As I have said, it was long before I became aware that I lacked anything,
especially any blessing so great as a father's faithful love and care;
and when life showed to me also a stern face and imposed heavy burdens,
my courage was strengthened by my happy confidence that I was one of
Fortune's favorites, as others are buoyed up by their firm faith in their
"star."

When the time at last came that I longed to express the emotions of my
soul in verse, I embodied my mother's prediction in the lines:

The child who first beholds the light of day
After his father's eyes are closed for aye,
Fortune will guard from every threatening ill,
For God himself a father's place will fill.

People often told me that as the youngest, the nestling, I was my
mother's "spoiled child"; but if anything spoiled me it certainly was not
that. No child ever yet received too many tokens of love from a sensible
mother; and, thank Heaven, the word applied to mine. Fate had summoned
her to be both father and mother to me and my four brothers and sisters-
one little brother, her second child, had died in infancy--and she proved
equal to the task. Everything good which was and is ours we owe to her,
and her influence over us all, and especially over me, who was afterward