life!

She didn't keep me long. Just that one great hug, and something else
that goes with it, and then _what_ do you think she said? If I'd
had a hat on I'd have taken it off to her at that moment. She looked
up into my face, and showed me hers, all smiling, and not a tear in
her eyes, and said:

_"Jacky, you're a brick!"_

And then I just broke out into a great laugh of relief, and I shouted:

_"Mother, you're a whole brickyard!"_

And we went downstairs carrying my luggage between us, and the worst
was over, and the thing I dreaded hadn't happened.

Perhaps you think she ought to have prayed over me, and given me a
Bible, and a lot of good motherly advice. Don't you think it! The
prayers had been spread over twenty-two years of my life, and the
Bible was all marked up with her markings. As for the good
advice--well--if she hadn't done her level best, long before that, to
teach me to keep clean, and think straight, and "hit the line
hard"--it was too late to begin then. But she didn't have to begin
then, because the thing was done, as well as any mother on earth could
do it. And if you think that little thumb-marked book wasn't in my bag
at that minute, you don't think right, that's all.

Dad said a few fatherly things to me before I went, like the all-round
trump he is, and I was glad to have him. I could stand that all right.