His
grave, clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words
that decided, once for all, the course we were to take, had been
far more to us than we knew.
It was hardest of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to
depend entirely upon him. Left with her eight children, the
eldest a boy of eighteen years, and with no property except the
roof that sheltered us and a small strip of land, her situation
was full of perplexities which we little ones could not at all
understand. To be fed like the ravens and clothed like the grass
of the field seemed to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing,
and I often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.
I knew that she believed in God, and in the promises of the
Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her
troubles and her helplessness. I felt almost like preaching to
her, but I was too small a child to do that, I well knew; so I
did the next best thing I could think of--I sang hymns as if
singing to myself, while I meant them for her.
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