The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I | Page 8

as a useless education, was met, in Charles's case, by my mother's taking in the students' washing, to provide them. In the cases of Jacob and myself, this drudgery was exchanged for that of a students' boarding-house.
In all the housework involved in this complication of her duties, she never had a servant until shortly before my birth, when she took into the house a liberated African slave, the only other assistance in the house, in my childhood, being a sister six years older than myself and the daughter of one of our neighbors, who came as a "help" at the time of my birth, and subsequently married my second brother. My mother was also the family doctor, for, except in very grave cases, we never had any other physician. She pulled our teeth and prescribed all our medicines. I was well grown before I wore a suit which was not of her cutting and making, though sometimes she was obliged to have in a sewing-woman for the light work. She made all the bread we ate, cured the hams, and made great batches of sausages and mincemeat for pies, sufficient for the winter's consumption, as well as huge pig's-head cheeses. How she accomplished all she did I never understood.
But with all her passionate desire to see one of her boys in what she considered the service of God, there was never, on my mother's part, the least pressure in that direction, no suggestion that the sacrifices she was making demanded any measure of deviation from our views as to the future. It was her hope that one of us would feel as she did, but she cheerfully resigned the hope, as son after son turned the other way. A boy who was born three years before me, and whose death occurred before my birth, was, perhaps, in her mind, the fulfillment of her dedication, for he was, according to the accounts of friends of the family, a child of extraordinary intelligence, and she felt that God had taken him from her. In one of those moments of confidence, in the years when I had become a counselor to her, I remember her telling me of this boy (known in the family as "little William," to distinguish him from me), and the sufferings she endured through her doubts, lest he should have lived long enough to sin, and had not repented, for, though her dreary creed taught that the rigors of eternal damnation rested on every one who had not repented of each individual sin, and that adult baptism was the only assurance of redemption, it did not teach, nor did she believe, that the innocence of childhood required the certificate of the church. All the rest of her children had professed religion and received baptism according to the rites of the Baptist Church, but little William left in the mother's heart the sting of uncertainty. Had he lived long enough to transgress the Law and not repented? was to her an ever-present question of terrible import. Years rolled by without weakening this torture of apprehension that this little lamb of all her flock might be expiating the sin of Adam in the flames of Eternity, a perpetual babyhood of woe. The depth of the misery this haunting fear inflicted on her can only be imagined by one who knew the passionate intensity of her love for her children,--a love which she feared to be sinful, but could not abate. Finally, one night, as she lay perplexing her soul with this and other problems of sin and righteousness, she saw, standing near her bed, her lost child, not as she supposed him to be, a baby for eternity, but apparently a youth of sixteen, regarding her silently, but with an expression of such radiant happiness in his face that the shadow passed from her soul forever. She needed no longer to be told that he was amongst the blessed. She told me this one day, timidly, as something she had never dared tell the older children, lest they should think her superstitious, or, perhaps, dissipate her consolation by the assurance that she had dreamed. Dream she was convinced it was not; but only to me, in her old age, had she ever dared to confide this assurance, which had been so precious to her.
In charity, comfort for the afflicted, help,--not in money, for of that there was little to spare,--but in food; in watching with the sick and consoling the bereaved in her own loving, sympathetic mother's way, she abounded. There was always something for the really needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation.