Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures | Page 6

upon a family like frost upon a field of flowers.
You pay three dollars to have your piano tuned, yet you train your
voice to sound harsh and hard.
How the tone of the voice controls was illustrated in my own home
several years ago. I went home in the early spring and found some one
had been among my bees and had left the lids of the hives lifted at the

time the bees were making brood. Going to the house I said to my wife:
"Where is Charlie?" He was the colored man in charge of the barn and
garden.
Mrs. Bain replied: "I suppose he is about the barn; he doesn't stay in the
house." I knew that, but somehow we Adams will go to our Eves with
anything that goes wrong.
"What's the trouble?" my wife asked.
I told her about the exposure of the bees, (about the effect of which I
knew very little) and said:
"I want Charlie to keep out of that apiary. He'll kill every bee I have."
Mrs. Bain in a very gentle manner said: "I did that myself. That's the
way father used to do. I was afraid your bees might starve during the
long cold spell, so I made some syrup and placed it in the upper
compartments. I lifted the lids so that the light would attract the bees up
to the syrup. I'm very sorry I did it, but I thought it would please you."
I said: "Well, I believe you did the right thing, my dear, and I am very
much obliged to you."
If my wife had said in a harsh tone: "I did that, sir. What are you going
to do about it?" then I would have said something.
A little bit of anger let loose in a field of human nature is as
destructible to noble impulses and generous feelings as a cyclone is to a
town. I was in an Iowa cyclone some years ago and I noticed when it
was approaching the people didn't run out of their homes and throw
stones at it. They ran for the storm cellars. When you see a bit of anger
coming toward you from brother, sister, husband, wife or friend, don't
throw a dictionary of aggravating words at it; get out of the way and it
will quiet down like the troubled waters of Galilee when "Peace be
still" fell upon them.

When we realize how sensitive character is to the touch of influences,
and how uncertain the character of the influence that may touch us,
how very careful we should be as parents as to what shall touch us, how
we shall touch others, who may be fed by our fulness, starved by our
emptiness, uplifted by our righteousness or tainted by our sins.
Sometimes a boy is sent to school with the idea that the influence of the
teacher will mold the character of the boy, when the magnetic touch by
which the faculties of the boy are sprung doesn't come from the teacher,
but from some boy on the playground and perhaps not the best boy.
Some boys are as potent on the playground as a major-general on a
battle-field. Some persons are like loadstones, they draw, others are like
loads of stone, they have to be drawn.
I have known down South in the days of slavery, coal black queens of
the domestic circle. The cows would come to the cupping as if it were a
spiritual devotion. Maiden mistresses would tell them their love stories,
when they wouldn't tell their own mothers. I am a southern man, born
and reared mid slavery, and I pay this tribute to the black "mammies"
of the South before the war. Down there in that hale, hearty colored
motherhood was laid the foundation of future health and strength for
many a white baby, when otherwise its mother would have had to see it
die. Frail, delicate mothers, who because of slavery had not done
sufficient work to develop physical womanhood, were not able to nurse
their own infants and gave them to the care of vigorous, healthy colored
mothers, who took them to their bosoms and nursed them into strength.
But for that supplemental supply of vigor, but for that sympathetic
partnership in motherhood, much of the most potent manhood of the
South would never have been known.
You who lived in the North before the war, and you who are younger
and have read about the auction block, the slave driver and the
cottonfield cannot understand the attachment between one of these
colored mothers and the white boy or girl she nursed. I know whereof I
speak, for I revere the memory of my old black mammy.
There are verses, written by whom I