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Who can lean over a crib at night, marveling upon that infinite innocence and candor swathed in the silk cocoon of childish sleep, without guessing the throb of fierce gentleness that runs in maternal blood? The earth is none too rich in compassion these days: let us be grateful to the mothers for what remains. It was not they who filled the world with spies and quakings. It was not a cabal of mothers that met to decree blood and anguish for the races of men. They know that life is built at too dear a price to be so lathered in corruption and woe. Those who create life, who know its humility, its tender fabric and its infinite price, who have cherished and warmed and fed it, do not lightly cast it into the pit.

Mothers are great in the eyes of their sons because they are knit in our minds with all the littlenesses of life, the unspeakably dear trifles and odds of existence. The other day I found in my desk a little strip of tape on which my name was marked a dozen times in drawing ink, in my mother’s familiar script. My mind ran back to the time when that little band of humble linen was a kind of passport into manhood. It was when I went away from home and she could no longer mark my garments with my name, for the confusion of rapacious laundries. I was to cut off the autographed sections of this tape and sew them on such new vestments as came my way. Of course I did not do so; what boy would be faithful to so feminine a trust? But now the little tape, soiled by a dozen years of wandering, lies in my desk drawer as a symbol and souvenir of that endless forethought and loving kindness.

They love us not wisely but too well, it is sometimes said. Ah, in a world where so many love us not well but too wisely, how tremulously our hearts turn back to bathe in that running river of their love and ceaseless charm!