I THINK old women—I don't quite like the word "lady," because it don't mean anything now-a-days—are the most beautiful and lovable things in the world. They are so near heaven that they catch the glow and the brightness which radiate from the pearly gates and illuminate their faces. When the hair begins to silver, and the embers in the fire grow gray and cold, and the sun has got so far around in life's horizon that the present makes no shadow, while the past stretches down the hillside to a little mound of earth, where we will rest for a season—a little mound not big enough to hold our corner lots, and marble fronts, and safes, which we shall have to leave on the other side of the hill, but big enough, I trust, to hold our memories, and fancies, our air castles and secrets; and when the journey is nearly done, and the night is setting in, and the darkness begins to gather around us without any stars, and the birds sing low in the trees, and the flowers wither and die, and the music we hear comes from afar, strangely sweet, like sounds coming over the water, and like little children we live in ourselves, and the world gradually recedes from us—then I should like to be an old woman, full of blessed memories and peaceful anticipations.
I think I know the best woman in the world, and I think every other man knows her. I think the one I know has the kindest heart, and the dearest face, and the most caressing hand, and the most undying devotion among all women. Her eyes were once to me the boundaries of the world, and were the first things I ever looked into, and pray Heaven they may also be the last I shall look into. And I think the best woman every other man knows has all these qualities in the same degree. And I think there is not one of us who has strayed so far from that woman—the best of all women—not one of us so calloused with the strife and toil of life, not one of us in the midst of difficulty and danger, who does not feel the invisible arms around him to shield him, and who does not long to go back to the arms and the love of that woman, and to rest, as we rested before our feet got into the flinty roads, upon the breast of our MOTHER.
