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FOR MOTHERS

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 27, 1901

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 78, No. 35.

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FOR MOTHERS.

Harper’s Bazar.
On one of the trains entering New York last Saturday, a woman afforded her fellow passengers an unconscious but powerful object lesson. With the woman was a little girl about six years old. The day was warm, and through the open windows the dust drifted in a fine gray cloud. Every passenger was exceedingly uncomfortable, but each forgot his discomfort in the spectacle of that suffering child.
The mother began operations by seating her little daughter beside her with a thump that made the child’s teeth rattle. Then, at intervals of one or two minutes during the weary journey, she paid the child these maternal attentions: She took off her hat; she smoothed her hair; she put the hat on again; she removed the child’s little jacket and put it on again; she straightened her collar; she wiped her face with her handkerchief; she removed an imaginary cinder from her eye; she smoothed her hair again; she took off and retied the ribbon on her hair; she stood her up and smoothed her down; she unfastened the bow at her neck and retied it. Over and over she followed this program while the awe-struck passengers looked on. The child accepted the situation with grim endurance. Evidently she had been used to it all her short life. The world to her was a strange place where mothers exhausted their nervous energy in useless attentions to little girls. Her small face was pathetically sad and tired. When the journey’s end was reached, she rose wearily, was put through it all once more, and got languidly off the car.
Among those who watched the scene was a prominent New York specialist in nervous diseases. He turned to the writer and summed up the entire situation in one sentence which has in it a sermon for every American mother.
“Each touch,” he said, grimly, “pushes that child a little nearer to the doors of the sanitarium that will some day open for her.”
There were other mothers on the train. Perhaps they took the lesson home.