p. 11 | MOTHER'S APRON STRINGS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Jun 20, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 25.

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MOTHER'S APRON STRINGS.

No ONE can help admiring the noble reply and manly spirit shown in the following incident:

"Charley! Charley!" Clear and sweet as a note struck from a silver bell, the voice rippled over the common.

"That's mother," cried one of the boys, and he instantly threw down his bat and picked up his jacket and cap.

"Don't go yet." "Have it out." "Finish this game." "Try it again," cried the players in noisy chorus.

"I must go right off, this minute. I told her I'd come whenever she called."

"Make believe you didn't hear," they exclaimed.

"But I did hear."

"She won't know you did."

"But I know it, and"—

"Let him go," said a bystander; "you can't do anything with him; he is tied to his mother's apron strings."

"That's so," said Charles, "and it's to what every boy ought to be tied—and in a hard knot, too."

"I wouldn't be such a baby as to run the minute she called."

"I don't call it babyish to keep one's promise to his mother," answered the obedient boy, a beautiful light glowing in his blue eyes. "I call that manly; and the boy who don't keep his word to her will never keep it to any one else—you see if he does." And he hurried away to his cottage home.

Thirty years have passed since those boys played on the common. Charley Gray is a prosperous business man in a great city, and his mercantile friends say of him that his word "is bond." We ask him how he acquired such a reputation. "I never broke my word when a boy, no matter how great the temptation, and the habits formed then have clung to me through life."—Anon.