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MOTHER

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 4, 1880

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 6, No. 41.

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MOTHER.

By Mrs. Charlotte E. Fisher

BY MRS. CHARLOTTE E. FISHER.
MOTHER! What a world of tenderness there is in the simple word! What hosts of recollections are clinging about it! The first dear word our baby lips framed; the one word that fell as music all through our childhood; the rich soprano of the home melody, linking all the other cords together.
Dear, loving mother! The little child clings trustingly to the helping hand, and falls to sweetest slumbers in the protecting arms. The boy, treading out and on to the farther bounds of childhood's enchanted land, tosses aside books and ball whenever a shadow dims his sky, and goes to mother for comfort. She can dispel the clouds; she can brighten every pleasure a thousand fold; she holds the magic key that unlocks all of life's most secret springs. The man, grown weary with all his striving with the world, all his battling with wrong, all his hopes, and fears, and aspirations, comes back to mother—comes with the old trust, as in other years, to lay his fevered head, safe and sheltered, in those dear arms, and be comforted as only mother can comfort. The woman—"my girl," mother always says, be she young or old, maiden or wife—comes to fall into many of the old-fashioned thoughts and ways for mother's sake. And when overburdened, sad, and heart-sick, when all adrift, shadowed over and shut in by clouds of doubt and fear, whose hand can soothe and smooth life's ills away but mother's? Whose eye can see beyond the clouds? Whose voice can sing to our souls, that above it all God's blessed sunlight is always burning with steady radiance? Who but mother?
Precious name! Speak it gently, aye, reverently—mother! She has suffered much, loved and waited long, ever hopeful, prayerful; "our household angel." Pray God that time's silver be sparingly sprinkled among the tresses we love so well. Pray God always and ever to bless and keep mother.—Arthur's Home Magazine.