Capital journal. (Salem, Or.) 1893-1895, 1894-01-17

ton, for they all ask it and keep asking
1t all the time. She is not only the
first to hear every case of perplexity,
but she is the judge in every court of
domestic appeal. That is what puts
the premature wrinkles on so many ma
ternal faces and powders white so many
maternal foreheads. You see, it is a
question that keeps on for all the years
If childhood. 1t comes from the nur-
terry, and from the evening stand where
The boys and girls are learning their
school lesson, and from the starting out
in the morning, when the tippet or hat
or slate or book or overshoe is lost, un-
til at night, all out of breath, the young
sters come in and shout until you can
hear them from cellar to garret and
from front door to the back fence of the
back yard. Where's motherr' In
deed child's life is so full of that
question that if he be taken away one
of the things that the mother most
misses and the silence that most op-
presses her is the absence of that ques-
tion, which she will never hear on earth
again, except she hears it in dream
which sometimes restores the nursery
| just as it was, and then the voice comes
back so natural, and so sweet, and so in
nocent, and so inquiling that the dream
breaks at the words, Where n,other?'
If that question were put to most of
us this morning. we would have to say,
if we spoke truthfully, like Siseras
mother, she is at the palace window.
She has become a queen unto God for
ever, and she is pulling back the rich
folds of the kings upholstery to look
down at us. We are not told the par
| ticulars about the residence of Sis
era s mother, but there is in that scene
in the book of Judges so much about
embroideries and.needlework and ladies
in waiting that we know her residence
must have been princely and palatial.
So we have no minute and particular
description of the palace at whose win
dow our glorified mother sits, but there
is so much in the closing chapters of
the good old book about crowns, and
pearls big enough to make gate out of
one of them, new songs and marriage
suppers, and harps, and white horses
candlesticks that we know the heaven
ly residence of our mother is superb, is
unique, is colonnaded, is domed, is en-
powered, is fountained, is glogifed be-
yond the power of pencil or pen or
tongue to present, and in the window of
that palace the mother sits watching
for news from the battle. What a con-
trast between that celestial surrounding
and her once earthly surroundings!
What work to bring up family. in
the old time way, with but little or no
hired help, except perhaps for the wash
ing day or for the swine slaughtering,
commonly called "the killing day!"
OLD FASHIONED MOTHERS.
There was then no reading of elabo-
rate treatises on the best modes of rear
ing children, and then leaving it all to
hired help, with one or two visits day
to the nursery to see if the principles
announced are being carried out. The
most of those old folks did the sewing,
the washing, the mending, the darn
ing, the patching, the millinery, the
mantua making, the housekeeping, and
in hurried harvest time helped spread
the hay or tread down the load in the
NOW. They were at the same time ca
terers, tailors, doctors, chaplains ard
nurses for whole household all togeth
er down with measles or scarlet fever,
or round the house with whooping
coughs and groups and runround fin
gers and earaches and all the infantile
distempers which at some time swoop
upon every large household. Some of
those mothers never got rested in this
world. Instead of the self rocking cra-
dies of our day, which, wound up, will
go hour after hour for the solace of the
young slumberer, it was weary foot on
the rocker sometimes half the day or
half the night - rock-rock rock -
rock. Instead of our drug stores filled
with all the wonders Of materia med
ica and called up through telephone,
with them the only apothecary short Of
four miles ride was the garret, with
its punches of peppermint and penny
royal and catnip and mustard and cam
omile flowers, which were expected to
do everything. Just think of it! Fifty
years of preparing breakfast, dinner
and supper. The chief music they
heard was that of spinning wheel and
rocking chair. Tagged out, headachy
and with ankles swollen. Those old |
fashioned mothers-if any persons ever
fitted appropriately into good, easy,
comfortable heaven, they were the
folks, and they got there, and they are
rested. They wear no spectacles, for
they have their third sight-as' they |
lived long enough on earth to get their
second sight-and they do not have TO
pant for breath after going up the en-
erald stairs of the Eternal palace, at |
whose window they now sit waiting for
news from the battle.
But if any one keeps on asking the
question Where's mother?" | answer,
She is in your present character. The
is that your physical fea-
lures suggest her. If there be seven
in household at least six of
them lock like their mother, and the