Wauwatosa news. [volume] (Wauwatosa, Wis.) 1900-1948, 1902-10-25
ABSENT ONES INFLUENCE.
4 Distinctive Phase Of Home Life in
America-Seldom Out of
Mind.

The French in their familiar adage in
sIst that the absent-they who cannot de-
fend themselyes-are always wrong, but
with us a quite different state of things is
true. 1t is the absent one on whom the
thought of mother or wife fixes itself, and
the vacant chair or silent chamber is a
constant appeal to loving remembrance.
Half a dozen young faces smiling
around the dinner table only make father
and mother wonder, with a yearning de-
sire for the power of occult sight, What
is Willie doing tonight:" His favorite
pudding will bring chorus of wishes
from the children that he might be there
to share, and the myriad associations of a
boys life with his home keep him in con-
slant loving connection with all the de-
tails of even an uneventful existance.
The noisy lad who came in with his
comrades behind him as if they were
storming party about to attack a castle,
and generally gave a sense of being too
tremendous force to dwell safely in q
moderate-szed house. leaves no persistent
echoes in the halls of the boisterous noise
which nearly deafened the hearers: only
his jolly laugh and hearty merriment Turk
liq the corners Oh! how he is missed.
To him his motAer gives her first waking
thought and her last prayer tonight For
the others she may feel all that is their
due aud be as loving as they can desire.
but the absent. the unseen, her first born
what evil influence has crept into his
heart among that heterogeneous thrOng of
schoOlmates: What temptation has
clutched at his heart? Has he been ex-
posed to illness and no one to ward off
the threatened evil? Has he come in
contact with smirching sin and been
drawn away from God and home? The
vacant room of an absent schoolboy re-
celveS many visit from the good mother
who finds in its loneliness the place in
which her heart can draw nearest to her
big lad who is now OF all her children the
one who occupies most of her thoughts
1t is not an unusual thing for the con-
verSatiOn. the reading the interests of the
household to be quite revolutionized by
the cagerness to follow such of its mem
bers as are travelling. Photographs, books
of travel, encyclopedias become actively
in demand, and what educates the eye of
those who climb to mountain tops or float
ON still Italian lakes, or stand awe6 and
elated under cathedral roofs, is stirring
and charming and stimulating old and
young at home.
And when the traveller has gone in
search of health. the strain of eager ex-
pectatiOn, kept to a point of intense So
licitude by mingled hope and fear is the
strongest emotion of the hearts that are
left to the quiet motony of home.
Three days of speed and of quick trans
mission of communicating thought re-
move. except in such extraordinary in
stances as that of the waiting wives of
great explorers and isolated searchers of
the unknown, the pain which in these
non-enduring days We could scarcely
bear
Separations are so ameliorated by con-
slant arrivals of mails and the mysterious
union of continents by the wizard-like
power of electricity that we can scarcely
imagine correctly what it was in the old
days to sail away from the home shore.
The departure of an old-fashioned war
vessel on long cruise meant the sure
succession of months of total ignorance
on the part of him whose heart was with
1.-THE girl he left behind him. and for
her what seemed endless periods of 81
lence, during which all storms seemed TO
threaten him and all dangers to- encircle
him. Many a bright girl lived in those
years the secluded and unsocial life of a
widow rather than seem to forget her
lover on the sea; and his letters, those
great folded sheets of foolscap paper,
sealed with a red wafer, came only when
chance vessel gave unlOoked-for op-
portunity. The writer has inherited many
such which close with: I'VE are about to
speak ship, and l hope she is home
ward-bound." \ letter only two months
old was Il treasure.