The Mena weekly star., 1921-05-26
aMan 'smotber

 yours the work-knotted old hands. Scatter few of the flowers of ten derness and appreciation in her path way while she is still alive and can be made happy by them.
 Don5t wait to put all your affection and gratitude and reverence for her into a costly ton of marble inscribed "Mother."
 Don't wait to put all your affection quets on her grave. It's mighty doubtful whether an angel in heaven takes any interest in cemeteries or gets any satisfaction from visiting earth and contemplating a flattering tombstone: but it is utterly, certainly certain that you can make your old mothers heart sing for joy by show | ing her, while she is alive, just one tithe of the love and appreciation that | you will heap upon her when she is dead.
 These words are written for some one particular man who reads this page. l do not know his name but know his story.
 He is middle-aged man, married | pfQoDtTOQS. llt IS q kOOu llEA | W respected, and he hasn't an idea but what he is doing his full duty by his poor old mother who lives in his home and whom he supports. He supplies her wants. She eats at his table, is sheltered by his roof, is warmed by his fire, is decently clothed by your hands, but this is all. | He neglects her.
 He never says a word of affection to her.
 He never nays her any little atten- tions.
 When she ventures an opinion, he cuts it short with curt contempt.
 When she tells her garrulous old stories, as old people will, he does not even try to conceal how much he is bored
 In thousand unintentional ways the old mother is made to feel that she is a cumberer of the ground, an Impeachment in the household, an old fashioned and useless piece of furni- ture of which every one will be glad to be rid of.
 1 Under this coolness and neglect the poor old mothers heart is breaking, and in a letter, written in trembling and feeble handwriting, she asks me I if 1 cannot say something that her son will read and that may make him think.
 Ahl if I only could 1 If I could only say to him, "Man, man, give love as well as duty to your mother Give her the wine of life as we'll as the bread. Don't forget the woman who never forgets you. Of course the man will say, and truly, that he is busy, ogerworked care-burdened; that he has the claims of wife and children upon him; that he is often irritable thru sheer physi- cal weariness and over-strain. Granted: But your mothers life has not been easy. Your father was poor man, and from the day she mar ried him she stood by his side fighting the wolf from the door with her naked hands, as woman must fight.
 She worked not the eight or ten-day of the union, but the twenty-four-hour day of the poor wife and mother.
 She cooked and cleaned and scrubbed and patched and nursed from dawn until bedtime and in the night was up and down getting drinks for I sleepers, listening for croupy coughs.
 She had time to listen to your stories of boyish fun and frolic and triumph.
 She had time to say the things that spurred your ambition on.
 She never forgot to cook the little dishes you like.
 She did without the dress she need ed that you might not be ashamed by your clothes before your fellow.
 Stop, man, and think what life would have been to you if she had treated you in your childhood as you are treating her in her old age.
 Suppose there had been no warm, caressing mothers love.
 Suppose there had been no soft breast on which you could weep out your childish sorrows, no clinging arms to enfold you and comfort you when the things of your little world went wrong?
 ! Would it not take away from the memory of all that is best and sweet est in life? Is there anything else so pitiful on earth as the little child that is motherless-that is an alien in a | strange home that has no one to love it?
 Yes, there is just one other figure more forlorn than the little unloved child, and that is the old mother who is unloved by the children she raised and who is doomed to spend the last years of her life an a glacial atmos- phere of neglect, her devotion, her a. bors, her sacrifice forgotten. Remember them now while there is yet time, while she is living, to pay back to her in love and tenderness some of the debt that you owe her. You can never pay it all, but pay down something on account this very night.
 Go home and put your arm around the shrunken old figure. Kiss the dropping old mouth with a real. live, warm kiss instead of giving her a perfunctory peck on the cheek. Tell her that she is the greatest mother a man ever had, and that all you are she made you.
 lt will cause her very soul to lean with joy. and life itself swim in iosy mist of Philadelphia Evening Bulletin