From this our suspicion is strengthened that the servant question belongs to no time or country, but is and always has been a perennial and ubiquitous problem.

“May 11, 1888. I feel very anxious about you, dear mother.  I heard through Mr. Van Rensselaer that you were better, and I hope that you will yet see many good days on earth and be happy in the affection of your children and friends here, before you go, a little before them, to join those in heaven.”

While expressing anxiety about his mother’s health, he could not have considered her condition critical, for on the 18th of May he writes again:—­

“I did hope so to make my arrangements as to have been with you in New Haven yesterday and to-day, but I am so situated as to be unable to leave the city without great detriment to my business....  Unless, therefore, there is something of pressing necessity, prudence would dictate to me to take advantage of this season, which has generally been the most profitable to others in the profession, and see if I cannot get my share of something to do.  It is a great struggle with me to know what I ought to do.  Your situation and that of the family draw me to New Haven; the state of my finances keeps me here.  I will come, however, if, on the whole, you think it best.”

Again are the records silent as to whether the visit was paid or not, but his anxiety was well founded, for his mother’s appointed time had come, and just ten days later, on the 28th of May, 1828, she died at the age of sixty-two.

Thus within the space of three years the hand of death had removed the three beings whom Morse loved best.  His mother, while, as we have seen, stern and uncompromising in her Puritan principles, yet possessed the faculty of winning the love as well as the respect of her family and friends.  Dr. Todd said of her home:  “An orphan myself and never having a home, I have gone away from Dr. Morse’s house in tears, feeling that such a home must be more like heaven than anything of which I could conceive.”

Mr. Prime, in his biography of Morse, thus pays tribute to her:—­

“Two persons more unlike in temperament, it is said, could not have been united in love and marriage than the parents of Morse.  The husband was sanguine, impulsive, resolute, regardless of difficulties and danger.  She was calm, judicious, cautious, and reflecting.  And she, too, had a will of her own.  One day she was expressing to one of the parish her intense displeasure with the treatment her husband had received, when Dr. Morse gently laid his hand upon her shoulder and said, ’My dear, you know we must throw the mantle of charity over the imperfections of others.’  And she replied with becoming spirit, ‘Mr. Morse, charity is not a fool.’”

In the summer of 1828, Morse spent some time in central New York, visiting relatives and painting portraits when the occasion offered.  He thus describes a narrow escape from serious injury, or even death, in a letter to his brother Sidney, dated Utica, August 17, 1828:—­