“Thank you, good morning.”

“Well Mr. Smith,” said Paul when he returned, “your father and mine were boys together.  He was several years younger than my father, and a great favorite in our family among the young folks.  About twelve years since when I had just commenced business, I lent him five hundred dollars, and when his business troubles became complicated I refused to foreclose a mortgage which I had on his home.  An acquaintance of mine sneered at my lack of business keenness, and predicted that my money would be totally lost, when I told him perhaps it was the best investment I ever made.”  He smiled incredulously and said, “I would rather see it than hear of it:  but I will say that in all my business career I never received any money that came so opportune as this.  It reminds me of the stories that I have read in fairy books.  People so often fail in paying their own debts, it seems almost a mystery to me that you should pay a debt contracted by your father when you were but a boy.”

“The clue to this mystery has been the blessed influence of my sainted mother;” and a flush of satisfaction mantled his cheek as he referred to her.

“After my father’s death my mother was very poor.  When she looked into the drawer there were only sixty cents in money.  Of course, he had some personal property, but it was not immediately available like money, but through the help of kind friends she was enabled to give him a respectable funeral.  Like many other women in her condition of life, she had been brought up in entire ignorance of managing any other business, than that which belonged to her household.  For years she had been shielded in the warm clasp of loving arms, but now she had to bare her breast to the storm and be father and mother both to her little ones.  My father as you know died in debt, and he was hardly in his grave when his creditors were upon her track.  I have often heard her speak in the most grateful manner of your forbearance and kindness to her in her hour of trouble.  My mother went to see my father’s principal creditor and asked him only to give her a little time to straighten out the tangled threads of her business, but he was inexorable, and said that he had waited and lost by it.  Very soon he had an administrator appointed by the court, who in about two months took the business in his hands; and my mother was left to struggle along with her little ones, and face an uncertain future.  These were dark days but we managed to live through them.  I have often heard her say that she lived by faith and not sight, that poverty had its compensations, that there was something very sweet in a life of simple trust, to her, God was not some far off and unapproachable force in the universe, the unconscious Creator of all consciousness, the unperceiving author of all perception, but a Friend and a Father coming near to her in sorrows, taking cognizance of her grief, and gently smoothing her path in life.  But it was not only by precept