All the rest of her children had professed religion and received baptism according to the rites of the Baptist Church, but little William left in the mother’s heart the sting of uncertainty.  Had he lived long enough to transgress the Law and not repented? was to her an ever-present question of terrible import.  Years rolled by without weakening this torture of apprehension that this little lamb of all her flock might be expiating the sin of Adam in the flames of Eternity, a perpetual babyhood of woe.  The depth of the misery this haunting fear inflicted on her can only be imagined by one who knew the passionate intensity of her love for her children,—­a love which she feared to be sinful, but could not abate.  Finally, one night, as she lay perplexing her soul with this and other problems of sin and righteousness, she saw, standing near her bed, her lost child, not as she supposed him to be, a baby for eternity, but apparently a youth of sixteen, regarding her silently, but with an expression of such radiant happiness in his face that the shadow passed from her soul forever.  She needed no longer to be told that he was amongst the blessed.  She told me this one day, timidly, as something she had never dared tell the older children, lest they should think her superstitious, or, perhaps, dissipate her consolation by the assurance that she had dreamed.  Dream she was convinced it was not; but only to me, in her old age, had she ever dared to confide this assurance, which had been so precious to her.

In charity, comfort for the afflicted, help,—­not in money, for of that there was little to spare,—­but in food; in watching with the sick and consoling the bereaved in her own loving, sympathetic mother’s way, she abounded.  There was always something for the really needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation.  She recognized the woman, who had come to our house with a story of a family of starving children, but as my mother’s experienced eye assured her she had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor always got.  “Why did you tell me you had children,” mother asked her, “when you came to me yesterday?” “It was not true,” said the dying woman, “but I was starving, and I thought you would be more willing to help me if you thought I had children.”  But from that day no beggar was turned from our door without food.  Silently and in secret she did what good works came to her to be done, letting not her right hand know what her left hand was doing, but all the poor knew her and her works.