These hours were spent with double profit, for she taught him while she worked, and light from her window was seen to glimmer long after most of the dwellers in her neighbourhood had gone to rest.  She taught him the ordinary branches of school learning, which she well understood; but she was much more careful to impress upon his mind the more important precepts of the gospel, that only true chart by which, man can steer through life safely, and which wisdom, she told him, was of more value than gold.  She grieved not that his face was imbrowned, or his hands hardened by labour:  toil is man’s natural inheritance, and he is bid to rejoice in his “labour, for it is the gift of God;” but she rejoiced in the maturing of his heart, and saw that the good seed she was sowing was taking root.

She had, however, one trouble concerning him, and not being able to discern clearly what was her duty, it gave her more anxiety than even her poverty.  His love for sketching could not be repressed.  She saw that he shared his father’s talent largely, but remembering what her husband’s views in reference to the cultivation of the noble art of painting had been, the struggle between maternal pride and the natural yearnings of a mother’s heart to gratify a darling and worthy child, in opposition to what seeming duty demanded, can scarcely be imagined.  Her late husband’s opinions, tempered as they always were by judgment and prudence, had acquired a character of sacredness in her view; but when William, in showing her his sums, showed also the rude but spirited sketches he had drawn on the border of his slate, she saw that the gift was from God, and she could not condemn, although she dared not praise.  She was afraid of entailing misery on him by fostering a taste beyond what his means would permit him to gratify.  He had no present prospect but that of earning his bread by the sorest labour.  Even if his talent were an extraordinary one, it would take a long time to cultivate it to a profitable point; and in the meantime, how was he to be supported?

She told all this to her son; but when he begged her, as his only recreation (for he never played with any boys except George Herman, as good a boy as himself), to let him look over his father’s portfolio of sketches, could she deny the favour? or was she wrong?  Nor could she forbid some pen-and-ink sketches, in which she recognised familiar objects, although she warned him against giving offence by caricaturing; and while she described to him the wonders of this glorious earth, with its embosomed treasures of mines and minerals, and made him read in his Bible how God had created all and called it good, she also showed him that man was the crowning work;—­beloved of God, notwithstanding his rebellion; made only a little lower than the angels, crowned with dignity and honour; and so loved by the Saviour, that he came to save those who otherwise would have been lost; and still bearing much of the original impress in which he was created.  She explained to him how wrong it is to make game of the peculiarities of any human being, ridicule his infirmities, or win a reputation by exhibiting his defects; bidding him always, at the close of her lecture, to read the sermon delivered on the mount, and to walk by its rule, and he would not fail to do right.