She carries about with her an atmosphere of sweetness and light.  The mother gives to her boy a kind of unspoken counsel.  It is a very subtle thing, like electricity in the material world, and equally as powerful as that mysterious fluid.  You get its effects by putting yourself eagerly and lovingly under its soothing yet ennobling and tonic influence.  It is a matter hard to describe, but more real than any other human force I know of.

So the first thing for you to do is to resolve to be “mother’s own boy,” as the sneering tongue of shallowness puts it, just as long as you possibly can.  It will be the greatest luck you will ever have, if you are able to be “mother’s own boy” as long as she lives.  Don’t be afraid that that will make you effeminate and soft; don’t think for a moment that it will paralyze the force and power of your growing manhood.

I have seen one of this kind of fellows hold in awe a mob of cowboys and plainsmen when passions were aroused and blows had already been struck.  I have seen such a man put down, single-handed, by word of his fearless authority, fights among a score of woodmen who had known nothing but the rank vigor of their unruled male lives.

The man whose will and character has been tempered by this holy fire takes on something of the suppleness, hardness, and firmness of steel, of which a delicate blade will cut the grosser iron of which that blade itself was a part before it was subjected to the refining process that made it steel.

Some time ago I was privileged to read the letters that one of our naval heroes had, when a young man, despatched home to his mother during our civil war.  He participated in two or three of our most desperate fights.  All of these letters showed him to have been—­and, what is better, to have remained—­a “mother’s own boy” as long as she lived.

He never sailed far enough away to weaken that potent and sacred power.  It reached around the world.  The years did not diminish it.  When her hair of brown had turned to white, he found that the influence which to his boyhood and youth had been so delightful became to his manhood uplifting and glorious.

And yet no buccaneer that rioted afloat with Morgan had courage more ferocious.  Yes, and, on the other hand, no Bayard “without fear and without reproach”; no Sydney who, when dying, handed his canteen to a wounded comrade that he might moisten his lips, while Sydney’s own were crackling with fever, was ever more tender or considerate.

What was it the expiring Nelson said when his decks ran blood, and crimson victory placed upon his whitening brow laurels of triumph, whose leaves were mingled with cypress?  “Kiss me, Hardy,” was what he said.  Strange words, were they not, for a scene of carnage?  Yes, but words which touched the hearts of the English people.