Life brings new lessons at every turn in the road, and one of the hardest of all is the one we older people have to learn—­to sit still while our children hurt themselves, or, what is worse, to sit still while other people hurt our children.  It is especially hard for me to bear, when life is made difficult for my Ada, for if ever any one deserved happiness my daughter does.  I try to do justice to every one, and I hope I am not unfair when I say that the best of men, and Cyrus is one of them, are sometimes blind and obstinate.  Of all my children, Ada gave me the least trouble, and was always the most loving and tender and considerate.  Indeed, if Ada has a fault, it is being too considerate.  I could, if she only would let me, help her a great deal more around the house; although Ada is a very good housekeeper, I am constantly seeing little things that need doing.  I do my best to prevent the awful waste of soap that goes on, and there are a great many little ways Ada could let me save for her if she would.  When I suggest this to her she laughs and says, “Wait till we need to save as badly as that, mother,” which doesn’t seem to me good reasoning at all.  “Waste not, want not,” say I, and when it comes to throwing out perfectly good glass jars, as the girls would do if I didn’t see to it they saved them, why, I put my foot down.  If Ada doesn’t want them herself to put things up in, why, some poor woman will.  I don’t believe in throwing things away that may come in handy sometime.  When I kept house nobody ever went lacking strings or a box of whatever size, to send things away in, or paper in which to do it up, and I can remember in mother’s day there was never a time she hadn’t pieces put by for a handsome quilt.  Machinery has put a stop to many of our old occupations, and the result is a generation of nervous women who haven’t a single thing in life to occupy themselves with but their own feelings, while girls like Peggy, who are active and useful, have nothing to do but to go to school and keep on going to school.  If one wanted to dig into the remote cause of things, one might find the root of our present trouble in these changed conditions, for Cyrus’s sister, Elizabeth, is one of these unoccupied women.  Formerly in a family like ours there would have been so much to do that, whether she liked it or not, and whether she had married or not, Elizabeth would have had to be a useful woman—­and now the less said the better.

It is hard, I say, to see the causes for unhappiness set in action and yet do nothing, or, if one speaks, to speak to deaf ears.  Oh, it is very hard to do this, and this has been the portion of older women always.  Our children sometimes won’t even let us dry their tears for them, but cry by themselves, as I know Ada has been doing lately—­though in the end she came to me, or rather I went to her, for, after all, I am living in the same world with the rest of them.  I have not passed over to the other side yet, and while I stay I am not going to be treated as if I were a disembodied spirit.  I have eyes of my own, and ears too, and I can see as well as the next man when things go wrong.