let us pay our debts to them at least in the tokens of remembrance. And
let us not despise their ways, lest those who come after us despise our
ways. May not the historian of 2020 moralize over the old fashioned
things of 1920, even as we now moralize over the past! All wisdom has
not yet been garnered, neither has all progress been achieved. And in
the meantime, folly, as Satan among the sons of God and men, is also
present.

Ah, yes, they were old fashioned days and old fashioned ways! But there
were in them many beautiful relations between parents and children. If
much was then exacted of children, much was also bestowed upon them.
Mothers would have lived on crusts rather than deprive their children of
schools. They measured their passing years not by the riches they
accumulated in twelve months, but by the growth and progress of their
children. Stocks and bonds were less, but flesh and blood were more. The
mother of whom I have been writing, and of whom I am still thinking--and
there were many such in Iowa then--was happiest when her children were
gathered around the evening lamp--and one lamp served all--each one with
a book or slate. All idleness was waste, and all waste was sin.

And books! what a supreme veneration that mother had for books. What was
the secret message she discerned as her children pored over the printed
pages? Was there some magic power in them which she coveted for them;
some key to the riddles of the future--the key which she did not find
herself? She often told me that her brother who had died in his youth
had written things which might have been printed in books had he lived
to perfect them--and I thought she wanted me, who had been named after
him, to finish his work. And years later when I placed in her hands my
own little book--a mere pamphlet which" I had bound in covers to please
her--what a delight she took in it! Of such trifling things was
happiness made in those old leisurely days that are gone. And yet is
there anything that has come into the world that is better or more
divine than love between mothers and their children?

But books around evening lamps were not all of life. The out of doors in
the sunlight and the twilight were also much, or even more, to that
mother. She taught me to love the fields and all that in them is. She
was mindful of the flowers and the trees, of the growing corn and the
lowing cattle; of the larks in the meadows and the eagles soaring in the
skies. She watched for the coming and the going of the water fowls when
the sun changed in his course. And all these things are forever
associated with my memories of her. I never see a prairie lily in bloom,
and I never hear a whippoorwill calling, that I do not think of her in
the beautiful days of old. My delight in them comes from the delight she
had in them. And could any of us "have loved the earth so well if we had
had no childhood in it?"

When I went away to do the things which she would have me do, if she had
not planned them for me before I was born, as often as I returned to the
old home we walked through the fields, by the hedges and the rail
fences, and under the trees which she never ceased to love. And always
back of the orchard, she would point out to me where the sweep of the
prairies had been, when she was young and Iowa was young. And always she
tried to tell me how beautiful they had been to her--and if anything had
been ugly and bitter, she seemed to have forgotten about them. She
remembered still the nesting places of the birds, and the nooks in which
the fairest flowers bloomed. She talked about the robins in the apple
trees and the thrushes in the hedges; of the violets in the hollows and
the roses on the ridges. She knew where the wild lilies still blossomed
in patches of sod which the plows of men had never upturned, and where
grew the clusters of pale gold which the Indians called puccoon, but
which she called fillette, out