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290 family to participate in the festivities. Many times the curate asked, 'Why did I not see Domingo?' And to this day he supposes that it was obedience to my mother's orders, instead of poverty, which prevented our attendance.

"I must mention one more characteristic anecdote of my mother. She had a friend of her infancy from whom death separated her at the age of sixty. The two friends had always continued to visit each other, consecrating one whole day to the delight of fusing their families into one, and the same friendship has united the daughters of both. Her friend enjoyed the bounties of wealth, but on the day that my mother passed with her, our own servant went into the friend's kitchen to prepare all the food which we were to consume during the day, the protest of twenty years against the practice having never in the least changed my mother's firm and unalterable resolution, in order that the ineffable pleasure of seeing her friend should not be marred by the possible suspicion that she wished even for a day to lay aside the duty of sustaining her family, or to turn her face away from the inequalities of fortune. Thus was practised at the humble hearth of the family of which I made a part, the noble virtue of poverty. Happy are the poor who have had such a mother!"

"My mother's house, the fruit of her industry, whose sunburnt bricks and mud-walls might be computed in yards of linen, woven by her own hands to pay for its construction, has received in the course of the last few years some additions which confound it with other dwellings of a certain moderate rank. Its original form, however, is that to which the poetry of the heart clings, the indelible image which presents itself pertinaciously to my mind when I remember infant pleasures and pastimes, the hours of