Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/137



HEARD a man say once that he did not want to send his grown son away from home because the boy's going would separate him, he felt, from his mother's influence. It was a foolish thought. There is nothing in time or in distance that can separate one from such an influence. You can feel it today with ten thousand miles or twenty years intervening as strongly as you did when as a child you lay with your head against her breast and felt her gentle hand upon your hair. You can hear her voice and see her face as if she were now in the room with you.

"I lost my mother forty years ago," an old man said to me recently, "and yet I have never ceased to feel a daily sense of loneliness and loss." And so many of us feel.

And yet no matter how long she has been gone or how far away she is, you know very