Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MOTHER Naturally, the first features that come to me from among the figures of the past, are the high forehead, the brown hair and the tender gray eyes of my mother. I can hardly tell whether or not I thought that her face was beautiful. The idea of beauty did not occur to me in that connection. It was a dear face, for it was mother's—that was all. But mother had certainly been handsome in her youth and had had many admirers. She was the youngest of the children of Joseph and Martha Thrivewell, and had been much petted and perhaps a little spoiled, and I noticed that whenever there was any difference of opinion in the family, it was always her way of thinking that prevailed. She had no other children; all the inexhaustible treasures of her love were concentrated as by a burning glass, wholly upon her little son, and he suffered from the excess of her affection. Poor mother! I could hardly leave her sight! Every draught of air, every sneeze, every mosquito- bite was the subject of her most anxious care. She had lost two children in the earliest hours of their infancy and a third (my brother Freddie) had beencarried off by scarlet-fever when he was only three years old. I was all that was left to her, and the one hope and aim of her life was to keep me from the destroyer who had so ruthlessly torn away her earlier treasures. At the least sign of a cough or a sore throat I was put to bed. In winter I had half an hour's exercise in the back yard and built my little snow fort upon the grass plat with a muffler wound round and round my neck up to my ears. I must not run and "get over-heated"; I must not read "exciting books" ; I must not go out in the night air, nor in the hot sun, nor in the rain, nor in the morning while the dew was on the grass. All life, wh...