Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — Her Monument. [ARTICLE]

Her Monument.

She built it herself, and yet she did not know that she had a monument. She lived in it, but she did not know that it existed. Her monument was her home. It grew up quietly, as quietly as a flower grows, and no one knew—she did not know herself —how much she had done to tend and water and train it. Her husband had absolute trust in her. He earned the money; she expended it. And as she put as much thought in her expenditure as he put in liis earning, each dollar was doubled in the expending. She had inherited that mysterious faculty which we call taste, and she cultivated it with fidelity. Every home she visited she studied, though always unconsciously, as though it were a museum or an art gallery; and from every visit she brought away some thought which came out of the alembic of her loving imagination fitted to its appropriate place in her own home. She was too genuine to be an imitator—for imitation is always of kin to falsehood —and she abhorred falsehood. She was patient with everything but a lie. So she never copied in her own home or on her own person what she had seen elsewhere; yet everything she saw elsewhere entered into and helped to complete the perfect picture of life which she was always painting with deft fingers in everything, from the honeysuckle which she trained over the door to the bureau in the guest’s room which her designing made a new work of art for every new friend, if it were only by a new nosegay and a change of vases. Putting her own personality into her home, making every room and almost every article of furniture speak of her, she had the gift to draw out from every guest his personality and make him at home, and so make him his truest and best self. Neither man nor woman of the world could long resist the subtle influence of that home; the warmth of its truth and love thawed out the frozen proprieties from impersonated etiquette, and whatever circle of friends sat on the broad piazza in summer or gathered around the open fire in winter knew for a time the rare joy of liberty—the liberty of perfect truth and perfect love. Her home was hospitable because her heart was large; and any one was her friend to whom she could minister. But her heart was like the old Jewish temple—strangers only came into the court of the gentiles, friends into an inner court; her husband and her children found a court yet nearer her heart of heart; yet even they knew that there was a holy of holies which she kept for her God, and they loved and revered .her the more for it. So strangely was commingled in her the inclnsiveness and the exclusiveness of love, its hospitality, and its reserve. Ah, blessed home-builder I You have no cause to envy women with a “gift.” For there is nothing so sacred on earth as a home, and no priest on earth so divine as the wife and mother who makes it, and no gift so great as the

gift which grafts this bud of heaven on the common Btock of earth. “Her children ■ha.ll rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.*