"If you could but see me," she wrote on one occasion, "kissing your picture, then, after a while, taking it up again, and, with a tear in my eye, calling you 'my beloved son,' you would comprehend what it costs me to use sometimes the stern language of authority, and to occasion to you moments of pain.

* * * Work diligently--be, above all, modest and humble; and when you find yourself excelling others, then compare what you have done with Nature itself, or with the 'ideal' of your own mind, and you will be secured, by the contrast which will be apparent, against the effects of pride and presumption." Long years after, when Ary Scheffer was himself a grandfather, he remembered with affection the advice of his mother, and repeated it to his children.

And thus the vital power of good example lives on from generation to generation, keeping the world ever fresh and young.
Writing to his daughter, Madame Marjolin, in 1846, his departed mother's advice recurred to him, and he said: "The word MUST--fix it well in your memory, dear child; your grandmother seldom had it out of hers.

The truth is, that through our lives nothing brings any good fruit except what is earned by either the work of the hands, or by the exertion of one's self-denial.

Sacrifices must, in short, be ever going on if we would obtain any comfort or happiness.