The Hillsborough Recorder

A Mother's Magic. The following touching and felicitous illustration of the power of ideas was given by Wendell Phillips, the other day, in a public speech at New York:

"I was told to-day a story so touching in reference to this, that you must let me tell it. It is a temperance case, but it will illustrate this just as well. It is the story of a mother on the hills of Vermont, holding by the right hand a son sixteen years old, mad with love of the sea. And as she stood by the garden gate, one sunny morning, she said: "Edward, they tell me that the great temptation of a seaman's life is drink. Promise me, before you quit your mother's hand, that you will never drink." "And," said he-for he told me the story-"I gave her the promise, and I went the broad globe over-Calcutta, the Mediterranean, San Francisco, the Cape of Good Hope, the North pole and the South-I saw them all in forty years, and I never saw a glass filled with sparkling liquor that my mother's form, by the garden gate, on the green hillside of Vermont, did not rise before me; and to-day, at sixty, my lips are innocent of the taste of liquor." Was not that sweet evidence of the power of a single word? Yet that was not half.

"For," said he, "yesterday there came into my counting room a young man of forty, and asked, Do you know me? 'No.' 'Well,' said he, 'I was once brought drunk into your presence on shipboard; you were a passenger; the captain kicked me aside; you took me to your berth, and kept me there until I had slept the sleep of intoxication; you then asked me if I had a mother: I said I never knew a word from her lips! you told me of yours at the garden gate, and to-day I am the master of one of the finest packets in New York, and I came to ask you to call and see me.' How far that little candle throws its beams! That mother's word on the green hill-side of Vermont! O God, be thanked for the almighty power of a single word!"