Staff of My Soul: A Poem

Putting' Mother on thef' Shelf

By Ida Stewart Peay

— Mother Nile who was also grandmother and greatgrand- — mother to a large and loving posterity was just getting to her usual self again after the first protracted and serious illness of her long life. At this moment she was gazing in the old dresser mirror that had reflected her image almost daily for fifty years, and it was nearly that long ago since it had pictured Tom's, as he looked teasingly over her shoulder in the days of yore and called his handsome young wife "a proud one." "Of course, I'm proud," she had owned mischievously in those days gone by, as she laid her soft cheek against his, "who isn't, that's worth a snap of your fingers?" "Of course, I'm proud," she admitted again, now, to her solitary reflection, as she arranged the sheer, muslin collar attractively on her neat, gray gown. "I'm just as proud as I ever — was hearts don't change much, after all; and I want Charles to see that I'm on deck, pert as ever, and Jim's girl must notice that her sweetheart's grandmother has some ambition and 'get-up' in her." When the good woman was at last ready and began to walk with some thing of her old strength and briskness through the garden to her son Charles' home, she indeed made a "fine figure of a woman," for even after all these years she was straight and tall, and would tip the scales at one hundred and eighty pounds. Evidences of the power and purposefulness of her character were still plentiful, yet, with the knowledge that she had passed her seventy-fifth mile stone one might ordinarily be pardoned for saying she had been a wonderful woman "in her day," but the development of this little tale forebears this last quotation. As she neared the broad veranda that stretched across her oldest boy's home, she was spied by her grandson, Jim, and the little high school girl who had stolen his heart. "0 what a beautiful woman your grandmother is," exlaimed the sweet young thing. Then, as she and Jim, in the humility of young love, went tenderly forward to meet the venerable lady, the girl gasped more to herself than to any one else and almost entirely under her breath, "O I'm sure she's the Mrs. Nile my father talked about." The presentation followed immediately, and soon, seated be-