Excerpt from Good Words for 1874 My mother and I. Never were there such friends as my mother and I; real equal friends, in addition to being mother and daughter. It was so from my cradle, my father having died a month after I was born. I never had a nurse-maid: she was too poor to give me one, even had she wished; but I think she did not wish. I was all she had, and she preferred keeping me wholly to herself. Besides, in those days mothers took care of their children rather more than they think it necessary to do now. It was not considered that even her duties to society compelled a lady to resign to a staff of inferior women, that other duty to bring up for God and man those precious little human souls and bodies with which Heaven had entrusted her. The world still held the old-fashioned opinion that to be a mother, in the largest sense, was at once the highest honour and the chiefest usefulness to which any woman could aspire. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.