483페이지 중 9페이지

With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being

to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of

tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while

during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of

patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a

silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.

For a long time I was their only care. My mother had much desired

to have a daughter, but I continued their single offspring. When

I was about five years old, while making an excursion beyond the

frontiers of Italy, they passed a week on the shores of the Lake

of Como. Their benevolent disposition often made them enter the

cottages of the poor. This, to my mother, was more than a duty;

it was a necessity, a passion-remembering what she had suffered,

and how she had been relieved-for her to act in her turn the

guardian angel to the afflicted. During one of their walks a poor

cot in the foldings of a vale attracted their notice as being

singularly disconsolate, while the number of half-clothed

children gathered about it spoke of penury in its worst shape.

One day, when my father had gone by himself to Milan, my mother,

accompanied by me, visited this abode. She found a peasant and

his wife, hard working, bent down by care and labour,

distributing a scanty meal to five hungry babes.