Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Tom's earliest recollections were of lying in his mother's arms and seeing the crescent moon across the housetops. But he did not remember his mother ever singing to him. Mrs. Kelly, poor lady, never sang anything—except hymns in a thin quaver. She took life far too seriously for that. To her Tom was a responsibility that left no vitality for playfulness or even the purr of mere comfort. She had been thirty when she married, she was forty- three when Tom was born, and she was now nearly fifty. Her girlhood had been a drab affair of a shabby genteel sort from which active sports had been excluded as vulgar. Any natural mirth she might have had as a child had long since succumbed to the apprehensions of her New England conscience. She did not really believe in a personal devil with a red tail, but she pretended to Tom that she did and felt herself in danger of hell fire because she did not. Dear, well-meaning lady! And though she loved Tom with a passionate devotion —was he not all she had on earth ?—yet the restraint of her Puritan upbringing and the belief that life was so serious a matter deprived her of the ability to give any natural expression to her feelings and forced her to mask her real affection under a demeanor of self-conscious severity. By day he lay in her lap in the same place, and instead of the moon, watched the little globules of light, reflected from the water standing on the tin roof of the bay window, dance on the ceiling. They danced and danced so jollily that he did not miss his mother's singing, and he would laugh with delight, and then his glance would stray to where a steel-engraved Madonna with great soulful eyes gazed down upon another baby, just like him, who lay in her arms—and beyond to where the red worsted motto urged him to "Look unto me ...