The mother

In the kitchen of the small thatched farmhouse the mother sat on a low bamboo stool behind the earthen stove and fed grass deftly into the hole where a fire burned beneath the i...

Is there one day different from another under heaven for a mother? In the morning the mother woke and rose before dawn, and while the others still slept she opened the door and...

But sometimes her wrath would come up hotly and then it would come with more than her usual scolding speech. Once or twice in a season a quarrel would go deep with her and give...

Now those three coins were of good value and coins the mother had brought with her when she came to be wed, and her own mother had handed them to her for her own when she left h...

Nevertheless, there was the hope of the seven days when his money might be gone. One by one the seven days came, and in each one it seemed to her in the midst of her waiting as...

And again the old man wrote and she said when she had thought a while, “One more thing there is he is to say. Say, ‘Tell my old mother I shall bring red stuff for her third shro...

Once when the children of her father’s house were grown out of babyhood and she was nearly ready to be wed herself there was a certain thing that happened to her, and it roused...

She drooped her head and strove to speak as commonly she did, and she said, “I thought to go and buy a silver pin, or one washed with silver, to hold my hair. The one I had grew...

And the mother sewed and sewed, and the neighbors brought in food so that she need not stop for anything but could sew on. In one day and a part of the night it was done, and th...

Presently in the deep night the stuff seized on her with such gripes as she never dreamed of and she gave herself up to die. And as the agony went on she came at last to forget...

So the mother rose at last and sighed most heavily, not knowing what her prayer was worth, and she lit her incense and went away again. When she had walked the ten miles and com...

“Maids there be a plenty in that village for we never kill them there as they do in some towns when babes are girls, and they are allowed to grow however many a mother has, and...

Now well the mother loved this fruit, and she ate heartily of all such as could not be sold or such as grew too ripe suddenly beneath the sun, and she ate on and on and when she...

There was only this good thing nowadays, she thought, and it was that her two sons did not quarrel so much. The elder was satisfied and master in the house, and the younger had...

So was the quarrel averted. But the mother was not eased and suddenly her eye fell on the old gossip standing in the crowd, her mouth ajar and eyes staring and all her old hangi...

Then the young woman stayed her knife and she said in her careful way, “I did not lest I might be wrong and grieve you worse than if I never gave you hope.”

“I do not know, mother,” said the son, his head hanging, his hands hanging loose between his knees as he sat upon a little stool. He wore his one robe still, but he had tucked t...