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As to my mother, dear soul, it was her calm, peaceful influence which kept my father within bounds, and softened his austere rule. Seldom indeed, even in his darkest moods, did the touch of her gentle hand and the sound of her voice fail to soothe his fiery spirit. She came of a Church stock, and held to her religion with a quiet grip which was proof against every attempt to turn her from it.

One of the most ultra-respectable merchants of the time, ranked of high commercial standing and austere social prestige, was, for instance, Marshall O. Roberts. This was the identical Roberts so deeply involved in the great mail-subsidy frauds.

"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's. "Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the subject had never struck him in that light before.

Joplin continued to live as comfortably as before, and seemed not to miss the wages of her husband, nay, she rather now, as if before kept back by the prudence of the deceased, launched into a less thrifty mode of life, and a gayety of dress at variance both with the mourning her recent loss should have imposed, and the austere tenets of her sect.

There is no affected negligence in his dress and appearance; his countenance is grave but not austere; and his approach commands respect without creating awe. Distinguished as he is by the perfect blamelessness of his life, he is no less so by the courtesy and engaging sweetness of his manner. He attacks vices, not persons, and, without severity, reclaims the wanderer from the paths of virtue.

We might imagine Oliver Cromwell drawing up such rules, but not Napoleon or Wellington. The class to which Washington belonged prided itself on good birth and good breeding. We picture him as austere, but, like Oliver Cromwell, whom in some respects he resembles, he was very human in his personal relations. He liked a glass of wine.

His sons became high-souled progenitors of many races of Brahmanas who were devoted to austere penances, learned in the Vedas, and founders of many clans.

The noise they made did not in the least accord with their respectable Quaker appearance. Shall I bring you one as a pet? Its austere presence would help you to remember your "latter end." When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real thing this time icebergs, and lots of them.

This was not the region of responsibility. It was sniffed at, to its discredit, by the austere; but if it was not, as such people said, a serious field, was not the compensation just that you couldn't be seriously entangled in it? Sherringham's great advantage, as he regarded the matter, was that he had always kept his taste for the drama quite in its place.

A medal of the Emperor Constantius is said to be still extant in which the mysterious symbol is accompanied with the memorable words, "By this sign shalt thou conquer." The austere simplicity of the Primitive Christians yielded at length to this innovation of sacred splendor.