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Great suffering taught him great sympathy. His great sympathy for men gave him great influence over men. As a lonely motherless little boy living in the pitiless poverty of the backwoods he learned both humility and appreciation. Then from a gentle step-mother he learned the beauty of kindness.
The world-wide popularity of Robinson Crusoe is chiefly due to the peculiar genius of the author; to his journalistic training, which enabled him to seize on the essential elements of interest and to keep these in the foreground; to the skill with which he presents matter-of-fact details, sufficient to invest the story with an atmosphere of perfect reality; to his style, which is as simple and direct as the speech of real life, and which is made vivid by specific words describing concrete actions, such as hewing a tree, sharpening a stake, hanging up grapes to dry, tossing a biscuit to a wild cat, taking a motherless kid in his arms; and to the skill with which he sets a problem requiring for its solution energy, ingenuity, self-reliance, and the development of the moral power necessary to meet and overcome difficulties.
His ordered existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans. Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless creatures, his own wife's flesh and blood.
There were plenty of people who would have taken her off the captain's hands, but nothing would induce the faithful creature to leave the motherless "childer." She loved them both and if they were to go through danger she would go with them. All the same she stood sturdily out in her resentment toward the captain and would not answer now. Jim, too, on the driver's seat, was gloomily silent.
What a joy, what a triumph to say to her some dear day, a few years hence, "You poor, motherless bairn, we have swept away the cobwebs of your dreams, given you back your will, put a clue to things in your hand: now go on and learn to live and be mistress of your own life under God!"
Nor was it absent from Lord Hollingford's, as he made reply, 'True, true. Yet a man like you ought to be free from any thought of household cares. You ought to have somebody. How old is Miss Gibson? 'Seventeen. It's a very awkward age for a motherless girl. 'Yes; very. I have only boys, but it must be very awkward with a girl. Excuse me, Gibson, but we're talking like friends.
Experience, not gained altogether at first hand, be it understood, but such as a clever woman easily gathers from the lives of those about her. As the motherless daughter of M. Selpdorf, she had had exceptional opportunities.
How could she have thought them! And there she was now in all the agony of her unrestrained passion. Well he knew, from his long experience of her nature, how she must have suffered to be in such a state of mind, to have so forgotten all the restraint of her teaching and her life! Poor, poor Stephen! Fatherless now as well as motherless; and friendless as well as fatherless!
That Lady Dunstable should have unkindly slighted this motherless girl, who had evidently plenty of natural capacity under her shyness, was just like her, and Doris's feelings of antagonism to the tyrant were only sharpened by her acquaintance with the victim. Why should Miss Wigram worry her self? Lord Dunstable? Well, but after all, capable men should keep such wives in order.
I was motherless at an early age; indeed, one of the first remembrances that I recall is the bright and glowing summer evening when my mother was carried from our plantation on James River to the opposite shore, where was our family burial-ground. Can I ever forget my father's uncontrolled grief, and the sorrow of the servants, as they followed, dressed in the deepest mourning.
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