This Was My Mother

By Mark Twain[America]

She was 82 and living in Keoluk when, unaccountably, she insisted upon attending a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley. All the way there, and it was some distance, she was young again with excitement and eagerness. At the hotel she asked immediately for Dr.Barrett, of St.Louis. He had left for home that morning and would not be back, she was told. She turned away, the fire all gone from her, and asked to go home. Once there she sat silent and thinking for many days, then told us that when she was 18 she had loved a young medical student with all her heart. There was a misunderstanding and he left the country; she had immediately married, to show him that she did mot care. She had never seen him since and then she had read in a newspaper that he was going to attend the old settlers' convention. "Only three hours before we reached that hotel he had been there," she mourned.

She had kept that pathetic burden in her heart 64 years without any of us suspecting it. Before the year was out, her memory began to fail. She would write letters to school-mates who had been dead 40 years and wonder why they never answered. Four years later she died.
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