Such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was the greatest life since Aristotle studied the starry universe.
Outside of India the lot of widows is not especially to be pitied. A widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with the stern reality.
Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it; and the memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to the one who endures the first cruel shock.
The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as one has a right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong and well: by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of most babies--and his mother thought, beyond them.
It is quite often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother-love is the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow when the other kind appears.
When the Reverend Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at the Widow Newton over his prayer-book, the good old dames whose business it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would occur.
People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women go to church to watch. Young clergymen fall an easy prey to designing widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow Newton made any original designs; she was below the young clergyman in social standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses were meant for her.
Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred, and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grandmother. The Reverend Barnabas Smith didn't like babies as well as he had at first thought. Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it is no particular difference if they are: a scarcity of discipline is better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved by it--love is a good substitute for a cat-'o-nine-tails.