I also assured her that as long as I lived all her comforts and wants would be scrupulously and sedulously looked after, and that nothing would be neglected to make her contented and happy. This interview seemed to give her great comfort and satisfaction. She seemed very happy over it.
After it was ended, she looked at me with a significant smile and said, “I see you have already raised your mustaches. You know you have a brother who is much older than you are; he hasn’t grown his mustaches yet. You must have yours off.”
I promptly obeyed her mandate, and as I entered the room with a clean face, she smiled with intense satisfaction, evidently thinking that with all my foreign education, I had not lost my early training of being obedient to my mother.
And if she could only have read my heart, she would have found how every throb palpitated with the most tender love for her.
During the remaining years of her life, I had the rare privilege of seeing her often and ministered to her every comfort that it was in my power to bestow.
She passed away in 1858, at the age of sixty-four, twenty-four years after the death of my father. I was in Shanghai at the time of her death. I returned to my native village in time to attend her funeral.
In the summer of 1855, I took up my residence in Canton, with the Rev. Mr. Vrooman, a missionary under the American Board. His headquarters were in Ham Ha Lan, in the vicinity of the government execution ground, which is in the southwestern outskirts of the city, close to the bank of the Pearl River. While there, I began my Chinese studies and commenced to regain the dialect of Canton, which I had forgotten during my stay in the United