In the kitchen of the small thatched farmhouse the mother sat on a low bamboo stool behind the earthen stove and fed grass deftly into the hole where a fire burned beneath the iron cauldron. The blaze...

Is there one day different from another under heaven for a mother? In the morning the mother woke and rose before dawn, and while the others still slept she opened the door and let out the fowls and t...

When the beans she had planted in the field were come to flower and the winds were full of their fragrance and when the valley was yellow with the blooming of the rape they grew for the oil they press...

But there was the man. To him there was no change in time, no hope of any new thing day after day. Even in the coming of the children his wife loved there was no new thing, for to him they were born t...

Through that day long the mother watched for the man to come home. It was a day when the fields could be left to their own growing, for the rice was planted in its pools, and in the shallow water and ...

Some seven days after that day a letter carrier who carried letters in a bag upon his shoulder passed by, a new thing in these later days, for in old days there were no such men, and to the folk of th...

Once more the spring came on, and now the mother must set herself hard to the land and she pressed the boy into the labor, too, and she taught him how to drive the beast. Push the plough he could not,...

Now from her youth up this woman had been ever a creature of deep still heats. She was not as some women are, quick to look at this young man and that and appraising any man who passed. No, she was a ...

If she could have forgotten the man and so finished with him, if he were dead and she had seen him buried in the earth and still and gone forever, if she could have been a widow and known her life wit...

She did not see the man again through the whole spring, although she remembered him. She did not see him until a day in the early summer, when the wheat was turning faintly gold, and she had sown her ...

In the night of that same day the wind rose suddenly as a tiger’s roar out of the distant hills, and it blew the clouds down out of the sky where they had hung heavy and full of rain, their light long...

The next day came gray and still with unfinished rain of summer and the sky pressed low over the valley heavy with its burden of the rain, and the hills were hidden. But the mother rose early and made...

Now the mother was no longer young. She was in her forty and third year, and when she counted on her fingers sometimes in the night how many years her children’s father had been gone, she used the fin...

Now all this hatred gathered in the elder son and even the mother did not know how deep it was until a certain day when out it came, bursting forth like a river dammed behind a dyke and swollen with w...

Every day the mother watched to see if what the girl had said was true, and it was true. The young wife was not rude, and her words came from her smoothly and with seeming careful courtesy always. But...

Now must the mother somehow make her days full to ease the fears she had and to forget the emptiness where once the blind maid had sat. Silent the house seemed and silent the street where she could no...

Crazed with her weariness was the mother when she came down from the halting gray ass that night before her own door. She had wept all the way home, now aloud and now softly, and the young man had bee...

Then did it seem as though the mother’s heart might have some comfort, for in the springtime of that year the younger son came home and he said, “I am come home to stay a while, mother, how long I do ...

But one day he did not come when he said he would. And how did she know he would surely come? Because but three days before he had come secretly and by night, walking across the field paths and not th...