A CHILD does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death. Though
I had looked upon my father's still, pale face in his coffin, the
impression it left upon me was of sleep; more peaceful and sacred than
common slumber, yet only sleep. My dreams of him were for a long time
so vivid that I would say to myself, "He was here yesterday; he will be
here again to-morrow," with a feeling that amounted to expectation.
We missed him, we children large and small who made up the yet
untrained home crew, as a ship misses the man at the helm. His grave,
clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words that decided,
once for all, the course we were to take, had been far more to us than
we knew.
It was hardest of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to depend
entirely upon him. Left with her eight children, the eldest a boy of
eighteen years, and with no property except the roof that sheltered us
and a small strip of land, her situation was full of perplexities which
we little ones could not at all understand. To be fed like the ravens
and clothed like the grass of the field seemed to me, for one, a
perfectly natural thing, and I often wondered why my mother was so
fretted and anxious.
I knew that she believed in God, and in the promises of the Bible, and
yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her troubles and her
helplessness. I felt almost like preaching to her, but I was too small
a child to do that, I well knew; so I did the next best thing I could
think of--I sang hymns as if singing to myself, while I meant them for
her. Sitting at the window with my book and my knitting, while she was
preparing dinner or supper with a depressed air because she missed the
abundant provision to which she held been accustomed, I would go from
hymn to hymn, selecting those which I thought would be most comforting
to her, out of the many that my memory-book contained, and taking care
to pronounce the words distinctly.