lain. It may
be that there is a clinging and tender memory yet--wakened by the home
atmosphere--of the divided sixpence.

Of your quondam friend, Frank, the pleasant recollection of whom revives
again under the old roof-tree, she tells you very little,--and that
little in a hesitating and indifferent way that utterly surprises you.
Can it be, you think, that there has been some cause of unkindness?

----Clarence is still very young!

The fire glows warmly upon the accustomed hearth-stone, and--save that
vacant place never to be filled again--a home cheer reigns even in this
time of your mourning. The spirit of the lost parent seems to linger
over the remnant of the household; and the Bible upon its stand--the
book she loved so well--the book so sadly forgotten--seems still to open
on you its promises in her sweet tones, and to call you, as it were,
with her angel-voice to the land that she inherits.

And when late night has come, and the household is quiet, you call up in
the darkness of your chamber that other night of grief which followed
upon the death of Charlie. That was the boy's vision of death; and this
is the youthful vision. Yet essentially there is but little difference.
Death levels the capacities of the living as it levels the strength of
its victims. It is as grand to the man as to the boy, its teachings are
as deep for age as for infancy.

You may learn its manner, and estimate its approaches; but when it
comes, it comes always with the same awful front that it wore to your
boyhood. Reason and Revelation may point to rich issues that unfold from
its very darkness; yet all these are no more to your bodily sense, and
no more to your enlightened hope, than those foreshadowings of peace
which rest like a halo on the spirit of the child as he prays in
guileless tones--OUR FATHER, WHO ART IN HEAVEN!

It is a holy and a placid grief that comes over you,--not crushing, but
bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler
instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen
and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam
again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in
goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all
foul matter, and leaves you in a state of calm that seems kindred to the
land and to the life whither the sainted mother has gone.

This calm brings a smile in the middle of tears, and an inward