at your mother; and she springs forward,
dropping your hand, and lays her fingers upon the forehead of the boy,
and passes her hand over his mouth.

"Is he asleep, Doctor?" she says in a tone you do not know.

"Be calm, madam." The Doctor is very calm.

"I am calm," says your mother; but you do not think it, for you see her
tremble very plainly.

"Dear madam, he will never waken in this world!"

There is no cry,--only a bowing down of your mother's head upon the body
of poor dead Charlie!--and only when you see her form shake and quiver
with the deep, smothered sobs, your crying bursts forth loud and
strong.

The Doctor lifts you in his arms, that you may see that pale
head,--those blue eyes all sunken,--that flaxen hair gone,--those white
lips pinched and hard!--Never, never will the boy forget his first
terrible sight of Death!

In your silent chamber, after the storm of sobs has wearied you, the
boy-dreams are strange and earnest. They take hold on that awful
Visitant,--that strange slipping away from life, of which we know so
little, and yet know, alas, so much! Charlie that was your brother, is
now only a name: perhaps he is an angel; perhaps (for the old nurse has
said it when he was ugly--and now you hate her for it) he is with Satan!

But you are sure this cannot be: you are sure that God, who made him
suffer, would not now quicken and multiply his suffering. It agrees with
your religion to think so; and just now you want your religion to help
you all it can.

You toss in your bed, thinking over and over of that strange
thing--Death; and that perhaps it may overtake you before you are a man;
and you sob out those prayers (you scarce know why) which ask God to
keep life in you. You think the involuntary fear, that makes your little
prayer full of sobs, is a holy feeling;--and so it is a holy
feeling,--the same feeling which makes a stricken child yearn for the
embrace and the protection of a Parent. But you will find there are
those canting ones trying to persuade you, at a later day, that it is a
mere animal fear, and not to be cherished.

You feel an access of goodness growing out of your boyish grief; you
feel right-minded; it seems as if your little brother in going to Heaven
had opened a path-way thither, down which goodness comes streaming over
your soul.

You think how good a life you will lead; and you map out great purposes,
spreading themselves over the school-weeks of your remaining boyh