. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day."

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can
receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable
explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but
gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their
fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast
loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly
years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole
extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage
represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and
pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he
misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about
for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an
_essential_--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It
was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it
was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds
himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the
tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know
the magnitude of his disaster.

The 18th of August brought me the awful tidings. The mother and the
sister were out there in mid-Atlantic, ignorant of what was happening;
flying to meet this incredible calamity. All that could be done to
protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and
good friends. They went down the Bay and met the ship at night, but did
not show themselves until morning, and then only to Clara. When she
returned to the stateroom she did not speak, and did not need to. Her
mother looked at her and said:

"Susy is dead."

At half past ten o'clock that night, Clara and her mother completed
their circuit of the globe, and drew up at Elmira by the same train and
in the same car which had borne them and me Westward from it one year,
one month, and one week before. And again Susy was there--not waving her
welcome in the glare of the lights, as she had waved her farewell to us
thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin, in the
house where she was born.

The last thirteen days of Susy's life were spent in our own house in
Hartford, the home of her childhood, and always the dearest place in the
earth to her. About her she had faithful old friends--