make you feel strange?" I asked. "It did me. It is an awful
thing to die and be put down into the ground, with all that earth on
one."

"Oh, but they don't know it," said Theodora. "It is only their dead
bodies; their spirits are far away."

"Yes," I said, "but I cannot help thinking of their bodies, and that it
is them still, only they cannot wake up and speak."

"Oh, no, their spirits are far away," replied my gentle cousin,
confidently.

"But that man, the one whose funeral Gramp and I went to, he died
intoxicated. Where do you honestly think he is now?" I asked her.

"It's a dreadful thing to think of," replied Theodora, solemnly. "You
know the Bible says, no drunkard can go to heaven."

"Then he will be burned forever and ever and ever, won't he?" I said.

"I suppose he will," she said, and taking out her handkerchief, she
wiped her eyes sadly.

"Do you think it will be real fire and that it will smart just as it
does when we burn our fingers?" I asked her.

"Maybe worse," Theodora replied, again wiping her eyes. "But sometimes I
cannot believe that it will be all the time, night and day, year after
year. Maybe it is wicked to hope it will not be, but I do want to think
that _they would stop sometimes_. Universalists teach that nobody will
be punished at all after they die; but Gram thinks they are not real
Christians. Our folks all believe that the wicked will be punished
forever, and the Bible does say so, I suppose. Grandmother says that all
the great Bible scholars agree that the wicked will be punished."

"What does Ad think?" I asked, at length.

"I don't know. I'm afraid that he doesn't think at all," replied
Theodora. "The thing I do not like in Cousin Addison is that he will
never take a serious view of these important questions. The time he had
the measles, he was very sick one day, and I said that I hoped that his
mind was at peace. He looked at me as if he were a little frightened at
first, for I suppose he thought that I thought that he was going to die,
for I did begin in a sort of clumsy way. His head was swelled nearly as
big again as it ought to have been, and he looked very queer about the
eyes. 'O Doad!' he exclaimed, 'please do talk of things that you know
something about.' But of course he felt peevish, being so sick."

"I suppose he did," said I. "But isn't it awful that everybody's got to
die--and no getting away from it?"

"Yes, it does make any one feel dreadfully sad," Theo