the worse!"

CHAPTER XXXIII.

So this is the way in which Barbara's hope dies! Our hopes have as many
ways of dying as our bodies. Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow
consumption, we nursing, cockering, and physicking them to the last.
Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that in full health, with
his bones full of marrow, and his eyes full of light, drops wordless
into the next world unaware. This last has been Barbara's case. When she
thought it healthiest, and most vigorous in its stalwart life, then the
death-mark was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles are as great
stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth road; over which, in a dark night,
we trip, and grumblingly stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our
limbs. To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to God;
hills, that lift us nearer heaven--that heaven, which, however
certainly--with whatever mathematical precision--it has been
demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere,
we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at. Barbara
has always looked heavenward. In all her mirth, God has mixed. Now,
therefore, in this grief that He has sent her--this ignoble grief, that
yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the
solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller
confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety
on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked
royally down the toiling centuries--the king, whom this generation,
above all generations, is laboring--and, as not a few think,
_successfully_--to discrown. To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as
when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.

Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I
suppose, I tried in after-days--sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms
out wide-backward toward the past--to speak the words that would have
been as easily spoken then as any other--that no earthly power can ever
make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.

I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant
and shabby. Why did not I say a great many more? Oh, all of you who live
with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day
how much you love them! at the risk of _wearying_ them, tell them, I
pray you: it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs.

I think that, at this ti