moment
she went.

Our Barbara is asleep!--to awake--when?--where?--we know not, only we
altogether hope, that, when next she opens her blue eyes, it will be in
the sunshine of God's august smile--God, through life and in death, _her
friend_.

CHAPTER L.

"Then, breaking into tears, 'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see,
All blissful things depart from us, or e'er we go to Thee;
We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear Thee in the wind:
Our cedars must fall round us e'er we see the light behind.
Ay, sooth, we feel too strong in weal to need Thee on that road;
But, woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.'"

I am twenty years old now, barely twenty; and seventy is the appointed
boundary of man's date, often exceeded by ten, by fifteen years. During
all these fifty--perhaps sixty--years, I shall have to do without
Barbara. I have not yet arrived at the _pain_ of this thought: _that_
will come, quick enough, I suppose, by-and-by!--it is the _astonishment_
of it that is making my mind reel and stagger!

I suppose there are few that have not endured and overlived the
frightful _novelty_ of this idea.

I am sitting in a stupid silence; my stiff eyes--dry now, but dim and
sunk with hours of frantic weeping--fixed on vacancy, while I try to
think _exactly_ of her face, with a greedy, jealous fear lest, in the
long apathy of the endless years ahead of me, one soft line, one lovely
line, may become faint and hazy to me.

How often I have sat for hours in the same room with her, without one
glance at her! It seems to me, now, _monstrous_, incredible, that I
should ever have moved my eyes from her--that I should ever have ceased
kissing her, and telling her how altogether beloved she was by me.

If all of us, while we are alive, could stealthily, once a year, and
during a moment long enough to exchange but two words with them, behold
those loved ones whom we have lost, death would be no more death.

But, O friends, that one moment, for whose sake we could so joyfully
live through all the other minutes of the year, to us never comes.

I suppose trouble has made me a little light-headed. I think to-day I am
foolisher than usual. Thoughts that would not tease other people, tease
me.

If I ever see her again--if God ever give me that great felicity--I do
not quite know why He should, but if--if--(ah! what an if it is!)--my
mind misgives me--I have my doubts that it will no