All around the house was still; while within, the children and the neighbors trod softly as they went from room to room, and their faces wore an anxious, troubled look, as if they already felt the presence of the shadow hovering¹ near. The heavy brass² knocker was muffled³, and the deep-toned churchbell across the way no longer told the hours of 12 and 9, for at each stroke the sick man had turned upon his pillow, and moaned as if in pain. So when the Sabbath came the people went up unsummoned to the house of God, where they reverently⁴ prayed for him, who was passing from their midst, and who, ere another week rolled round, would be “where congregations ne’er break up, and Sabbaths never end.”

 

For many days he had lain in a kind of stupor⁵ from which nothing roused him save the rush of the engine as it swept across the meadow at the foot of the hill. Then he would start up, asking eagerly if “they had come, Anna, Rose, and Jamie.” Much he talked of the absent ones, and as day by day went by and still they came not, he wept like a little child, as he said to his wife, “I shall never see them more.”

 

“And if you do not,” she asked, “what shall I tell them?”

 

215For a time he lay as if her question was unheard—then opening his eyes he answered, “Tell Anna, my stricken one, that there is for her a balm in Gilead; that whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and though the waters through which she is passing be deep and troubled, they shall not overflow⁶, for the everlasting⁷ arms are beneath her.”

 

“And Rosa, have you no message for her?” asked my mother as he ceased speaking.

 

“Oh, Rosa, Rosa,” he answered quickly, “Tell her—tell her everything—but not here—not in this room. She thinks I do not love her, and when she comes and finds me gone, go with her to my grave. She will believe you if you tell her there how dear she was to me, and how, through the long weary nights before I died, I wept and prayed for her that she might one day meet me in the better land. I never meant to love one child more than another, but if I did—tell her she was my pride, the one on whom I doted. She thought me cold and unfeeling, because I stayed not to bid her adieu that morning. Ah, she did not know that with the first dawn of day I stole up to her

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