“I love you some, father, but not as I did my mother; and now my mother is in heaven, who shall I have to take care of me and kiss me, father; who will say a prayer to me every night?  Aunt Susan’s prayers are not like mother’s; and your voice doesn’t sound so sweet by the side of my bed as my mother’s did.  Oh dear! what did my mother die for, and leave me a poor little motherless boy?”

His father then took him upon his knee, wiped his tears, and soothed him to sleep with gentle caresses.  No word could David utter.  For a long time he sat with his sleeping boy, beside his dead.  The paleness of his cheek, and the frequent sigh, expressed his sorrow.  His mother again tried to draw from him an expression of his Christian fidelity, fearing that he was untrue to his God and his Master under a trial so severe.  When at length he did speak, a hardened heart might have been moved by his broken sentences and choking words, as he made an effort to assure his anxious parent.

“Mother, I have the utmost confidence in the mercy and goodness of God—­even now that he has taken to himself one so very dear.  I feel sure there is some great and important lesson which he would have me learn from this sorrowful event.  I have all faith that Abby is at rest, and will still love those of us who are left on the earth to mourn.  I believe we shall meet each other in the future, that we shall recognize and love each other, with a far more perfect and a purer love than we have cherished here.  I shall be lonely, and miss from my hours at home the counsel, the aid, the cheerfulness, sympathy and attentive love of one of the best of women.  Her beautiful example in the service of her Master will often be remembered with deep and sincere grief.

“All this I could bear calmly; if it were more bitter, I could bear it and not weep.  But to think of my children—­as motherless babes; to hear Willie tell his sorrow, and mourn so bitterly in his tender years for a mother—­so dear; to feel that with his susceptibility and keen sensitiveness he realizes so fully his loss; to hear him sob on his pillow at night, and, when alone, call himself ’little motherless Willie;’—­oh, mother! what man or Christian would not bow beneath a burden like this?—­It is the contemplation of four motherless children that wounds me most.  It seems to me Abby herself would not reprove me, could those cold lips now bring me a message from her spirit in heaven.”

* * * * *

With expressions like those in the chamber of the dead was every hour in the home of David embittered, for weeks and months, by the little mourning child.  He gathered flowers and laid them before his father, saying, “I don’t suppose you care about them, father; but my mother isn’t here to take them.  I pick them because they look up into my face as if mother was somewhere near them.  But they wither on my hand, and hold down their heads, just as I want to do now my mother is dead.”