I tried to prepare him for the impending death, by showing him that it was the end of pain, but his horror of it was inextinguishable, and he cried in agony, “Oh, no, no!  Papa, I wish to live as long as you do;” and, though his faculties were fortunately failing, he beckoned me to lay my head by his on the pallet I had prepared for him on the floor, and offered me a last feeble caress and showed his pleasure in having me by him.  He had loved me above all things on earth, even more than his loving mother, and to be with me had always been his dearest delight, and now we met Death alone, he and I, and I could only remember David’s cry, “Absalom, my son!” I watched the fading life, the diminishing breath in the midnight silence of the solitary house, and almost desired Death to hasten, for the final struggle had begun, and the suspense was torture to me.  And when the last long breath was drawn, and the limp, deserted body was all that was left to me of my thirteen years of passionate devotion, my pride and hope, and the nursing care of so many years, I walked out into the midnight and left my boy to Death.  The long tension was over, and I could give way to tears.

It was only a child’s death, a common thing, almost as common as family existence, but it gave a new color to my life, establishing forever a sympathy with the common grief, and a community of sorrow with all bereft fathers and mothers, in the premature dissipation of the hopes of their future, and the lapse of a dear companionship into the eternal void.  This is the human brotherhood of sorrow, sacred, ennobling, sanctifying where it abides, the deepest lesson of the school of life.  My feet have wandered far, and my thoughts still further from the places and beliefs of my childhood; but whatever and wherever I may be, this grief at times catches me and holds me in a pause of dumb tears, and every similar bereavement I witness renews the sympathetic grief.  I have never been able to find a consolation for that loss, for it carried with it the future and its best dreams.  When his mother died, I thought that any death were easier to bear than the sudden and terrible tragedy of that; but in the devastated youth and the lingering pain of Russie’s leaving, I found that

      “not all the preaching since Adam
  Has made Death other than Death.”

We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized.  In these things we follow prejudices.  Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to encumber the boy’s mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of God until