The whole family seemed crushed by the blow.  Little Henry (now the great preacher), who had been told that his mother had been buried in the ground, and also that she had gone to heaven, was found one morning digging with all his might under his sister’s window, saying, “I’m going to heaven, to find ma!”

So much did Mr. Beecher miss her counsel and good judgment, that he sat down and wrote her a long letter, pouring out his whole soul, hoping somehow that she, his guardian angel, though dead, might see it.  A year later he wrote a friend:  “There is a sensation of loss which nothing alleviates—­a solitude which no society interrupts.  Amid the smiles and prattle of children, and the kindness of sympathizing friends, I am alone; Roxana is not here.  She partakes in none of my joys, and bears with me none of my sorrows.  I do not murmur; I only feel daily, constantly, and with deepening impression, how much I have had for which to be thankful, and how much I have lost....  The whole year after her death was a year of great emptiness, as if there was not motive enough in the world to move me.  I used to pray earnestly to God either to take me away, or to restore to me that interest in things and susceptibility to motive I had had before.”

Once, when sleeping in the room where she died, he dreamed that Roxana came and stood beside him, and “smiled on me as with a smile from heaven.  With that smile,” he said, “all my sorrow passed away.  I awoke joyful, and I was lighthearted for weeks after.”

Harriet went to live for a time with her aunt and grandmother, and then came back to the lonesome home, into which Mr. Beecher had felt the necessity of bringing a new mother.  She was a refined and excellent woman, and won the respect and affection of the family.  At first Harriet, with a not unnatural feeling of injury, said to her:  “Because you have come and married my father, when I am big enough, I mean to go and marry your father;” but she afterwards learned to love her very much.

At seven, with a remarkably retentive memory,—­a thing which many of us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to be distracted by the trifles of every-day life,—­Harriet had learned twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible.  She was exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor minister’s library to attract a child.  She found Bell’s Sermons, and Toplady on Predestination.  “Then,” she says, “there was a side closet full of documents, a weltering ocean of pamphlets, in which I dug and toiled for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of a Don Quixote, that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty dissecta membra, amid Calls, Appeals, Essays, Reviews, and Rejoinders.  The turning up of such a fragment seemed like the rising of an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud.”  Finally Ivanhoe was obtained, and she and her brother George read it through seven times.