Inside of another month that noble little fellow was dead.  Apparently he was his own healthy, happy little self, and then was stricken as he had been before.  The pastor of the church of which the parents are members told me of the death scene.  It occurred at about one o’clock in the morning, and the mother was worn and haggard from anxiety and days of watching.  The members of the family, the physician, and the pastor were standing around the bed, but the mother was on her knees close beside the little one, who was writhing in the most awful convulsions.  Then the stricken mother looked straight into heaven and made a personal appeal to God to come and relieve the little fellow’s sufferings.  Again and again she prayed:  “Oh, God, do come and take my little boy.”  And the Angel of Death, in answer to that prayer, came in and touched the baby, and he was still.

The mother of that child may or may not know that the grandfather of that child came into that room that night, though he had been long in his grave, and murdered her baby—­murdered him with tainted blood.  That grandfather had not lived a clean life, and so broke a mother’s heart and forced her in agony to pray for the death of her own child.

When I had finished I walked quietly away, leaving the boys to their own thoughts, and as I walked I breathed the wish that my boys may live such clean, wholesome, upright, temperate lives that no child or grandchild may ever have occasion to reproach them, or point the finger of scorn at them, and that no mother may ever pray for death to come to her baby because of a taint in their blood.

CHAPTER XXIII

GRANDMOTHER

My grandmother was about the nicest grandmother that a boy ever had, and in memory of her, I am quite partial to all the grandmothers.  I like Whistler’s portrait of his mother there in the Luxembourg—­the serene face, the cap and strings, and the folded hands—­because it takes me back to the days and to the presence of my grandmother.  She got into my heart when I was a boy, and she is there yet; and there she will stay.  The bread and butter that she somehow contrived to get to us boys between meals made us feel that she could read our minds.  I attended a banquet the other night, but they had no such bread and butter as we boys had there in the shade of that apple-tree.  It was real bread and real butter, and the appetite was real, too, and that helped to invest grandmother with a halo.  Sometimes she would add jelly, and that caused our cup of joy to run over.  She just could not bear a hungry look on the face of a boy, and when such a look appeared she exorcised it in the way that a boy likes.  What I liked about her was that she never attached any conditions to her bread and butter—­no, not even when she added jelly, but her gifts were as free as salvation.  The more I think of the matter, the more I am convinced that her gifts were salvation, for I know, by experience, that a hungry boy is never a good boy, at least, not to excess.