Poor old man!  ’Twas hard for him to look up, with so much to draw him down.  But I don’t think he ever forgot God.

A little before sunset, one afternoon, a few weeks after the sad news of David’s death had reached us, Mary Ellen came out to where I was sitting under the lilacs, and asked if I couldn’t move Emily into her own room for a little while.

“Is she able?” I asked.

“I don’t know what has come over her,” she replied, “she seems so strong.  For a long time I thought her asleep, but all at once she spoke out clear and loud, and said, ’I want to see his grave.  If anybody could take me to my own room, I could see his grave.’  She keeps repeating it, and she means the sea.”

’Twas not much to take her across the entry.  Mary Ellen arranged everything, and we placed her on a sofa by the window.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “how I have longed for this!  I have hungered and thirsted for a good look at the sea.”

Her cheeks were pale, her eyes large and bright.

She looked so ethereal, so unearthly, and lay so long motionless, with her eyes fixed upon the water, that I half feared she would at that moment pass away from us,—­that she might, in some beautiful form, a dove, or a bright angel, soar upward through the open window, and be lost to our sight among the golden-edged clouds above.

But she was thinking of David’s grave.  And a beautiful grave it seemed, from that window.  The water was still, as smooth as glass.  I had never noticed upon it so uncommon a tinge.  ’Twas mostly of a pale green, very pale; but portions of it were of a deep lilac.  Farther off it was purple, and very far off a dim, shadowy gray.  I was glad it had on that particular night such a peaceful, placid look.

“Oh, what a beautiful grave!” said Emily.  Then her eyes wandered to different points of the landscape, dwelling for a long time on each.

“I suppose you think,” said she, at last, in a low, sweet voice, “that it is easy for a sick girl to go.  But I love everything I’ve been looking at.  It may be more beautiful there, but it will not be the same.  I shall want to see exactly this stretch of water, and the islands beyond, and the shadows on those woods away off in the distance, and the field where father has mowed the grass for so many years.  Every summer, as soon as June came in, I’ve listened, early in the morning, before noise began, to hear the whetting of the scythe, and then waited for the smell of the hay to come in at the windows.

“Those maples, on the knoll, are my dear friends.  I’ve been glad with them in the spring, and sorry with them in the fall, through all these years.  The birds and the dandelions and the violets are all my friends.  I’ve waited for them every year, and it seemed as if the same ones came back.  You well people can’t understand it.  They are near to me.  I enter into the life of each one of them, just as you do into the lives of your human friends.  Spirits go everywhere, see everything.  That will be too much.  I’m attached to just this spot of earth.  And then I’m attached to myself.  I can’t realize that I shall be the same, and I don’t want to give myself up, poor miserable creature as I am.”