Grief has a strange power in opening the hearts of those who sorrow in common.  The father, who has seemed to you, not so much neglectful, as careless of your aims and purposes,—­toward whom there have been in your younger years yearnings of affection which his chilliness of manner has seemed to repress, now grows under the sad light of the broken household into a friend.  The heart feels a joy it cannot express, in its freedom to love and to cherish.  There is a pleasure wholly new to you in telling him of your youthful projects, in listening to his questionings, in seeking his opinions, and in yielding to his judgment.

It is a sad thing for the child, and quite as sad for the parent, when this confidence is unknown.  Many and many a time with a bursting heart you have longed to tell him of some boyish grief, or to ask his guidance out of some boyish trouble; but at the first sight of that calm, inflexible face, and at the first sound of his measured words, your enthusiastic yearnings toward his love and his counsels have all turned back upon your eager and sorrowing heart, and you have gone away to hide in secret the tears which the lack of his sympathy has wrung from your soul.

But now over the tomb of her, for whom you weep in common, there is a new light breaking; and your only fear is lest you weary him with what may seem a barren show of your confidence.

Nelly too is nearer now than ever; and with her you have no fears of your extravagance; you listen delightfully there by the evening flame to all that she tells you of the neighbors of your boyhood.  You shudder somewhat at her genial praises of the blue-eyed Madge,—­a shudder that you can hardly account for, and which you do not seek to explain.  It may be that there is a clinging and tender memory yet—­wakened by the home atmosphere—­of the divided sixpence.

Of your quondam friend, Frank, the pleasant recollection of whom revives again under the old roof-tree, she tells you very little,—­and that little in a hesitating and indifferent way that utterly surprises you.  Can it be, you think, that there has been some cause of unkindness?

——­Clarence is still very young!

The fire glows warmly upon the accustomed hearth-stone, and—­save that vacant place never to be filled again—­a home cheer reigns even in this time of your mourning.  The spirit of the lost parent seems to linger over the remnant of the household; and the Bible upon its stand—­the book she loved so well—­the book so sadly forgotten—­seems still to open on you its promises in her sweet tones, and to call you, as it were, with her angel-voice to the land that she inherits.

And when late night has come, and the household is quiet, you call up in the darkness of your chamber that other night of grief which followed upon the death of Charlie.  That was the boy’s vision of death; and this is the youthful vision.  Yet essentially there is but little difference.  Death levels the capacities of the living as it levels the strength of its victims.  It is as grand to the man as to the boy, its teachings are as deep for age as for infancy.