“Jennie, what is the matter?  You look sick.”

“I am sick, John,” said she; “sick at heart.  Willie Gear is dead.”

“Willie Gear dead!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” said Jennie.  “He was skating on the pond.  I suppose this warm weather has weakened the ice.  It gave way.  Three of the boys went in together.  The other two got out.  But Willie was carried under the ice.”

Jennie was driving.  Instead of turning up the hill from the depot she kept down the river road.  “I thought you would want to go down there at once,” said she.  “And so I left baby with Nell and came down for you.”

We rode along in silence.  Willie Gear was his father’s pride and pet.  He was a noble boy.  He inherited his mother’s tenderness and patience, and with them his father’s acute and questioning intellect.  He was a curious combination of a natural skeptic and a natural believer.  He had welcomed the first step toward converting our Bible-class into a mission Sabbath-school, and had done more than any one else to fill it up with boys from the Mill village.  He was a great favorite with them all and their natural leader in village sports and games.  There was no such skater or swimmer for his age as Willie Gear, and he was the champion ball-player of the village.  But I remember him best as a Sabbath-school scholar.  I can see even now his earnest upturned face and his large blue eyes, looking strait into his mother’s answering gaze, and drinking in every word she uttered to that mission-class which he had gathered and which she every Sabbath taught.  He was not very fortunate in his teacher in our own church Sabbath-school.  For he took nothing on trust and his teacher doubted nothing.  I can easily imagine how his soul filled with indignation at the thought of Abraham’s offering up his only son as a burnt sacrifice, and how with eager questioning he plied his father, unsatisfied himself with the assurances of one who had never experienced a like perplexity, and therefore did not know how to cure it.

And Willie was really gone.  Would it soften the father’s heart and teach him the truth of Pascal’s proverb that “The heart has reasons of its own that the reason knows not of;” or would it blot out the last remnant of faith, and leave Mr. Gear without a God as he had been without a Bible and without a Saviour?

I was still pondering these problems, wildly thinking, not aimlessly, yet to no purpose, when we reached the familiar cottage.  Is it indeed true that nature has no sympathy?  There seemed to me to be on all around a hush that spoke of death.  There needed no sorrowful symbol of crape upon the door; and there was none.  I almost think I should have known that death was in the house had no one told me.

As I was fastening my horse Mr. Hardcap came up.  We entered the gate together.

“This is a hard experience for Mr. Gear,” said I to Mr. Hardcap.

“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” replied Mr. Hardcap, severely.