And then a few minutes after, taking little Olive upon his knees, and making Roland sit in a small chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, the old man began,—
'My dear wife were powerful fond o' flowers, and she were quite as clever at rearing 'em as ever I were. She would get cuttin's from James Green up at the house, and in summer our garden was just a pictur.' Just before she were a taken ill, James had sent her down a lily bulb, a beautiful pure white one, and she'd put it in a pot in our cellar, and says she to me, "Bob, I means to bring that lily out by Easter; with care I'm sure I shall do it!" Then when she were near her end, and she seed me a-frettin' my heart out, she calls me to her bed. "Bob," says she, "take care o' my lily, and, Bob dear, when Easter comes and you see it a-burstin' out in all its beauty, then think o' me and the children." "So also is the resurrection of the dead.... It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power." "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him!" Them were the very two tex's she said to me, and then she says: "The nex' time you'll see me, Bob, will be in my body o' glory! Unless you foller me first, but I can't help thinking," she says, "that the Resurrection mayn't be far off!" And so she left me!'
There was a pause. Bob wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, then put Olive down from his knees and walked across to his flower-pots.
The children followed him silently, and peeped over the edge of the pots, only to see bare brown earth, and their faces fell at the sight.
Bob turned to them with a smile: 'This here big pot in the middle is my wife's lily; I set to work when she went, and got four other o' the same kind o' bulb and planted them in these smaller pots. This one is Bessie's, that one is Nellie's, and the others are just Bob's and Harry's. Well, all that winter I goes to my graves in the churchyard, and comes back to these pots, and I shakes my head over them all, and couldn't get no comfort nohow. But shall I ever forget a-comin' into my kitchen on Easter Sunday, and seein' the sun shine in upon five pure white lilies! I just fell a-sobbin' on my knees beside them.
"Lord," I says, "I knows as certain sure as I sees these lilies now, and remembers all the silence and darkness that came upon them from the time they were put in the earth, that Thou wilt give me back my dear ones ten thousand times more beautiful than ever I saw 'em here! And if their Easter will come a little later, 'tis just as sure!" Ay, little ones, and for three years the Lord has delighted my soul by bringin' up these lilies at Easter time, just to tell me that my graves is goin' to be opened like the Lord's Himself, and I'm a-goin' to see my family again. The devil himself may tempt and try one in the winter, but away he goes in the spring, when every bit o' this blessed earth is preaching the resurrection to us!'
Much of this was above the children's heads, but Roland said, after a minute's thought, 'Will dead people come up out of the ground like the flowers?'