Then tell me, mothers, was’t not hard to lose
And miss him from my side—
My little boy that died?
“How many another boy, as dear and charming,
His father’s hope, his mother’s one delight,
Slips through strange sicknesses, all fear disarming,
And lives a long, long life in parent’s sight!
Mine was so short a pride!
And then—my poor boy died.”
“Perhaps if he had lived,” she said, as she handed me a little tintype of a round-faced baby, whose laughing face was surrounded by ringlets of hair which looked as though they might have been silk.