During the days following the Fourth, this impression of death which had entered my mind began to assume more definite limits, and grew pertinent to my own status. I had heard that the average age of man was thirty-three years, and granting that I should reach that age, I could expect to live a little over twenty years more. That was a long time, to be sure, twenty years; but it would pass, and at the end of it I should have to die and look as that man looked, and be buried in the ground. The thought of it caused me to gasp suddenly, and filled me with a sense of terror and despair so awful that I could scarcely restrain myself from crying out. Most young people, I conjecture, pass through a similar mental experience, when the drear fact of death is first realized.
It continued to weigh heavily on my mind; and by way of relief from it, I followed Theodora out into the garden the next Sunday evening, and after quite an effort, opened the subject with her. There was no one else with whom I could have summoned resolution to broach that topic.
"Did you ever see anybody after they were dead?" I asked her.
She did not seem very much surprised at the question, since it was Sabbath eve. "Do you mean their body?" she inquired.
"Yes, their body," I replied.
"I have seen three," she said, at length.
"Didn't it make you feel strange?" I asked. "It did me. It is an awful thing to die and be put down into the ground, with all that earth on one."
"Oh, but they don't know it," said Theodora. "It is only their dead bodies; their spirits are far away."
"Yes," I said, "but I cannot help thinking of their bodies, and that it is them still, only they cannot wake up and speak."
"Oh, no, their spirits are far away," replied my gentle cousin, confidently.