"I want you, Susan, if you are strong enough to-day, to repeat to my friend that little account of yourself that you were once kind enough to give me."
"What, the whole story?" said Susan, "beginning at the beginning, as the children say?"
Susan was silent a minute or two, as if to collect her thoughts, and then said, I have always believed, that, though it seemed strange that such a good-for-nothing creature as I am should be spared, and others taken away, that, may be, I was left to give my testimony for some good purpose, and that my experience might do some good to poor pilgrims. For
"It is a straight and thorny road,
And mortal spirits tire and faint;
But they forget the mighty God
Who feeds the strength of every saint."
Susan knew half the hymn book by heart, and loved to repeat hymns so well, that she could hardly have told her story without this preface. She immediately began as follows:—
"My father, who was a sailor, lost his life at sea when I was two years old; my mother never had very good health, and about six years afterward she fell into a consumption. She lived only a year after she was taken sick. I was too young to remember much of her, but I have a distinct recollection of seeing her often sitting by a little stand like this, with an open Bible upon it; and once I was struck with her looking up to heaven with her hands clasped for a long time as if she were praying, and then looking at me, and then at the book; and I saw big tears rolling down her cheeks. She called me to her, and said, with an earnest but broken voice, God save my child from the evil that is in the world! and give her the testimony of a good conscience.
These words I could not forget, for the next day she died. We forget many things in this world, ladies, but the words of a dying mother we cannot help remembering. This was the first time I had ever seen death, but there was such a peaceful, happy expression in my mother's face, that it did not seem very terrible to me, till I found they were going to carry her away; indeed, I think I must have believed it was sleep, and expected her to awake; for, when they took her from me, I was half out of my senses, and screamed for them to leave me my mother.
A kind old lady, a friend to my mother, took me in her lap and put her arms round me, and tried to soothe and comfort me. She told me my mother had gone to heaven; that it was only her body that was dead; but that her soul was living, and was gone to heaven. "She will never be sick or unhappy any more; she is gone to God, and she will live forever with Jesus Christ and all good beings."
"But I want to see her," said I.
"You will see her again, I doubt not, my child, if you are good," the old lady said. Perhaps I should not have remembered so exactly what she said, if she had not frequently repeated the same thing to me, and if I had not loved my mother so much.