And one morning (I remember that it was a gloomy winter morning),—losing patience at last during one of these tiresome admonitions, I boldly asked Cousin Jane to tell me why I should try to please God more than to please anybody else. I was then sitting on a little stool at her feet. Never can I forget the look that darkened her features as I put the question. At once she caught me up, placed me upon her lap, and fixed her black eyes upon my face with a piercing earnestness that terrified me, as she exclaimed:—
“My child!—is it possible that you do not know who God is?”
“No,” I answered in a choking whisper.
“God!—God who made you!—God who made the sun and the moon and the sky,—and the trees and the beautiful flowers,—everything!... You do not know?”
I was too much alarmed by her manner to reply.
“You do not know,” she went on, “that God made you and me?—that God made your father and your mother and everybody?... You do not know about Heaven and Hell?”
I do not remember all the rest of her words; I can recall with distinctness only the following:—“and send you down to Hell to burn alive in fire for ever and ever!... Think of it!—always burning, burning, burning!—screaming and burning! screaming and burning!—never to be saved from that pain of fire!... You remember when you burned your finger at the lamp?—Think of your whole body burning,—always, always, always burning!—for ever and ever!”
I can still see her face as in the instant of that utterance,—the horror upon it, and the pain.... Then she suddenly burst into tears, and kissed me, and left the room.
From that time I detested Cousin Jane,—because she had made me unhappy in a new and irreparable way. I did not doubt what she had said; but I hated her for having said it,—perhaps especially for the hideous way in which she had said it. Even now her memory revives the dull pain of the childish hypocrisy with which I endeavoured to conceal my resentment. When she left us in the spring, I hoped that she would soon die,—so that I might never see her face again.