Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

At last I took down from the book-closet Mrs. Trimmer's story of the robins and read it to him, and he became very much interested in the little nest and its inhabitants. After a while, the children in the story had birds of their own in a cage, which they took care of assiduously, but at length on one occasion went away and left them for many days uncared for, so that they died; I read right on through the page on which it was told that on going to the cage when they came home, they found the birds lying on their backs with their beaks wide open, stark dead! I paused in my reading, and he repeated, "stark dead! what do those words mean? What was the matter with the birds?" I laid the book down, and said, "You know that some things live, and some things only keep." "Yes," said he. I continued, "You know that living beings feel pain or pleasure, one or the other, all the time, and that things that only keep do not feel at all."

"Yes," said he.

"Well, things that live and feel—living beings—always eat and drink; they continue to live by eating and drinking, and God tells them to eat by making it pleasant for them to taste things. Now these little birds lived by eating and drinking, and if they had been free, they would have found food and drink somewhere in the world; but those children had shut them up in a cage; and when they were so thoughtless as to go away and forget the birds that they had undertaken to take care of, the little birds grew hungry, and you know it is not pleasant to feel even a little hungry, but they grew hungrier and hungrier till their poor little bodies were as full of pain as they could be. Now our Heavenly Father could not possibly have them suffer so much pain, and so He told them to come to Him, and their life went right out of their bodies, and then their bodies were just like everything else that only keeps; they could feel no more pain."

"What a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father it is!" said the child; "what nice ways He has about everything!"

"Yes," said I, "He has the ways of love."

He asked no questions at this time, nor made any generalization. I took up the book, and read on about the children's burying the bodies of the birds, etc.

Thus the death of the body was first presented to his imagination as only a relief from pain of the life that inhabited it. He was immensely interested, and the subject became the most common topic of conversation.

There were some books in the house which had pictures of hunts, and one was of a stag-hunt, the stag at bay, the dogs seizing him, the huntsmen firing. These books had been carefully kept from him. I now took them down, and showed them to him, interested him in the timid stag running for its life, and its ingenious devices to elude the dogs by swimming across streams, and at last when the dogs had seized it, or the huntsman fired the cruel shot which tore the breast or side of the poor beast, the final release, God's call of the life to Himself! At which the child would utter exclamations of delight: that final escape was the best of all.

This story was so interesting, it absorbed his attention, and he did not generalize. But it took its place among the good deeds of God's love, that when life became too painful in the body it was taken away to enjoy itself with God.

His mother, in whose presence were all the conversations, was intensely interested; but still as he did not think of human death, she hardly felt that he had conceived the idea.