“I mean to say that if there is such a thing as common sense, you will talk with Roy as you talked with him here,—only not as you talked with him here, because there will be no troubles nor sins, no anxieties nor cares, to talk about; no ugly shades of cross words or little quarrels to be made up; no fearful looking-for of separation.”
I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort that she gave me.
“Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and joke and play—”
“Laugh and joke in heaven?”
“Why not?”
“But it seems so—so—why, so wicked and irreverent and all that, you know.”
Just then Faith, who, mounted out on the kitchen table, was preaching at Phœbe in comical mimicry of Dr. Bland’s choicest intonations, laughed out like the splash of a little wave.
The sound came in at the open door, and we stopped to listen till it had rippled away.
“There!” said her mother, “put that child, this very minute, with all her little sins forgiven, into one of our dear Lord’s many mansions, and do you suppose that she would be any the less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that? Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom of life when he takes us to himself? I don’t believe any such thing. There were both sense and Christianity in what somebody wrote on the death of a humorous poet:—
‘Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone,—
This man of the smile and the jest?’