Sir Everard did not answer: he stooped over the little sleeper, and kissed him again tenderly. "Whatever you do, don't wake him," he whispered; "let him sleep as long as ever he can."
He left the room; and as he went down-stairs the children's conversation in the cornfield that Sunday afternoon recurred to him, and he could not help making a mental comparison between the young corn and the young life, both so suddenly uprooted from the earth.
Meeting the doctor in the hall, he briefly communicated the physicians' opinion, and begged him to make it known to the household. To announce it himself, he felt to be impossible.
He found the worn-out child in a heavy sleep when he reached the drawing-room; there was nothing to draw his thoughts from the subject upon which they had been dwelling, and he found himself going over and over the scene in the corn-field. He seemed to see and hear it all with startling distinctness. Wherever he looked, he saw Humphrey sitting on the top of the gate with the ears of corn in his destroying hand and Miles looking sorrowfully up at him.
He could not bear it at last, and walked up and down the room, to get it out of his head. But even then their voices rang in his ears, and filled him with pain.
"Never mind, Miles," sounded in clear bell-like tones the voice which would never rise above a whisper again. "I will plant them in the sunny bit of our own garden, where the soil is much better than here, and where they will grow much finer than if they had been left to ripen with the rest. Perhaps they will thank me some day for having pulled them out of the rough field, and planted them in such a much more beautiful place."
But he might have found comfort instead of pain in the words, had he followed out the metaphor which had been floating in his head. For would not the child one day thank Death, the destroyer; who in uprooting him fresh and green from the earth, would transplant him to the rich soil of God's own garden; where, in the sunshine of His Maker's presence, he should ripen into that perfection, which is unknown among the children of men?
For natures like Humphrey's are not fit for this rough world. Such a capacity for sorrow has no rest here, and such a capability for enjoyment is fittest to find its happiness in those all-perfect pleasures which are at God's right hand for evermore.
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