The blue trumpeter suffered the fate of all reformers. He came before his time. He was heralding the truth before the world was ready for it, and he died unheard and neglected. And hundreds of other heralds are lying dead to-day in the fields, victims to the merciless rigor of the rain and the snow and the cold.
And I therefore plead for all the birds who have come to us from the South. Shelter them whenever you can. Feed them and care for them. Summer, without its choir of birds, will be as blank as heaven without stars, a house without a child, a garden without flowers. The clearest indications of Paradise we get on earth, are the birds, the flowers, and the little children, and the man or woman who doesn't love them will have a trying time in Paradise, if he or she ever gets there.
I have never seen it recorded that they have any of these things in the other place.
Therefore, again I say, deal gently with the birds and the flowers, for not a sparrow falls to the ground without His notice, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like the lilies of the fields.
April 17, 1868.
