No, the family history doesn’t enlighten us as to whether the old squire went back to camp meeting to resume his prayers for salvation, or not. Quite likely the saving of his cattle and hog money satisfied him for that particular season. Men weren’t as greedy in those days as they are now, and he may have left the great supply of saving grace for others to enjoy.
YOUR BABY STILL
A short time ago an old schoolmate friend wrote me that they had lost their darling—a baby boy of ten months, and the mother was grieving herself sick over her great loss. “Couldn’t you write something to console her—something to make a bright spot out in the future to look ahead to with hope?” he wrote. How easy to ask this, but how hard to comply. How impossible to wipe away the sorrow from a bleeding heart and persuade the heart to cease bleeding and the bereaved soul to cease its grieving.
After a little thought it struck me forcibly that the memories and recollections of a dead child must always picture the child as it was when death took it away. And I sat down and put myself in that mother’s place and wrote as though I were writing the words of hope that sometime would surely fill her loving soul. I print them now for the hundreds of other sorrowing mothers who see before them, day and night, the dear face of their darling who sleeps out in the church yard, the land where babies never grow old.
I could write out of that mother’s heart, because I, too, have a baby sleeping in the land of perpetual youth. Had she lived she would now be a grown woman—perhaps today weeping over a little grave where her own darling lay sleeping.
Weeping over his little bier,
Kissing the lips of her baby dear,
Touching the eyes in their endless sleep—