“Let me see our good clergyman, now that I am well enough to see him,” said he. He then took a hand of each of his brothers and sisters, joined them together, and pressed them to his lips, looking from them to his father, whose back was now turned. “You understand me,” whispered George: “he can never come to want, while you are left to work and comfort him. If I should not see you again in this world, farewell! Ask my father to give me his blessing!”
“God bless you, my son! God bless you, my dear good son! God will surely bless so good a son!” said the agonized father, laying his hand upon his son’s forehead, which even now was cold with the damp of death.
“What a comfort it is to have a father’s blessing!” said George. “May you all have it when you are as I am now!”
“I shall be out of this world long, long before that time, I hope,” said the poor old man, as he left the room. “But God’s will be done! Send the clergyman to my boy!”
The clergyman remained in the room but a short time: when he returned to the family, they saw by his looks that all was over!
There was a solemn silence.
“Be comforted,” said the good clergyman. “Never man left this world with a clearer conscience, or had happier hope of a life to come. Be comforted. Alas! at such a time as this you cannot be comforted by any thing that the tongue of man can say.”
All the family attended the funeral. It was on a Sunday, just before morning prayers; and as soon as George was interred, his father, brothers, and sisters, left the churchyard, to avoid being seen by the gay people who were coming to their devotion. As they went home, they passed through the field in which George used to work: there they saw his heap of docks, and his spade upright in the ground beside it, just as he had left it, the last time that he had ever worked.
The whole family stayed for a few days with their poor father. Late one evening, as they were all walking out together in the fields, a heavy dew began to fall; and James urged his father to make haste home, lest he should catch cold, and should have another fit of the rheumatism. They were then at some distance from their cottage; and Frank, who thought he knew a short way home, took them by a new road, which unluckily led them far out of their way; it brought them unexpectedly within sight of their old farm, and of the new house which Mr. Bettesworth had built upon it.
“Oh! my dear father, I am sorry I brought you this way,” cried Frank. “Let us turn back.”