“We are prone to forget, as one and another fall, and the chasm is closed up and Life seems the same—except within the bleeding hearts of mourners—that our day is coming as surely as those others have gone. In effect, we arrogate immortality for ourselves.
“The longer I live, and the more I see of the things that perish with the using, the more firmly persuaded am I that there is but one reality in life, and that is Religion. Why not make it an every-day business? Since the loving care of the Father is the only thing that may not be taken from us, why do we not look to it for every joy, and cling to it for every comfort?...
“Write soon. Will you not come to me? I am very lonely at times. One sister gone! Another absent!
“I am wondering if you have changed as much as I feel that I have? It is not natural to suppose that you have. You have not the same impression of added responsibility, the emulation to throw yourself into the breach made by the removal of one so beloved, and, in her quiet way, exercising so much influence. If I could but hope that patience and prayerful watchfulness would ever make me ‘altogether such an one’ as she was!
“How many and how happy have been the meetings in heaven since I last saw you! Dear little Sallie B.! How often in fancy do I see her walk away in the moonlight night of our parting! I never look from the front window in the evening without recalling that hour.”
XX
OUR TRUE FAMILY GHOST-STORY
One evening of the winter following the events recorded in the last chapter, “Ned” Rhodes and I had spent a cosey two hours together. My parents never did chaperon duty, in the modern acceptation of the word. They made a habit, without hinting at it as a duty, of knowing personally every man who called upon us. When, as in the present case, and it was a common one, the visitor was well known to them, and they liked him, both of them came into the drawing-room, sat for a half-hour or longer, as the spirit moved them, then slipped out, separately, to their own sitting-room and books.
I have drawn Ned Rhodes’s picture at length as “Charley” in Alone. I will only say here that he was my firm and leal friend from the time I was twelve years old to the time of his death, in the early eighties.