Yesterday evening he was still talking with us; embracing and kissing us; he had promised to take us to the country, and to-day he was not: he was dead. Quite incomprehensible! In my childhood I had often racked my brains with the question, "What is there beyond the world?" Void. Well, and what surrounds that void? Many times this distracting thought drove me almost to madness. Now this same maddening dilemma seized upon me. How could it be that my father was dead?
"Let us go to mother!" was my next thought.
"We shall go soon after her. She has already departed."
"Whither?"
"To the country."
"But, why?"
"Because she is ill."
"Then why did she laugh so in the night?"
"Because she is ill."
This was still more incomprehensible to my poor intellect.