XXVI.
AT WHITNEY HALL.
It has often been in my mind to tell of John Whitney’s death. You will say it is too sad and serious for a paper. But it is well to have serious thoughts brought before us at certain seasons. This is one of them: seeing that it’s the beginning of a new year, and that every year takes us nearer to another life whether we are old or whether we are young.[3]
Some of them thought his illness might never have come on but for an accident that happened. It is quite a mistake. The accident had nothing to do with the later illness. Sir John and Lady Whitney could tell you so as well as I. John was always one of those sensitive, thoughtful, religious boys that somehow don’t seem so fit for earth as heaven.
“Now mind, you boys,” cried Sir John to us at breakfast. “There’s just a thin coating of ice on the lake and ponds, but it won’t bear. Don’t any of you venture on it.”
“We will not, sir,” replied John, who was the most obedient son living.
There’s not much to be done in the way of out-door sports when snow lies on the ground. Crowding round the children’s play-room window later, all the lot of us, we looked out on a white landscape. Snow lodged on the trees, hid the grass in the fields, covered the hills in the distance.
“It’s an awful sell,” cried Bill Whitney and Tod nearly in a breath. “No hunting, no shooting, and no nothing. The ponds won’t bear; snowballing’s common. One might as well lie in bed.”
“And what sort of a ‘sell’ do you suppose it is for the poor men who are thrown out of work?” asked Sir John, who had come in, reading a newspaper, and was airing his back at the fire. “Their work and wages are stopped, and they can’t earn bread for their children. You boys are dreadfully to be pitied, you are!”
He tilted his steel spectacles up on his good old red nose, and nodded to us. Harry, the pert one of the family, answered.