“Dear Madam, he will never waken in this world.”
There is no cry—only a bowing down of your mother’s head upon the body of poor, dead Charlie!—and only when you see her form shake and quiver with the deep, smothered sobs, your crying bursts forth loud and strong.
“LISTENING ATTENTIVELY TO SOME GRIEVOUS COMPLAINT”
The Doctor lifts you in his arms, that you may see—that pale head,—those blue eyes all sunken,—that flaxen hair gone,—those white lips pinched and hard!—Never, never, will the boy forget his first terrible sight of Death!
“SOME OF BIDLOW’S BOYS”
Frank has a grandfather living in the country, a good specimen of the old-fashioned New England farmer. He is a Justice of the Peace, and many are the country courts that you peep upon, with Frank, from the door of the great dining-room. You watch curiously the old gentleman, sitting in his big arm-chair, with his spectacles in their silver case at his elbow, and his snuff-box in hand, listening attentively to some grievous complaint; you see him ponder deeply—with a pinch of snuff to aid his judgment,—and you listen with intense admiration, as he gives a loud, preparatory “Ahem,” and clears away the intricacies of the case with a sweep of that strong practical sense which distinguishes the New England farmer,—getting at the very hinge of the matter, without any consciousness of his own precision, and satisfying the defendant by the clearness of his talk, as much as by the leniency of his judgment. He farms some fifteen hundred acres,—“suitably divided,” as the old-school agriculturists say, into “woodland, pasture, and tillage.” The farm-house, a large irregularly built mansion of wood, stands upon a shelf of the hills looking southward, and is shaded by century-old oaks. The barns and outbuildings are grouped in a brown phalanx a little to the northward of the dwelling. Between them a high timber gate opens upon the scattered pasture-lands of the hills. Opposite to this, and across the farmyard, which is the lounging-place of scores of red-necked turkeys, and of matronly hens, clucking to their callow brood, another gate of similar pretensions opens upon the wide meadow-land.
