Death seemed to have no terrors for the little ones. I talked to them of Jesus, and told them he was our Elder Brother and God was our Father. The little boy listened as I talked of heaven, and seemed very thoughtful. In another week, to a day, I was there again. The little fellow was going too; and now he said,—
"I want you to buy me a pretty coffin, won't you? and put nice leaves and flowers in it. I am going to heaven, you know, and I shall see my brother. Jesus is my brother, you know."
And so he passed away like one falling to sleep. I could not but think of the glorious change for these little ones, now "safe in the arms of Jesus." From a hut to a mansion, from hearing the hoarse, gruff breathing of the mill to the chanting of the heavenly choirs, from the dark squalor and rags to see the King in his beauty, to hunger no more, to thirst no more, neither to have the sun light on them nor any heat, to be led to living fountains of waters, to have all tears wiped from their eyes—who would wish them back?
I remember in one case a man whose wife had run off with another man, and had left him with two boys, one an idiot. The poor little child was found dead under the feet of the oxen, and when the funeral took place the man with his remaining son came through the woods and across lots to the cemetery, while a man with the coffin in a cart came by the road. The only ones at the funeral were these two and the carter, with myself.
I visited one home where nine out of eleven were down with diphtheria. Two young girls in a fearful condition were in the upper rooms; nothing but horse-blankets were hung up in the unplastered rooms, but they did not keep out the snow. The father and the man who drove were the only ones beside myself at this funeral. In one family four died before the first was buried.
It made me think of the plague in London, and the man tolling the bell and crying, "Bring out your dead." Scarlet fever, small-pox, and typhoid were epidemic for some time, and it was then the people began to appreciate the services of the minute-man.
Some cases were rather odd, to say the least. One night a boy was lost. I suggested to his mother that he might be drowned, and that the pond ought to be searched. Her reply was amazing: "Well, if he's drownded, he's drownded, and what's the use till morning." Here was philosophy. Yet at the funeral this woman was so punctilious about the ceremonies that, seeing a horse which broke into a trot for a few steps, she said "it didn't look very well at a funeral to be a-trottin' hosses."