pain me to see them in other hands, much as I love to see children happy with their toys.

Its clothes you may lay aside; I shall often look them over, and each of the colors that he wore will remind me of him as he looked when he was here. I shall weep often when I think of him; but there is a luxury in thinking of the one that is gone, which I would not part with for the world. I think of my child now, a child always, though an angel among angels.

The eye has lost its

The child is dead. lustre. The hand is still and cold. Its little heart is not beating now. How pale it looks! Yet the very form is dear to me. Every lock of its hair, every feature of the face, is a treasure that I shall prize the more, as the months of my sorrow come and go.

He was

Lay the little one in his coffin. never in so cold and hard a bed, but he will feel it not. He would not know it, if he had been laid in his cradle, or in his mother's arms. Throw a flower or two by his side: like them he withered.

Carry him out to the grave. is a hard road this to the grave.

seems to disturb the infant sleeper. are, at the brink of the sepulchre.

Gently. It

Every jar

Here we Oh, how

damp, and dark, and cold! But the dead do There is no pain, no fear, no

not feel it.

weeping there.

rest!

Sleep on now, and take your

Fill it up! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Every clod seems to fall on my heart. Every smothered sound from the grave is saying, Gone, gone, gone! It is full now.

turf gently over the dear child.

Lay the

Plant a

myrtle among the sods, and let the little one sleep among the trees and flowers.

Our

child is not there. His dust, precious dust, indeed, is there, but our child is in heaven. He is not here; he is risen.

I shall think of the form that is mouldering here among the dead; and it will be a mournful comfort to come at times, and think of the child that was once the light of our house, and the idol—ah! that I must own the secret of this sorrow-the idol of my heart.

And it is beyond all language to express the joy, in the midst of tears, I feel, that my sin, in making an idol of the child, has not made that infant less dear to Jesus. Nay, there is even something that tells me the Saviour called the darling from me, that I might love the Saviour more when I had one child less to love. He knoweth our frame;

he knows the way to win and bind us. Dear Saviour, as thou hast my lamb, give me too a place in thy bosom. Set me as a seal on thy heart.

It

And now let us go back to the house. is strangely changed. It is silent and cheerless, gloomy even.

When did I enter this

door without the greeting of those lips and eyes, that I shall greet no more? Can the absence of but one produce so great a change so soon? When one of the children was away on a visit, we did not feel the absence as we do now. That was for a time; this is for He will not return. Hark! I thought for a moment it was the child, but it was only my own heart's yearning for the lost. He will not come again.

ever.

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*

*

*

Such thoughts as these have been the thoughts of many in the season of their first grief.

As heart answereth to the heart, there is a wondrous likeness in the sorrow of parents over the death of their little ones. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant are alike, when they sit by the side of their babes in the struggles of death; and when they follow them to the grave, their hearts are

true to nature, and nature mourns when the loved are torn away.

One of the iron sort of men, a man of war, sent for me to come and see him in his affliction. His child, a sweet girl of three or four years only, had been taken with the croup, and died before medical relief could be obtained. He met me in his hall, and fell on my neck, and wept like a child. I had never seen him weep before. I had never thought that such a man as he had tears to shed. And I do not know that he would have wept, had the pestilence or the sword. swept off all the rest of those whom he loved, and spared the infant that nestled in his bosom.

If this is a weakness to those who have never tasted the cup, I am sure that none of them will be offended with these words, for they will not read them till they are weeping. too. To be a brother in sorrow, you must have suffered. Even the Lord of heaven had to become a man, that he might, by his experience, learn to bear our sorrows. And then he wept with those who wept.

Some time ago I was at the funeral of the child of a pastor; and when the neighboring minister, who had been called upon to bury

The

his brother's child, had closed his words of sympathy and comfort, the stricken father rose and said: "When I have sought to minister to your consolation in the times of your affliction, weeping with you over your dying children, you have often said to me that I knew nothing of the anguish, and could not sympathize with you in your loss. loss. I feel it now. I never did before." And then he pointed them to the sources of comfort that God was opening to his soul, and asked them to come to the fountain and drink. house in which we were then assembled stood on a hill-side, overlooking a beautiful river, and, on the other side of it, "sweet fields. stood drest in living green." The pastor went on to say-and there was a strange power and beauty, too, in the words as they fell from his lips in the midst of tears-"Often, as I have stood on the borders of this stream, and looked over to the fair fields on the other shore, I have felt but little interest in the people or the place in full view before me. The river separates me from them, and my thoughts and affections were here. But a few months ago, one of my children moved across to the other side, and took up his residence there. Since that time, my heart has been