"Wal, I reckon it's because the Cape has such warm, comfortable sand to
lie down in."

My friend Mrs. Addy lay in the Crowell family lot, and during my
pastorate at East Dennis I preached the funeral sermon of her father,
and later of her mother. Long after I had left Cape Cod I was frequently
called back to say the last words over the coffins of my old friends,
and the saddest of those journeys was the one I made in response to
a telegram from the mother of Relief Paine. When I had arrived and we
stood together beside the exquisite figure that seemed hardly more quiet
in death than in life, Mrs. Paine voiced in her few words the feeling
of the whole community--"Where shall we get our comfort and our
inspiration, now that Relief is gone?"

The funeral which took all my courage from me, however, was that of
my sister Mary. In its suddenness, Mary's death, in 1883, was as a
thunderbolt from the blue; for she had been in perfect health three days
before she passed away. I was still in charge of my two parishes in
Cape Cod, but, as it mercifully happened, before she was stricken I had
started West to visit Mary in her home at Big Rapids. When I arrived
on the second day of her illness, knowing nothing of it until I reached
her, I found her already past hope. Her disease was pneumonia, but she
was conscious to the end, and her greatest desire seemed to be to see me
christen her little daughter and her husband before she left them. This
could not be realized, for my brotherin-law was absent on business,
and with all his haste in returning did not reach his wife's side until
after her death. As his one thought then was to carry out her last
wishes, I christened him and his little girl just before the funeral;
and during the ceremony we all experienced a deep conviction that Mary
knew and was content.

She had become a power in her community, and was so dearly loved that
on the day her body was borne to its last resting-place all the business
houses in Big Rapids were closed, and the streets were filled with men
who stood with bent, uncovered heads as the funeral procession went by.
My father and mother, also, to whom she had given a home after they left
the log-cabin where they had lived so long, had made many friends in
their new environment and were affectionately known throughout the whole
region as "Grandma and Grandpa Shaw."

When I returned to East Dennis I brought my mother and Mary's three
children with me, and