around you? But
hush, these are the foot-prints of Death; he has indeed been with you
in his uncertain rounds. The deep, reposing influences indicate his
path. I will not dare to question a mother's love, so strange and
inexplicable in power, and so mysterious in operation, gentle as the
breathing of the memory, ungovernable as the whirlwind in its frenzy,
tender as the angel of sympathy, yet stronger than the bands of Death,
it is painful to witness such a cloud of sorrow resting on one so
young as you, without an atheistic questioning, the all-wise purposes
of our Father in heaven.

Your own lovely babe you so fondly adored,
Death's torn from the heart of her mother,
So full was your soul of a mother's deep love,
You would gladly have died to restore her.
Poor fragile, fading, short-lived flow'r,
She was bright and lovely for an hour.

To The Reader.

And now, courteous reader, perchance thou art weary with thy
wanderings, and the flowers we have gathered may appear withered to
thee, and devoid of beauty or fragrance, and the peep into memory's
inner chambers may not have afforded thee the pleasure that I have
derived from the survey. If so, farewell, I will intrude no more upon
thy time or patience. The curtain has fallen, the dim, misty curtain,
and memory has turned her golden key, closed her portfolio, and sat
down with folded hands, to brood over her hoarded treasures, placing
each in its proper place, to be brought forward again at her mandate,
to beguile, perchance, other weary midnight hours with their magic
spell. The past cannot be redeemed, and the future is hid in
uncertainty; but the present, the golden present is ours, and while
our little bark is floating upon the stream of time, let us improve
the precious moments as they fly, and spend them in a cultivation of
the best affections of the human mind. The mind, that boundless ocean
of human thought that is placed within each individual, stretching
on throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity. But there must come a
solemn time to all who live. Death is upon our track, and will surely
soon overtake us, and our decaying bodies must be hid forever from
sight beneath the clods of the valley: but these minds shall then
live, and happy they who, by a cultivation of the best principles of
our nature, have an antepast of heaven while upon earth.

May this be our happy case, gentle reader, if we meet not again on
earth, we shall