, "She will not die; God will raise her
up." In our weakness and blindness, we could see no mercy nor wisdom
in this terrible bereavement, this scorching desolation of the
already heavily-stricken servant of the Most High. He was naturally
of a most hopeful disposition, and this, notwithstanding the
discouraging words of the physician, buoyed up his soul, and he with
us hoped against hope. They could not persuade him to leave her for
a moment. Whole nights he watched by the side of her he loved best
on earth, anticipating every word and look, and administering to her
comfort.

How you would have felt for us, dear Anna, had you been here! We
would walk by the house, and look up at the windows or door, not
daring to knock for fear of disturbing her, but hoping to see one of
the physicians or some one of the family, of whom to make inquiries.
Oh, the nervousness of those days! the restless, weary nights we
passed, till our fears and apprehensions became a racking torment,
and we felt almost that we must die (sic) ourselves ourselves or be
out of suspense; but when, on the evening of the tenth day after her
illness, a messenger came with pallid face and almost wild look to
say that she was _dead_, we were stunned. I really think we were
almost as much shocked as though we had not heard of her illness;
for we felt that, at the eleventh hour, some favourable turn _must_
take place. I think we expected a miracle to be performed, so
certain were we, or wished and tried to be, that she would recover.

But God's ways are not as our ways; truly, they are past finding
out. We felt like putting our hands on our mouths, for fear of
rebelling against _His_ most righteous decrees. "Be still, and know
that I am God," was all that we could say. It was hard to realize
that the sun was still shining behind the cloud, for this was a
darkness that might be felt. There seemed a pall over the earth and
sky. Oh, how unsatisfactory seemed all on earth! how dark and
strange! how mysterious and unreal! We could not weep, we were
stunned, and it seemed at the time that we could never come back to
earth without her. But when the touching relation of her last hours
was made to us, the fountains of grief were unsealed, and we wept,
as it were, rivers of tears.

I can give you no idea on paper of the beauty and sublimity of that
death-scene as it was painted to me. We imagined that the heart must
shrink, or at least draw back before the entrance in