ays fully appreciated, rose before his
remembrance, like the angels in Jacob's dream, climbing up to Heaven.
Louis stood behind him, his head bowed upon his shoulder, sobbing as if
his heart would break. Helen was nestled in her father's arms, with the
most profound and unutterable expression of grief and awe and dread, on
her young face. She was told that her mother was dying, going away from
her, never to return, and the anguish this conviction imparted would
have found vent in shrieks, had not the awe with which she beheld the
cold, gray shadows of death, slowly, solemnly rolling over the face she
loved best on earth, the face which had always seemed to her the
perfection of mortal beauty, paralyzed her tongue, and frozen the
fountain of her tears. Mittie stood at the foot of the bed, looking at
her mother through the opening of the curtain, partly veiled by the
long, white fringe that hung heavily from the folds, and which the wind
blew to and fro, with something like the sweep of the willow. The
windows were all open to admit the air to the faintly heaving lungs of
the sufferer, and gradually one curtain after another was lifted, as the
struggle for breath and air increased, and the light of departing day
streamed in on the sunken and altered features it was never more to
illuminate. Mittie was awe struck, but she manifested no tenderness or
sensibility. It was astonishing how so young a child could see _anyone_
die, and above all a _mother_--a mother, so kind and affectionate, with
so little emotion. She was far more oppressed by the realization of her
own mortality, for the first time pressed home upon her, than by her
impending bereavement. What were the feelings of that speechless,
expiring, but fully conscious mother, as she gazed earnestly, wistfully,
thrillingly on the group that surrounded her? There was the husband,
whom she had so much loved, he, who often, when weary with business, and
perplexed with anxiety, had seemed careless and indifferent, but who, as
life waned away, had shown the tenderness of love's early day, and who
she knew would mourn her deeply and _long_. There was her noble,
handsome, warm-hearted, high-souled boy--the object of her pride, as
well as her affection--he, who had never willfully given her a moment's
pain--and though his irrepressive sighs and suffocating sobs she would
have hushed, at the expense of all that remained of life to her--there
was still a music in them to her dying