It was the compassion of folks that first led me to such thoughts, and as
I grew older I began to deem that their pity had done little good to my
young soul. Friends are ever at hand to comfort every job; but few are
they who come to share his heaviness, all the more so because all men
take pleasure in comparing their own fair lot with the evil lot of
others. Compassion--and I am the last to deny it--is a noble and right
healing grace; but those who are so ready to extend it should be cautious
how they do so, especially in the case of a child, for a child is like a
sapling which needs light, and those who darken the sun that shines on it
sin against it, and hinder its growth. Instead of bewailing it, make it
glad; that is the comfort that befits it.

I felt I had discovered a great and important secret and I was eager to
make our sainted mother known to my brothers; but they had found her
already without any aid from their little sister. I told first one and
then the other all that stirred within me, and when I spoke to Herdegen,
the elder, I saw at once that it was nothing new to him. Kunz, the
younger, I found in the swing; he flew so high that I thought he would
fling himself out, and I cried to him to stop a minute; but, as he
clutched the rope tighter and pulled himself together to stand firm on
the board, he cried: "Leave me now, Margery; I want to go up, up; up to
Heaven--up to where mother is!"

That was enough for me; and from that hour we often spoke together of our
sainted mother, and Cousin Maud took care that we should likewise keep
our father in mind. She had his portrait--as she had had my mother's--
brought from the great dining-room, where it had hung, into the large
children's room where she slept with me. And this picture, too, left
its mark on my after-life; for when I had the measles, and Master Paul