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Why, you are only buying one little wagon this year; I thought I saw
you buying two last Christmas; one of the little ones has outgrown it,
I reckon? What, dead! I beg your pardon. It was thoughtless of me.
Dead! Then he has outgrown it. Outgrown it all--sickness, pain,
disappointments, a long, weary life--all at a single leap. But this
does not comfort you. Ah, no; nothing comforts us for those we have
seen slip into the dark. It will be but human in you to miss him this
Christmas, and to think of the hundred ways in which he would have had
pleasure if he had only lived. I think that in the death of children
there is an added grief to that we feel when men and women die. They
are so little, so helpless, one cannot help feeling anxious about how
they will get along in the new world they have gone to; who will take
care of them, and whether they will be neglected. When the time comes
for putting the children to bed in the evening, we cannot help thinking
about the little one who has gone from life, and wondering as we sit
by the firelight whether there is any one taking care of it. We can't
help feeling sure that it wants to be with its mother; it always used
to when night came on. It always climbed into her lap when dark came
and it surely wants to be back to-night. It cannot be happy, for it
is among strangers, and if it is unhappy, there is but one place for
it, its home, and but one bosom on which to lay its head, its mother's.
And so our human heart talks on in its hot grief. It is a great comfort
to remember, after awhile, that there is a Father who watches over it
as tenderly as he has watched over all his children, and who will guide
the little one into a new and higher life, as He will us older children
who come to Him later in life, like tired and weary children seeking
a mother's breast.