Even then, it was evident she
knew her friends, and many were the tokens of affection bestowed
upon them as they watched beside her couch, and ministered to her
necessities.
Often would she reach up her little emaciated hands, and placing them
upon her mother's cheeks, press them tenderly. It seemed to soothe
her, when her mother would lay her head upon her pillow beside her,
and take her little wasted hand in hers. And when she sang to her, in
a low, trembling voice, her little favorite hymn,
"There is a happy land, far; far away,"
she lay quiet, and seemed listening with much attention, raising one
little hand three times, then laying it fondly round her mother's
neck. Long, during that day, did the grief-stricken mother breathe
sad, melancholy music into the ears of her dying child.
Towards evening that restless state, so common in cholera infantum,
came on, accompanied at every breath by a groan, which the doctor said
must soon wear her out.
He gave her an opiate, hoping to relieve the distress.
Towards midnight she dropped into a little slumber, and the mother,
weary with watching, retired, leaving the father and a sister, to take
care of her.
It was Sabbath morning; the gray dawn was just streaking the east with
the earliest beams of day, when the father, who sat a little distance
from his child, thought he saw her gasp for breath. He sprang to her
side, and saw too truly, that that pale visitant from the spirit land,
that comes to us but once, was dealing with his child.
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