About eight o'clock on Thursday evening, a heavy stupor came over him,
and the fearful death-rattle warned us of the approach of the grim
messenger. We watched his failing breath with agonizing emotions. But
we turned from him one little moment, and when we turned again, the
lamp of life was extinguished. O, the fearful agonizing cry that arose
by that death bed, when we realized that the husband and father had
passed away, forever away. But while we wept and mourned, he slept on
unheeding. Death made little change in his countenance, and when he
was dressed in his accustomed clothing, and laid in his coffin, he
looked like a weary man taking rest in sleep.
It was a pleasant day in mid April that we bore him to his grave, and
laid him down beneath the green branches of the arbor vitae tree. How
many mournful thoughts pressed upon the heart, almost crushing out the
very life, as the mournful train followed him to that sacred spot. Who
that has looked into an open grave, and seen the coffin of the dearly
loved lowered into it, but has felt an indiscribable agony filling the
heart, and blotting out all the prospect of future earthly happiness?
And who that listens to the sound of the heavy, damp earth as it falls
upon the coffin, but will say, "oh, has earth another sound like
this?" And there we left the husband and the father reposing beneath
the tree his own hand had trained, and in the yard where he had spent
so many hours laboring to beautify the spot where he was so soon to
lie down in his last long sleep.
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