"Night after night I lay down on the board so as to sleep by her, for it seemed to please the poor darling. `Let me hold your hand,' she'd say; and when I gave it to her, she'd hold it tightly, and lay it on her pillow, and put her little hot cheek upon it till I took it away to get her cough medicine, and then held her up in my arms to take it. I don't make a fuss, ma'am, about what I did--it only came natural; and I couldn't have slept and known that her little lips were hot and dry for want of drink; while when I held her up like that, she'd nestle close to me, and creep her little thin arms under my weskit, and ask, in her pretty gentle way, whether she might stay so, because she could sleep there. "And there she would sleep, only starting up now and then to look in my face, as if to see whether she was safe. Then she'd lay her head down again, and whisper to me that something kept pulling her away, and try to tell me about what she had been dreaming. But her poor little feverish head was all wrong, and her words broken and muddled like. "`Somebody's calling--somebody's calling,' she kept on whispering to me the last day. `There!' she'd say, with a start, `didn't you hear somebody call "Pine, Pine!"' and then she would call eagerly, `Yes, yes!' and turn to me and whisper, `Was that my mamma?' "What could I do, ma'am?--what could I do but bend my head down over the poor darling, and not let her see the hot tears come rolling down my cheeks. It was then that I felt most how I had been cheating myself and holding myself up with false hopes, and all the time that what she said was true; for though I was holding her tightly to me--tightly as she clung, it was all of no use, for something was drawing her slowly and surely away. "I tried more than once to smile and say something cheery to her, but she only looked strange at me, and said, `Don't, please;' and then, soon after, she said, in a sort of dreamy way, `Tell me what it's like, and whether I shall see my mamma there!' "`What what's like, my pet?' I says, shivering the while to hear her talk so. "`What heaven's like, and all about going there!' "What could I tell her?--what could I say, a poor ignorant man like me? I felt frightened-like, ma'am, to hear her so regularly talking about something drawing her away. I know now that it was from the dreamy troubled state of her head; while she always talked so about her mamma, and never said a word about him. I taught her to say that, you know, ma'am, for I hoped some day she would have been fetched into her proper speer, to be well off; and that's why I did my best to improve her mind, and taught her catechism, and so on. And so she is well off, and better than she could ever have been here, and fetched into her proper speer, she is; for if ever there was a little angel here, it was my poor darling. But I couldn't, bear to part with her, and it was not in that way I meant."