“Naturally. Why should you? You have not felt it, you cannot feel it, it does not belong in your world. With a hundred thousand words I should not be able to make you understand what fear is. How then am I to explain death to you? You have never seen it, it is foreign to your world, it is impossible to make the word mean anything to you, so far as I can see. In a way, it is a sleep----” “Oh, I know what that is!” “But it is a sleep only in a way, as I said. It is more than a sleep.” “Sleep is pleasant, sleep is lovely!” “But death is a long sleep--very long.” “Oh, all the lovelier! Therefore I think nothing could be better than death.” I said to myself, “Poor child, some day you may know what a pathetic truth you have spoken; some day you may say, out of a broken heart, ‘Come to me, O Death the compassionate! steep me in the merciful oblivion, O refuge of the sorrowful, friend of the forsaken and the desolate!’” Then I said aloud, “But this sleep is eternal.” The word went over her head. Necessarily it would. “Eternal. What is eternal?” “Ah, that also is outside of your world, as yet. There is no way to make you understand it.” It was a hopeless case. Words referring to things outside of her experience were a foreign language to her, and meaningless. She was like a little baby whose mother says to it, “Don’t put your finger in the candle flame; it will burn you.” Burn--it is a foreign word to the baby, and will have no terrors for it until experience shall have revealed its meaning. It is not worth while for mamma to make the remark, the baby will goo-goo cheerfully, and put its finger in the pretty flame--once. After these private reflections I said again that I did not think there was any way to make her understand the meaning of the word eternal. She was silent awhile, turning these deep matters over in the unworn machinery of her mind; then she gave up the puzzle and shifted her ground, saying: “Well, there are those other words. What is good, and what is evil?” “It is another difficulty. They, again, are outside of your world; they have place in the moral kingdom only. You have no morals.” “What are morals?” “A system of law which distinguishes between right and wrong, good morals and bad. These things do not exist for you. I cannot make it clear; you would not understand.” “But try.” “Well, obedience to constituted authority is a moral law. Suppose Adam should forbid you to put your child in the river and leave it there overnight--would you put the child there?” She answered with a darling simplicity and guilelessness: “Why, yes, if I wanted to.”