“There are, there must be, other senses finer and more acute than our five physical ones,” she thought, as she crept from her bed, refreshed and wide awake. The stars had paled, and the clear gray of the early dawn lit up the crests of the abounding hills. * * * * * The simple preparations for the funeral rites were made in silence. Men and women moved mechanically about the camp. The very cattle seemed to understand. No casket was procurable, but every man in camp was ready to do all in his power to supply the need. Junipers of goodly size abounded in the neighboring woods. From two of these, felled for the purpose, thick puncheons were hewn to form a crude but stanch enclosure for the good woman’s final home. A grave was made, with hard labor, in the abounding sandstone, and the women lined its vault and edges with flattened boughs of evergreen, thus making an ideal resting-place for the still, white form, as beautiful in death as it had been in youth. There was no prayer or sermon. The simple rites were about to close when Mary whispered to her father: “I have heard mother say she wanted us all to sing when they should be laying her away.” And the three eldest daughters of the peaceful dead and the storm-rent living sang with tremulous but not unmusical tones:— “Oh, heaven is nearer than mortals think, When they look with trembling dread At the misty future that stretches on From the silent home of the dead. “’Tis no lone isle in a boundless main; No brilliant but distant shore, Where the loving ones who are called away Must go to return no more. “No, heaven is near us; the mighty veil Of mortality blinds the eye, That we see not the glorious angel bands, On the shores of eternity. “I know, when the silver cord is loosed, When the veil is rent away, Not long and dark shall the passage be To the realms of endless day.” John Ranger looked upward with bared brow and streaming eyes, and in his heart a flickering hope was born. The Reverend Thomas Rogers, with all his fervent eloquence and well grounded belief in the very orthodox scheme of salvation which he had so constantly preached, had never shaken his doubts as did the plaintive promises of that simple, impressive hymn. His devoted wife, strong in her faith in the efficacy of prayer, had long ceased to speak to him of her religious convictions, for which his ready logic and quaint ridicule suggested no answer. At such times, consoling herself with the command of her Master, she would enter into her closet, shut the door, and pray for him and their children in secret, with never a doubt that sometime, someway, her prayers would be answered openly. And who shall say that her faith was not at last rewarded, in a way she least expected, through that plaintive song, through which, being dead, she had yet spoken?