"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond--the bond of fear and sympathy and sorrow--than any other item has done for a long time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fe, and the mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night, when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined--either dead or living--and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and child-death is the saddest thing in all the world. "A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for a child's soul to wander in, that, sane as we may be, stolid as we may try to be, we think in imagery, and the figure of little feet setting off on the far track to the end of things, hunting God, wrings our heart-strings and makes our throats grip and our eyelids quiver. "And then a child dying, leaving this good world of ours, seems to have had so small a chance for itself. There is something in all of us struggling against oblivion, striving vainly to make some real impress on the current of time, and a child, dying, can only clutch the hands about it and go down--forever. It seems so merciless, so unfair. Perhaps that is why, all over the world, the little graves are cared for best. It is to the little graves that we turn in our keenest anguish and not to the larger mounds; to the little graves that our hearts are drawn in our hours of triumph. And so the child, though dead, lives its appointed time and dies only in the fullness of its years. The little shoes, the little dresses, the 'little tin soldiers covered with rust,' and the memories sweeter than dreams of a honeymoon, these are life's immortelles that never fade. And though men and women come and go upon the earth, though civilisations may wither and pass, these little images remain; and the sun and the stars, which see men come and go, may see these little idols before which every creature bows, and the sun and stars, knowing no time, may think these children's relics are also eternal.