The last week has been a reign of terror. It is stated that the birds have never died so fast, especially the singing birds. The flowers, too, have died. And with the flowers and the birds, their companions, the little children have passed away, until it makes one sad to think into how many homes a shadow has come within the past short week. Death, like another Herod, has knocked at every door, save where some protecting angel guards the threshold. We fain would have kept him out, but our hands were powerless, and in almost every household where he entered, he smote the youngest and the fairest--little eyes, in which the light of Heaven had never faded--little hands, untaxed by any of life's burdens--little feet, unstained by any of the dust of life's highway, in which we elder ones are so sadly begrimed that we have lost much of the semblance of our former selves. And I think this morning that, if earth is sadder for the loss of the children, Heaven must be brighter and more beautiful for the troops of little ones that have passed through the Gate Beautiful, and now walk in Paradise, among the birds and flowers which died when they died. And I think that, along the invisible strings which stretch from our hearts to the little green waves of turf in the Acres of God, and thence reach heavenward, will come songs in the night-watches, and pulses of music we shall recognize, and, recognizing, become better men and better women. I am sure that some loving angel will tenderly watch each of these new mounds of earth, and that, on each recurring spring, we shall see the blue of their eyes in the blue of the violet, and the gold of their hair in the gold of the daisies; that we shall hear their voices in the songs of the robin, and that they will live for us evermore, in all things beautiful. And may the Great Father stretch His hands in infinite tenderness and blessing over all bowed heads and darkened homes, and in benison over all beds of suffering. July 25, 1868. * * * * *