Everything around us is quiet. The inmates of the cottage are mostly out sailing. The gentle provider for the household comforts, “on hospitable thoughts intent,” is preparing for their return from this “toil of pleasure,” tired and ravenously hungry. We are entirely alone; and as we sit in this wonderful quiet, the little poem quoted above, “If We Knew,” stirs our heart with strange and solemn power. Lives there one who does not, in moments of retirement or solitude, look back to the earliest hours of childhood, and recall times when, if he could have known the results, his actions would have been far different? If all could in youth look along the map of life clear to the end, seeing all the breakers and quicksands, which by patience and self-control could have been avoided, how much more comforting would be the view they might take, in after years, of the “backward track”! No doubt it is well, for many reasons, that we cannot read the future. Trials and sorrows, which no skill or forethought could have turned aside, would have been doubled by anticipation and foreknowledge. And yet we doubt if there are many who, looking back from the “half-way house,” would not willingly endure all the additional pain if they might have possessed the power to foresee the inevitable results of certain courses, and, profiting by this foreknowledge, have avoided the danger or the sin. Brother, sister, “if you knew” that soon “those little baby fingers” would “never trouble you again,” would you be impatient or cross to your little playmates for their childish, willful ways? Two little boys were playing together. Both wanted the rocking-chair for a horse. Full of health and animal spirits, their dispute ran high, and ended in a blow. Only a few days passed, and the baby hands of the younger were folded in “snowy grace” upon the cold and quiet heart, and laid in the grave. A short time after, hearing bitter sobs in the garden, the mother found the lonely brother--himself but just past babyhood--lying under the peach-trees, watching with eager eyes some birds flying over his head, and calling, between his sobs: “O birdies! little birdies! Fly up! fly higher! and tell Jesus if he will only let little brother come down to me, he shall have the rocking-chair all the time, and I never, never will strike him again! O, _never, never_!” Ah! how many brothers and sisters look back upon little disputes and sharp, childish quarrels, that would hardly have been remembered had both been spared to grow up together; but one having been taken away, that dispute, or the wrong done, remains through life a sore spot in the heart of the survivor.