I look back now into my little heart as it was then, and remember the paroxysms of silent pain I used to have at times, deep within, while yet I seemed to be like any other boy. I heard my sisters one day discussing whether I cared much for Daisy's death. "He don't seem to, much," said one. "Oh, children are little animals, they forget what's out of sight," said another. But I did not forget,--I could not bear to go to the meadow where we gathered strawberries,--to the chestnut trees where we had gathered nuts,--and oftentimes, suddenly, in work or play, that smothering sense of a past, forever gone, came over me like a physical sickness. When children grow up among older people and are pushed and jostled, and set aside in the more engrossing interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the expression of inward feeling,--and yet, often at this time the instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute. But the child has imperfectly learned language. His stock of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology with which to embody a mere emotional experience. What I felt when I thought of my little playfellow, was a dizzying, choking rush of bitter pain and anguish. Children can feel this acutely as men and women,--but even in mature life this experience has no gift of expression. My mother alone, with the divining power of mothers, kept an eye on me. "Who knows," she said to my father, "but this death may be a heavenly call to him." She sat down gently by my bed one night and talked with me of heaven, and the brightness and beauty there, and told me that little Susie was now a fair white angel. I remember shaking with a tempest of sobs. "But I want her _here_," I said. "I want to see her." My mother went over all the explanations in the premises,--all that can ever be said in such cases, but I only sobbed the more. "_I can't see her!_ Oh mother, mother!" That night I sobbed myself to sleep and dreamed a blessed dream. It seemed to me that I was again in our meadow, and that it was fairer than ever before; the sun shone gaily, the sky was blue, and our great, golden lily stocks seemed mysteriously bright and fair, but I was wandering lonesome and solitary. Then suddenly my little Daisy came running to meet me in her pink dress and white apron, with her golden curls hanging down her neck. "Oh Daisy, Daisy!" said I running up to her. "Are you alive?--they told me that you were dead." "No, Hazzy, dear, I am not dead,--never you believe that," she said, and I felt the clasp of her soft little arms round my neck. "Didn't I tell you we'd see each other again?" "But they told me you were dead," I said in wonder--and I thought I held her off and looked at her,--she laughed gently at me as she often used to, but her lovely eyes had a mysterious power that seemed to thrill all through me.