Thus the grave yawns for another victim, and having swallowed him, and a million more that same day, returns to its former state of insatiable famished greed. It is a law--natural, wise, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding--that all created beings, in which there is progressive life, must come forth, ripen, decay, and fall. But why, oh! why, in too many cases does the decay and fall forerun the ripening? Why is so many a worm permitted to gnaw out so many a closed bud's green heart? Why is the canker death allowed to pasture on so many an unblown life? Why are so many little toddling children, not yet come into the heritage of reason to which we are all by our human birth entitled, borne from their mother's emptied arms to their small short graves? Is it, as Hartley Coleridge very nobly, whether truly or untruly, said-- "God only made them for his Christ to save?" Very wasteful is the mighty mother, knowing that her materials are inexhaustible. And so they lay Jack down in the wormy grave. "Bear, bear him along, With his few faults shut up like dead flow'rets." No one will ever abuse him or say anything ill-natured of him again; for to speak evil of the helpless, speechless, answerless dead, requires a heart as bad, a nature as cowardly vile, as his must be that foully murders a young child. And the mourners go home, and take off their hatbands and scarves, and give them to their wives to make aprons of. And old Luath lies in the hall, watching still, with ears attentively pricked at any incoming footstep, and hope drooping, as day droops too, begins to howl dismally towards sun-down.