"Speak of our Redeemer!" said the father. "Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour,--remember Him who also passed through life,--remember that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to enlighten the night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and death also, for he shared both of them with thee. May his calm and lofty form look down on thee in the last darkness, and show thee his Father!" A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the dun clouds which the tempest had left, and the setting sun filled the entire vault of heaven with the magnificence of his fire. "Remember, in the last hour, how the heart of man can love. Canst thou forget the love wherewith one heart repays a thousand hearts, and the soul during life is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the oak of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its roots, and derives new strength, and sends forth new buds during its hundred springs?" "Dost thou mean me?" said the father. "I mean my mother also," replied the son. Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would console himself in his last hours with the reminiscence of the days of her love; and the father said, but very gently, thinking on his wife, "To meet again, to meet again!" "Remember then, in the last hour," continued Gottreich, "that pure being with whom thy life was beautiful and great,--with whom thou hast wept tears of joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom God appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the first and last heart of love,--and then close thine eyes in peace!" On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, black mountains, and the deep sun looked forth from between them, as it were out of a valley between buttresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its joy-glistening eye. "See!" said the dying man, "what a glare!" "It is the evening sun, father." "Ay, this day shall we see one another again!" continued the old man; but he spoke of his wife, who was long since dead. The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his father the blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, which he had that very day enjoyed by anticipation and described upon his journey; or to say to him how it comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better state; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow into the future, reminiscence binds the flowers of the present and the fruits of the past upon one stem. Who could have courage to speak of the joys of earthly meeting to one who seemed to be already in the contemplation of a meeting in heaven? Startled, he asked, "Father, what ails thee?"