What a sad bereavement is the death of the husband and father! Children! there is the grave of your father! You have recently heard the clods of the valley groan upon his coffin. The parent stem from which, you grew and to which, you fondly clung, has been shattered by the lightning-stroke of death, and its terrible shock is now felt in every fiber of the wrenched and torn branches. Yours is now a widowed and an orphaned home. The disconsolate members are left helpless and hopeless in the world; the widowed mother sits by the dying embers of her lonely cottage, overwhelmed with grief, and poor in everything but her children and her God. These orphans are turned out upon the cold charities of an unfriendly world, neglected and forlorn, having no one to care for them but a poor, broken-hearted mother, whose deathless faith points them to the bright spirit-world to which their sainted father has gone, where parting grief shall weep no more. But a greater bereavement even than this, is, the death of a wife and mother. Ah! here is a bereavement which the child alone can fully feel. When the mother is laid upon the cold bier, and sleeps among the dead, the center of home-love and attraction is gone. What children are more desolate and more to be pitied than the motherless ones? She, who fed them from her gentle breast and sung sweet lullaby to soothe them into sleep,--she, who taught them to kneel in prayer at her side, and ministered to all their little wants, and sympathized with them in all their little troubles,--she has now been torn from them, leaving them a smitten flock indeed, and the light of her smile will never again be round their beds and paths. As the shades of night close in upon that smitten home, and the chime of the bell tells the hour in which the mother used to gather them around her for prayer, and sing them to their rosy rest, with what a stricken heart does the bereaved husband seek to perform this office of love in her stead; and as he gathers them for the first time around him, how fully does he feel that none can take a mother's place! "My sheltering arms can clasp you all, My poor deserted throng; Cling as you used to cling to her Who sings the angel's song. Begin, sweet ones, the accustomed strain, Come, warble loud and clear; Alas, alas! you're weeping all, You're sobbing in my ear; Good night; go, say the prayer she taught, Beside your little bed. The lips that used to bless you there, Are silent with the dead. A father's hand your course may guide Amid the storms of life, His care protect those shrinking plants That dread the storm of strife; But who, upon your infant hearts, Shall like that mother write? Who touch the strings that rule the soul? Dear smitten flock, good night!"