It is not that the child is to be blamed for not knowing enough to stay away; but her coming here has made me wonder whether I am different from other women; why Roy was so much more to me than many brothers are to many sisters. I think it must be that there never _was_ another like Roy. Then we have lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he had grown to me, heart of my heart, and life of my life. It did not seem as if he _could_ be taken, and I be left. Besides, I suppose most young women of my age have their dreams, and a future probable or possible, which makes the very incompleteness of life sweet, because of the symmetry which is waiting somewhere. But that was settled so long ago for me that it makes it very different. Roy was all there was. February 26th. Death and Heaven could not seem very different to a Pagan from what they seem to me. I say this deliberately. It has been deliberately forced upon me. That of which I had a faint consciousness in the first shock takes shape now. I do not see how one with such thoughts in her heart as I have had can possibly be “regenerate,” or stand any chance of ever becoming “one of the redeemed.” And here I am, what I have been for six years, a member of an Evangelical church, in good and regular standing! The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion from death, which was all the idea I had of anything when they first brought him home, has not gone yet. It is horrible. It was cruel. Roy, all I had in the wide world,--Roy, with the flash in his eyes, with his smile that lighted the house all up; with his pretty, soft hair that I used to curl and kiss about my finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that folded me in and cared for me,--Roy snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow,--in the hideous wet and snow,--never to kiss him, never to see him any more! * * * * He was a good boy. Roy was a good boy. He must have gone to Heaven. But I know nothing about Heaven. It is very far off. In my best and happiest days, I never liked to think of it. If I were to go there, it could do me no good, for I should not see Roy. Or if by chance I should see him standing up among the grand, white angels, he would not be the old dear Roy. I should grow so tired of singing! Should long and fret for one little talk,--for I never said good by, and-- I will stop this. * * * * * A scrap from the German of Bürger, which I came across to-day, shall be copied here. “Be calm, my child, forget thy woe, And think of God and Heaven; Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee Himself for comfort given. “O mother, mother, what is Heaven? O mother, what is Hell? To be with Wilhelm,--that’s my Heaven; Without him,--that’s my Hell.” February 27th. Miss Meta Tripp, in the ignorance of her little silly heart, has done me a great mischief.