There is something peculiarly solemn in standing on an island of graves. The very dust that the summer breeze wafts over us, may indeed remind us of our mortality,—suggest a thought that it, perhaps, was once animated: but the complete isolation of such a spot as this, fixes the mind to the contemplation, as though thought for once were fettered, and the subject of her meditations were bound upon her, like the wave upon that sepulchral shore,—and so it was felt by all now, and not a word was spoken as they laid M’Kenzie in his long home. But we must return to the cabin where the roof-tree had thus fallen in its prime, and where yet, through faith and hope that is in Christ Jesus, the widow was enabled, amid the desolation of all things earthly, still to bear up, and amid her first tears, to thank God that her husband had departed in peace. The delirium had ceased about an hour before his death, and he had bade his Margaret remember that, though while spared to his family they had a right to look to him for support, yet he had been but the instrument, in God’s hands, for providing it; and that now he was taken from them, God would be sure to supply their necessities through some other channel, rather than be wanting to his promise of being a “husband to the widow, and a father to the fatherless.” He bade her read him the eighth chapter of Romans, “that blessed chapter,” he said, “which begins with no condemnation and ends with no separation.” When she came to the words “killed all the day long—accounted as sheep for the slaughter,” he fixed his eyes upon her; and as she read on, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us,” he repeated after her “more than conquerors through Him,” “_more_ than conquerors.” And as she read further, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus,” he bowed his head as if in experimental assent, and his spirit departed to God who gave it. Such had been M’Kenzie’s end; and his widow as she thought of his freed spirit rejoicing before the Throne and with the Lamb, was comforted, and found peace in the expectation of the time when she and his little ones should also be summoned to that land where “they neither hunger nor thirst any more.” That night she read the latter part of the seventh chapter of the Revelation with her children; and as she told how their father was now among this “great multitude,” little Moggie cried, and asked as she shivered with the cold, why they might not go to him; for “O mither, though ye hae read that there’s nae heat there, onie mair than here, yet gin there’s nae hunger, it wadna be sae sair to bear.”