University of Virginia Library

59. CHAPTER LIX.

Scarcely had the gloom from the late melancholy occurrence
been dispelled before our settlements were trembling
at reports of a coming, resistless, unpitying, destructive
foe—the Asiatic Cholera!

Innumerable were our schemes to turn aside, evade, or
counteract, this fell disease; and all fear of other sickness
and death was absorbed in fear of this! As if God had
only one minister of vengeance, or of chastisement! As if
He was to be dreaded in the thunder and tempest, and forgotten
in the calmness and sunshine! Indeed, that only
dreaded death then came not;—God sent another messenger
of terror and of mercy—The Scarlet Fever!

This disease appeared first and without apparent cause
in the family of Dr. Sylvan. Thence, in a few weeks, it
spread carrying death and mourning into most of our habitations.
It followed no known law, sometimes yielding and
then refusing to yield to the same treatment and in the

same as well as different families: and often in other
places resisting the established, or different, or even opposite
treatment, and sweeping all into the grave! The
cholera then had no alarms! The King of Terrors was
among us in forms as frightful and destructive!

Then was it, dear one! after days and nights of ceaseless
and anxious watchings, and after fitful alternations of
hope and fear, we saw those eyes, so soft and yet so brilliant,
suddenly and strangely quenched—as though life had
retreated thither to a last refuge and death, having long
before triumphed o'er thy dear, dear form, did there, as a
last act, put out that most precious light!

What didst thou mean by those mysterious words in the
dying strife?—“Father! father! how tired I am!” Was
it so hard to die?— * * Didst thou hear, in answer,
the wailings of bitterest anguish?—or feel on thy cold
cheek the last kisses—while tears wet that face, changing
and passing for ever? * * * Sleep, dear babe! in thy
bed under the forest leaves, amid those lone graves—we
shall meet, and, never to part—no! never!

Clarence had buried two children in the far East: he
was now called to lay another in the far West. That Sabbath
morning can never be forgot! Among others, who
suffered most, was our fellow-citizen Mr. Harlen. His
four chidren were all deaf-mutes. Two of these had died
in succession, at an interval of eight days: and, when the
second lay in its little coffin, in front of the pulpit in the
Methodist Chapel, the third, a fine boy, nine years old,
distressed at some supposed error, stole from his weeping
parents in the church, and, advancing to the coffin of his
dead brother, placed the bier as to him seemed suitable
and decorous! Poor darling one! on the next Sabbath,
he lay in his own coffin on that same bier, and before that

same pulpit! And another coffin, and another bier, were
there—and the chief mourner was Clarence! The heart-broken
parents of the mutes—(ay! mute, indeed, now!)
—had entreated him to pray for themselves, if possible,
that day in public! He did so. And over the coffins of
their dead children, he spoke to others and himself too,
words of consolation; and offered prayer to Him that can
and did bind up the broken in heart, and raise up them that
were bowed down!

Mournful train! The vision is before me ever—as it
emerges from the house of God! It slowly ascends the
hill!—the two coffins!—the two stricken households!—
the False One between friends at that double burial!
The train is entering the Forest Sanctuary! They are
separating, some to lay the deaf one with his kin—some
to see the stranger lay his babe near my buried one! —

— Reader! I now write many things in playfulness
—none in malice—yet, years of my life passed, when sadness
only was in my heart; and words and thoughts of
pleasantness were impossible! Ay! the gloom of hell, if
not its despair, possessed my soul! But, I have found
religion not inconsistent with great and habitual cheerfulness.
Nay, thoughts of death, judgment, and eternity, may
be ever present and ever dominant in a mind taught by
many sorrows to make light of the things of time and
sense!

How do these solemn words and things sort with thy
cheerfulness? For, remember, by the agreement or disagreement,
your character is: and that thine most certainly,
as mine, are—Death—Judgment—Eternity!