While so waiting Russie was taken with the first convulsion peculiar to his malady, and then I realized that Death had come, and, unwilling to face him in the semi-publicity of an inn, I took the boy in my arms to the railway, and from the station nearest to the cottage bore him thither.
I tried to prepare him for the impending death, by showing him that it was the end of pain, but his horror of it was inextinguishable, and he cried in agony, "Oh, no, no! Papa, I wish to live as long as you do;" and, though his faculties were fortunately failing, he beckoned me to lay my head by his on the pallet I had prepared for him on the floor, and offered me a last feeble caress and showed his pleasure in having me by him.

He had loved me above all things on earth, even more than his loving mother, and to be with me had always been his dearest delight, and now we met Death alone, he and I, and I could only remember David's cry, "Absalom, my son!" I watched the fading life, the diminishing breath in the midnight silence of the solitary house, and almost desired Death to hasten, for the final struggle had begun, and the suspense was torture to me.

And when the last long breath was drawn, and the limp, deserted body was all that was left to me of my thirteen years of passionate devotion, my pride and hope, and the nursing care of so many years, I walked out into the midnight and left my boy to Death.

The long tension was over, and I could give way to tears.
It was only a child's death, a common thing, almost as common as family existence, but it gave a new color to my life, establishing forever a sympathy with the common grief, and a community of sorrow with all bereft fathers and mothers, in the premature dissipation of the hopes of their future, and the lapse of a dear companionship into the eternal void.

This is the human brotherhood of sorrow, sacred, ennobling, sanctifying where it abides, the deepest lesson of the school of life.