My feet have wandered far, and my thoughts still further from the places and beliefs of my childhood; but whatever and wherever I may be, this grief at times catches me and holds me in a pause of dumb tears, and every similar bereavement I witness renews the sympathetic grief.

I have never been able to find a consolation for that loss, for it carried with it the future and its best dreams.
When his mother died, I thought that any death were easier to bear than the sudden and terrible tragedy of that; but in the devastated youth and the lingering pain of Russie's leaving, I found that "not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death." We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized.

In these things we follow prejudices.

Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to encumber the boy's mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of God until he was old enough to understand what "God" meant; but one day during his illness I found him, when he should have been sleeping, weeping bitterly, and to my inquiry as to the cause of his trouble, he replied, "Do you think, Papa, that, if I went to sleep saying my prayers, God would be satisfied if I finished them after I woke ?" That terrible hereditary conscience could not be laid, and perhaps the boy was fortunate in his early death..