messenger from the "Kingdom of Ponemah" had already started after her; and the car of death was moving toward earth, to bear her to the "Islands of the Blessed; " but she knew it not; for still the earthly form swayed to the will obedient, still “the magic car moved on." Avon's bard has truly said, "Misfortunes never come single;" and the Song of Hiawatha truly sings, in lines of Longfellow measure, "So disasters come not singly; But, as if they watched and waited, Till the air is dark with anguish." But there is no hardest fate, no deepest woe in the trial-lives of wandering souls. Superlatives are meaningless. Comparatives alone are appropriate. Every hard trial has a harder, every sad time a sadder, and every dark day a darker; so of the bright, the beautiful, the good, and the happy, with a superlative only in the Perfect, the Infinite, the Omniscient. The child, or boy (for at this age he was both or either), was deposited with a Quaker family on the mountain, while the mother went to watch by the bedside of a relative, where the camp-fires of life were slowly expiring, little suspecting the angel of death was reaching for her to go first to the "Land of the Hereafter," and welcome there the dying one, and leave here her lonely babe to buffet the storms alone. She retired from the sick bed late one night, and lay her wearied body on its couch for repose, and quietly arose into the regions of eternal dream; for, ere she awoke she died, died without a struggle, apparently without the motion of a muscle, for the quiet face wore still its genial smile. In the morning they found the pale, cold form at rest; but the spirit had been called, and obeyed the summons, taken passage with the messenger to the sphere where the angels bid her welcome to their home. But she could not stay quietly there, for her boy was lingering and struggling in the wrangling world below; and she asked and obtained permission to return, and guard him for a few years, to aid his feeble soul in its trial-hours and combats with a world of scorn and contempt. The Infidel laughed at the idea of her being a spirit, and the Christian ridiculed the idea of a spirit coming to earthly friends; but both were ignorant and in error; for she was a spirit, and did come back from her happy home, to fill a mission to earth and to the lonely child. The physician said she died by a nightmare. She says she died by a disease of the heart. No matter; she was dead to the world of touch and sight, to the outer sense and earthly form, and only alive to herself and the spiritual senses of others; and the Lone One now inherited his name and organization, and nothing more. No wonder the neighbors said they sometimes saw her form, pale and shadowy, sitting on the bier which stood long over her grave, in the orchard where they laid her body to rest near its kindred! No wonder the timid and superstitious said they heard her voice moaning in the breeze, as it whistled through the orchard, answering to the wind, which "sat in the pines, and gave groan for groan!" No wonder the whip-poor-will flew directly from the house to the grave, and from the grave to the house, and sang mournfully his sad song at each end of his short journey! No wonder all who knew her asked each of each, "What will become of her boy?" Few, very few, in that day, knew that our parents dead were living still, our spirit-guides. Her blessing came in the lines of the angel, F. S. Osgood: LABOR. Pause not to dream of the future before us; Pause not to weep the wild cares that come o'er us; Unintermitting, goes up into heaven! Never the ocean-wave falters in flowing; More and more richly the rose-heart keeps glowing, 'Till from its nourishing stem it is riven. "Labor is worship!" the robin is singing; Speaks to thy soul from out Nature's great heart! Only man, in the plan, shrinks from his part. Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth ; Idle hearts only the dark future frightens ; Play the sweet keys, wouldst thou keep them in tune! Labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us, Droop not, though shame, sin, and anguish, are round thee; Look to yon pure heaven smiling beyond thee ! Rest not content in thy darkness, a clod ! Labor! All labor is noble and holy! Let thy great deeds be thy prayer to thy God! SECTION III. The first half of the first SUFFERING. decade in earth-life was now by the Lone One counted in years. Both parents (if he had two) were gone up out of their bodies, and he was left alone in his, fatherless, motherless, penniless, friendless, worthless, useless, and deathless. The last, and indeed, only, warm heart that beat for him was cold and still. The last and only face that smiled for him could smile no more. No hand to sustain, no arm to support, no voice in kindness to direct, could he expect more, for now he was the world's child. Its cold selfish heart beat only for gold and glory, of which the child had none. The tears often stole down the cheek as the heart uttered its grief, while in childlike innocence he wildly asked, "Where is my mother?". mother is dead,” came, coldly, stupidly, back the answer. have they done with her?""Put her in the ground."—"Cruel, wicked men!" exclaimed the boy. "O, no; God took her away." ---“Did God kill my mother?" wildly asked the child. "Your "What Only took her away." O, cruel, cruel God! bring me back my mother; for the world has no friend for me when she is gone!" But they laughed at the child, whose innocent and ignorant heart condemned God for taking away his mother, whom he needed so much and God so little; for now he felt himself fully to be the poor outcast of creation," no more to hear a kindly word, or grasp a kindly hand." In obedience to the statute of New Hampshire, each town at its annual meeting selects three men who are overseers of the poor, and whose duty it is to provide homes for those who have none, and no means of support. Of course the world's child became their ward at the death of his mother. In the town was a citizen farmer, whose name we will call David, not because he slew Goliah, or Uriah, but because he was known by that name at the time. He was a trader in cattle, and sheep, and swine; not well organized for a happy life, and badly educated in social and spiritual affairs. This citizen applied to the authorities for the boy, whom he had attempted in vain to obtain from the mother, for he saw in him a machine capable of doing much hard work, and releasing his own children from many tasks. He readily obtained the boy, and the bond was signed which sold the world's child into bondage for sixteen long years to one of the most cruel and cold-hearted masters. The bond required schooling each winter; and at the expiration of the time, when twenty-one years of life should render the boy a man capable of selling himself, two suits of clothes, and a hundred dollars in money, were to be his compensation for services. He was transferred from the mountain to the home of David, but never to the affections. Even the children were taught to manifest superiority over him, he was with, but not of them. Not one spark of sympathy or love could be afforded him, for he was the child of nobody in this world. Many a time a sore back, or a bruised body, evinced the physical superiority and heartless cruelty of David; often for trifling offences unavoidable to the boy; the marks of frost and exposure on the extremities of his body remained for years, and the effects of hard labor, sadly unproportioned to his strength, remained still at the end of the fourth decade. True, the old jockey would sometimes come to visit his son David, and pat the boy on the head, and say “my son," words which he never heard from other lips addressed to him, and at which his heart would leap with joy; and he thought, if David would only say those words, how he would try to be good. The effects of this severe treatment can only be entirely removed when he changes his home for that of his mother, or other spirit-friends. The summers came, and the winters came, and toil, toil, toil, was his portion. Not school, nor play. True, an old spelling-book said, "All work and no play makes boy." If so, he must have been a "dull boy." A poet says "work is worship." If so, the Lone One was indeed a "devout child ;" and yet the Christian creeds would have consigned him to hell, as the fashionable circles of society already had done for this life. Heavily, and slowly, the years rolled away, bringing to his childhood only misery and grief. There was no "under-ground railroad" to take him to freedom; and no freedom for him to be taken into, except in the far-distant, and to him mystic, number, twenty-one. Why that should be the age for freedom, he knew not; but so it was written, and he was the victim. Why that threeseven number should be a key to unlock manhood in a boy was, and still is, a mystery to the Lone One. Gladly would he have Jack a dull |