a fall."

Then we went on in silence. The sailors were carrying father in as we
reached the house. They laid him on the sofa, we saw his poor head...

Nov. 23.-I will try to write the rest now. Father was alive but
insensible. He had fallen down into the hold of the ship, and the
sailors heard him groaning there. He lived three hours after they
brought him home. Mr. Freeman and all our friends were very kind. But
we like best to be alone, we three, mother and James and I. Poor
mother looks twenty years older, but she is so patient, and so
concerned for us, and has such a smile of welcome for every one that
comes in, that it breaks my heart to see her.

Nov. 25.-Mother spoke to me very seriously to-day, about controlling
myself more. She said she knew this was my first real sorrow, and how
hard it was to bear it. But that she was afraid I should become
insane some time, if I indulged myself in such passions of grief. And
she said, too, that when friends came to see us, full of sympathy and
eager to say or do something for our comfort, it was our duty to
receive them with as much cheerfulness as possible.

I said they, none of them, had anything to say that did not provoke
me.

"It is always a trying task to visit the afflicted," mother said,
"and you make it doubly hard to your friends by putting on a gloomy,
forbidding air, and by refusing to talk of your dear father, as if
you were resolved to keep your sorrow all to yourself."