"_I DO_ not know how that may be," said the mother, lifting her
head, and looking through almost blinding tears, into the face of
her friend. "The poet may be right, and, "Not as a child shall I
again behold him, but the thought brings no comfort. I have lost my
child, and my heart looks eagerly forward to a reunion with him in
heaven; to the blessed hour when I shall again hold him in my arms."

"As a babe?"

"Oh, yes. As a darling babe, pure, and beautiful as a cherub."

"But would you have him linger in babyhood forever?" asked the
friend.

The mother did not reply.

"Did you expect him always to remain a child here? Would perpetual
infancy have satisfied your maternal heart? Had you not already
begun to look forward to the period when intellectual manhood would
come with its crowning honors?"

"It is true," sighed the mother.

"As it would have been here, so will it be there. Here, the growth
of his body would have been parallel, if I may so speak, with the
growth of his mind. The natural and the visible would have developed
in harmony with the spiritual and the invisible. Your child would
have grown to manhood intellectually, as well as bodily. And you
would not have had it otherwise. Growth--development--the going on
to perfection, are the laws of life; and more emphatically so as