a hour or two; and she come out a cryin', and says she,--

"Mother, I don't see how you can stand it. It would break my heart to see
Cicely's broken-hearted look, and hear her talk for half a day; and you
have to hear her all the time." And she wiped her eyes.

And I says, "Tongue can't tell, Tirzah Ann, how your ma's heart does ache
for her. And," says I, "if I knew myself, I had got to die and leave a boy
in the world with such temptations round him, and such a chin on him, why,
I don't know what I should do, and what I shouldn't do."

And says Tirzah Ann, "That is jest the way I feel, mother;" and we both of
us wiped our eyes.

But I held firm before her, and reminded her every time, of what she knew
already,--"that there was One who was strong, who comforted her in her
hour of need, and He would watch over the boy."

And sometimes she would be soothed for a little while, and sometimes she
wouldn't.

Wall, this day, as I said, she had worried and worried and worried. And at
last I had soothed her down, real soothed. And she asked me before I went
down-stairs, for a poem, a favorite one of hers,--"The Celestial Country."
And I gin it to her. And she said I might shet the door, and she would
read a spell, and she guessed she should drop to sleep.

And as I was goin' out of the room, she called me back to hear a verse or
two she particularly liked, about the "endless, ageless peace of Syon:"--