The Home at Greylock. E. Prentiss

Mrs. Grey had been the happy mother of seven children; they all lived to grow up and marry, and to rise up and call her blessed, with the exception of her youngest daughter, Maud. People said it was a wise and kind thing on the part of Providence, that Maud was not one of the marrying sort. Her mother needed one child to help her down the declivity of life, and it was delightful to see them together. Some who were not acquainted with them, and who only knew them by sight, at church, contrived to see, out of the backs of their heads, that these twain could not live without each other. Maud shared in this opinion to the extent of firmly believing that she could not survive her mother. She was a good, dutiful, devoted child, whose sunny temper made her life like a song in the maternal ear.

"How good God is to me," was Mrs. Grey's frequent thought, "in giving and in sparing to me this darling child! How strange and how sad it would be to live alone in this large house! And Maud fits in to every crack and crevice there is in me as very few girls could. And she is so thoroughly and genially happy that it is not selfish in me to rejoice that she does not care to fly out of the nest!"

They were always together; and in their walks, and talks, and readings, in their visits to the sick and the poor, in their good-fellowship and innocent sallies of humor, they were more like two sisters than mother and daughter. So they went on their way, rejoicing, till Maud had reached her nineteenth year, and then a stealthy step crossed the threshold, and an inexorable hand seized upon this young life and crushed it out.

But is this the way to put it? Is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, uttered in the fear of God and the love of Christ? No! a thousand times, no! The event had its sad, its tearful, its sorrowful side; every stricken mother-heart knows that to its core; but it had another side. The life of a young, blooming, mortal frame was brought, humanly speaking, to an untimely end; but the life of an immortal soul went to expand in a congenial atmosphere, where it was far more at home than it had ever been on earth, where all the problems that had ever baffled it, and all the trials that had ever wearied it, had their full explanation; with none to molest, to misunderstand, or to grieve it; beyond temptation, suffering, and sin; in a word, to be "forever with the Lord."

Is it, then, a lot to be desired to die young? Certainly not. We are to desire to die young, or live to a useless old age that cumbers the ground on which it totters, according to the Divine will, not according to our own short-sightedness; and this is what Mrs. Grey thought and felt when the strong, bright light of Maud's presence faded away from her vision, and she could see her no longer, save by the eye of faith. Perhaps some few misunderstood the patient, unselfish way in which this bereavement was met, and thought the brave heart that endured such a sorrow with no clamor, was made of steel. But those who really knew this bereaved mother, knew the whole story. The life-long habit of Gospel love to the neighbor, and of faith in God as One who could not by any possibility make a mistake, came to her rescue. It was right because He did it. And what if she was sorely wounded, was she the only one lying mangled on the battle-field? With characteristic energy she summoned her absent children home; with her own hands she threw open the rooms they were to occupy; and when, during the next days, they came from all directions, in twos, and threes, and fours, to

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