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SAD are the associations as we stand within a dwelling where lie the dead! The once unbroken circle has now a vacant chair and an awful void. The tomb-like silence that reigns through cach apartment tells that a solemn crisis is reached in the household history. Earthly tics are severed, and "love lies bleeding." The room in which the sacred relics repose, awaiting the hour of burial, is a kind of "Holy of Holics." Though the spirit is not there, yet the human form in which it tabernacled is dear even when dissolving back to dust. Softly we tread, as if our step would disturb the peaceful sleeper. And long after the remains have been laid in the "narrow house," the apartment is hallowed by the vivid associations that come thronging there. This is emphatically a FAMILY SCENE. It will occur in every household. It will destroy these numerous intimacies; for "the land shall mourn every family apart."

Few realize the dread uncertainty of life. Even the lamented Heber, who wrote the beautiful lines,

"Death rides on every passing breeze,—

And lurks in every flower;

Each season has its own discase,

Its peril every hour,—"

did not realize that himself should illustrate their fearful import. Yet he entered the bath-room at Trichonopoly in perfect health, and was brought out a lifeless corpse. By a tie so frail are the joys of the family relation held on carth. It is true that "death rides on every passing breeze." A needle destroyed Lucia, the sister of Aurelius, while playing with her little son. A grape choked Anacreon, the sweet bard of ancient Ionia. A hair terminated the life of Fabrius, once a Roman consul. And a fly killed Pope Adrian IV. It is not alone in the wild tornado, or the raging pestilence that death sunders the ties of kindred. It is confined to no boundaries or seasons.

"Leaves have their times to fall,

And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set - but all,

Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O death!"*

The emperor Mervanes had this motto engraved upon his scal; "Remember thou must die!" God engraves the warning upon the foreheads of dying men. Philip, king of Macedon, ordered his page to address him every morning in these words; "Remember, O king, thou art mortal!" God addresses not only kings, but every member of every family, and not only every morning, but every evening and every hour, "Ye know not what shall be on the morrow."

The history of families speaks of little else than death. Onc-fourth of all the members die before they pass the age of a single year, and only two-fifths attain to six years of age. THIRTY MILLIONS of our race die annually; about eighty thousand daily; more than three thousand hourly, more than fifty every minute; almost one every second. What havoc is here in earth's countless families! What

Mrs. Hemans.

disappointments, blasted hopes, and repining love! While I write, what severing of tics, what grief, what lamentation! The earth is little else than a vast cemetery, and the sounds that are wafted to our cars are mostly the voices of the dead. For every moment some one of the human family is consigned to the dust, and the knell of death mingles its dolorous notes with the sighing of the bereaved. We wonder not that the ancient Egyptians were accumstomed to carry their coffins to festivals in order to keep reminded of mortality, nor that the Chinese kept them in their private dormitories.

In the afflictions of families death is presented under various forms, involving much that is dark and incomprehensible; and these hidden ways of the Lord are often called the MYSTERIES OF PROVIDENCE. A few facts will illustrate.

In the land of Moab, thirteen centuries before the birth of Christ, a poor but pious woman, named Naomi, took up her residence. Driven by relentless famine, she came with her husband and children from Bethlehem-Judah-a place distant by the space of one hundred and twenty miles, over a mountainous region, and since honored by the angelic heraldry descending to announce the Savior's birth to the watching shepherds. She came unwittingly to bury her husband and children in this heathen country, far away from the land of their birth, and the dust of their fathers. She came to

learn a sad lesson of sorrow in a fatherless, husbandless, and childless home to see whither the widow's heart will turn in her bereavement and haggard want, but to the widow's God. What a complication of wo! Driven by famine from her carly home to a land of heathen strangers, bereft of all her family in so brief a period, left penniless and alone to survive as best she could upon the scanty fare of penury! Child of Providence! The hand of God is laid heavily upon thee, and thou art ready to exclaim, "Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy

footsteps are not known." But thousands live to keep thee company in mysteries like these.

After a long and chequered experience Jacob arrived at Bethel with his family. He was one of the faithful few who hold on "in the even tenor of their way" amid all the vicissitudes of life-a man after God's own heart. Scarcely had he left that sacred spot before Rachel, his wife, for whom he served fourteen years in Padan-aram, died; and he heard from her lips "as her soul was in departing," the name, Ben-oni, (the son of my sorrows) given to her infant child. None more than Jacob deserved the blessing of an unbroken household. None more than the infant child needed a mother's watch. Yet the family was broken, and the child was made motherless. How many families could Jacob scc where the death-blow would have fallen less heavily! How many from which the mother could have been removed with less detriment! Indeed, could he not have spared some other member of his own family far better? But the Lord saith unto him, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."

The young man dies. He has laid his intellect and his heart upon the altar of God, and designs to become a reaper in the distant fields of the Lord, already white for the harvest. With unwearied diligence and the highest promise, he applics himself to the burnishing of his splendid intellect, and the cultivation of his noble heart. Around him cluster the brightest hopes of the family. But he dies. The flower of the household garden withers; the jewel is plucked from its crown; the star drops from its firmament. And yet the drone, the dissolute, the ignoramus, lives on in the same circle, the object of daily and hourly solicitude, the child of many fears and great anxieties;-lives to add not a drop to the cup of domestic bliss, nor a unit to the value of the social compact,

nor a name to the roll of the sacramental hosts, but possibly to bring down the grey hairs of his parents, in sorrow, to the grave. Mysterious Providence! cries the disappointed mourner, and, lifting his eyes to God, joins with tweeping prophet, "Let me talk with Thee of thy judgment. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" and back the answer comes, "Be still and know that I am God."

The infant dies. It has lived to utter no word against the truth, no to lift its hand in wilful disobedience. Its unfolding mind has plotted no deeds of sin. Its little heart. has not been stained by contact with a wicked world. No passions rankle in its breast. And it knows not an enemy in the wide, wide world. Its body is a beautiful casket and its soul a priceless gem. But the infant dies, and the desolate mansion rings no more with its laugh of gladness. Amid excessive sufferings, such as Theology does not attempt fully to aplain, he goes down to the dust, while we ing parents and surviving children gaze in silent wonder and awe upon the mystery of death.

The gallant steamer sails from the busy port. Warm hearts mingle on the crowded deck in anticipation of the annual festivities on the succeeding day. Yet a little while, and many will be welcomed to the home of their youth amid tokens of affection and hearty congratulations. But suddenly the huge fabric reels before the rushing tornado, and the boiling occan tosses it as a feather from billow to billow. Now it trembles in every beam and timber, and anon it dashes upon the rocky shore, lining it with the fragments of the shattered wreck, and the mangled and dismembered bodies of men and women. There perish the young and beautiful. There the husband and father, returning after two years' absence, dies upon the very eve of the expected mccting. There the lover, on his way to greet his betrothed,

The reader will recognize the allusion here to the Atlantic.

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