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CHAPTER III. WISE COUNSEL. Some pious people seem not to care how many of their dearest hearts the Lord in heaven takes from them. How well I remember that in later life, I met a beautiful young widow, who haa loved her husband with her one love, and was left with twin babies by him. I feared to speak, for I had known him well, and thought her the tenderest of the tender, and my eyes were full of tears for her. But she looked at me with some surprise, and said: "You loved my Bob, I know," for he was a cousin of my own, and as good a man as ever lived, "but, Sylvia, you must not commit the sin of grieving for him." It may be so, in a better world, if people are allowed to die there; but as long as weare here, how can we help being as the Lord has made us ? The sin, as it seems to me, would be to feel or fancy ourselves case- hardened against the will of our Maker, which so often is that we should grieve. Without a thought how that might be, I did the natural thing, and cried about the death of my dear father until I was like to follow him. But a strange thing happened in a month or so of time, which according to Deborah saved my life, by compelling other thoughts to come. My father had been buried in a small churchyard, with nobody living near it, and the church itself was falling down, through scarcity of money on the moor. The Warren, as our wood was called, lay somewhere in the parish of Brendon, a straggling country, with a little village somewhere, and a blacksmith's shop and an ale house, but no church that anyone knew of, till you came to a place called Cheriton. And there was a little church all by itself, not easy to find, though it had four bells, which nobody dared toring,for fear of his head and the burden above it. But a boy would go up the first Sunday of ea...
