but it was so pretty that papa and I were perfectly happy in it.  Poor mamma did not like the closets and the kitchen.  The house we had left was a huge, old-fashioned house, with four square rooms on a floor; one of these was the kitchen, and mamma missed it very much.  But she lived only a few days after we moved in.  I never knew of what disease she died.  She was ill but a few hours and suffered great pain.  They said she had injured herself in some way in lifting the furniture.  It was all so sudden and so terrible, and we were surrounded by such confusion and so many strange faces, that I do not remember anything about it distinctly.  I remember the funeral, and the great masses of white and purple flowers all over the table on which the coffin stood, and I remember how strangely papa’s face looked.

“And then Aunt Abby came to live with us, and we settled down into such a new, different life, that it seemed to me as if it had been in some other world that I had known mamma.  My sister Abby was two years old, and my darling brother Nat was ten, when mamma died.  It is very hard to talk about dear Nat, I love him so.  He is so precious, and his sorrow is so sacred, that I am hardly willing to let strangers pity him, ever so tenderly.  When he was a baby he sprang out of mamma’s lap, one day, as she was reaching up to take something from the mantel piece.  He fell on the andiron-head and injured his spine so that he could never walk.  He is twenty years old now; his head and chest and arms are about as large as those of a boy of sixteen, but all the rest of his poor body is shrunken and withered; he has never stood upright, and he cannot turn himself in his chair or bed.  But his head and face are beautiful.  It is not only I who think so.  Artists have seen him sitting at the window, or being drawn about in his little wagon, and have begged permission to paint his face, for the face of a saint or of a hero, in their pictures.  It is the face of both saint and hero; and after all that must be always so, I think; for how could a man be one without being the other?  I know some very brave men have been very bad men, but I do not call them heroes.  Nat is the only hero I ever knew; if I were a poet I would write a poem about him.  It should be called ‘the CROWNLESS king.’  Oh, how he does reign over suffering, and loss, and humiliation, and what a sweet kingdom spreads out around him wherever he is!  He does everybody good, and everybody loves him.  Poor papa used to say sometimes, ’My son is a far better preacher than I; see, I sit at his feet to learn;’ and it was true.  Even when he was a little fellow Nat used to keep up papa’s courage.  Many a time, when papa looked dark and sad, Nat would call to him, ’Dear papa, will you carry me up and down a little while by the window?  I want the sky.’  Then, while they were walking, Nat would say such sweet things about the beauty of the sky, and the delight it gave him to see it, that the tears would come into papa’s eyes, and he would say, ’Who would think that we could ever forget for a moment this sky which is above us?’ and he would go away to his study comforted.