The brother lingered till the remains of his sister were laid in the grave, then he followed her, to add another to the long row of headstones that marked the resting place of that stricken family.  They sleep together, side by side, ten in number, the oldest one scarce twenty-two years old.  As we stand by the spot and read the melancholy tale, we can but exclaim with Ossian, “The flower lifts its green head to the sun.  Why dost thou awake me, O gale,” it seems to say, “I am wet with the dews of heaven.”  “The time of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves.”  “To-morrow shall the traveler come; he that saw me in my glory shall come; his eye shall search the field for me but shall not find me.”

A youth of great promise next presents; his mother had many years since fallen a prey to the fatal disease, and although he inherited from her the fearful malady, “the young disease that must subdue at length,” had not as yet developed itself.  Buoyant with hope and expectation, he was preparing to enter the gospel ministry, having consecrated himself to God and his service.  He had entered the institution at North Yarmouth, and by his assiduous attention, almost finished his education.  He was expecting soon to launch out upon the broad ocean of public usefulness, but his heavenly Father bid him “come up higher,” and he passed on into the more expansive ocean of eternity.  The seeds of an inherent disease sprung up and bore early fruit, and deposited this young man in his grave, far from the home and the friends of his childhood.  The eye of the stranger rests upon it, the foot of the stranger visits it.

A younger sister too, fell by the same powerful agent far from home, and is buried in a land of strangers.  A brother sleeps by his mother’s side in the family burial ground.

In another family the mother was called first from a family of little children.  She wept in the agonies of death, as she contemplated their bereavement.  She pressed to her heart the infant of a few days, and prayed fervently to that God that heareth prayer, to be the God of her dear children, to protect them in their tender age, and lead them in the narrow way that leads to eternal life.  After the sands of life had ebbed out, and her loving heart had ceased to feel, the tear-drops that had fallen for her children still lingered upon her cheeks.

A lovely daughter followed her at the early age of sixteen, another ere she reached the meridian of life, leaving seven children.  Another daughter passed away just as her sun was verging toward the western hemisphere, leaving a son and daughter.  The son soon followed her and was laid by the side of his mother and grandmother.

The crimson spot upon the daughter’s cheek, accompanied by the hacking cough, seem to denote that the tardy messenger will soon bear another victim to the mansions of death.  Another daughter too is lingering upon the confines of the grave, while the fatal seeds are taking deep root in the constitutions of two of the sons, and heralding by unmistakable evidence the approach of death.