I went to her.  I had seen her several times within the last few weeks, but had observed nothing to make me consider her seriously ill.  I now saw at a glance that Tomkins was right.  She had not long to live.

“I am sorry to see you suffering so much, Mrs Tomkins,” I said.

“I don’t suffer so wery much, sir; though to be sure it be hard to get the breath into my body, sir.  And I do feel cold-like, sir.”

“I’m going home directly, and I’ll send you down another blanket.  It’s much colder to-day than it was yesterday.”

“It’s not weather-cold, sir, wi’ me.  It’s grave-cold, sir.  Blankets won’t do me no good, sir.  I can’t get it out of my head how perishing cold I shall be when I’m under the mould, sir; though I oughtn’t to mind it when it’s the will o’ God.  It’s only till the resurrection, sir.”

“But it’s not the will of God, Mrs Tomkins.”

“Ain’t it, sir?  Sure I thought it was.”

“You believe in Jesus Christ, don’t you, Mrs Tomkins?”

“That I do, sir, with all my heart and soul.”

“Well, He says that whosoever liveth and believeth in Him shall never die.”

“But, you know, sir, everybody dies.  I must die, and be laid in the churchyard, sir.  And that’s what I don’t like.”

“But I say that is all a mistake.  You won’t die.  Your body will die, and be laid away out of sight; but you will be awake, alive, more alive than you are now, a great deal.”

And here let me interrupt the conversation to remark upon the great mistake of teaching children that they have souls.  The consequence is, that they think of their souls as of something which is not themselves.  For what a man has cannot be himself.  Hence, when they are told that their souls go to heaven, they think of their selves as lying in the grave.  They ought to be taught that they have bodies; and that their bodies die; while they themselves live on.  Then they will not think, as old Mrs Tomkins did, that they will be laid in the grave.  It is making altogether too much of the body, and is indicative of an evil tendency to materialism, that we talk as if we possessed souls, instead of being souls.  We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when it is cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.

“Do you really think so, sir?”

“Indeed I do.  I don’t know anything about where you will be.  But you will be with God—­in your Father’s house, you know.  And that is enough, is it not?”

“Yes, surely, sir.  But I wish you was to be there by the bedside of me when I was a-dyin’.  I can’t help bein’ summat skeered at it.  It don’t come nat’ral to me, like.  I ha’ got used to this old bed here, cold as it has been—­many’s the night—­wi’ my good man there by the side of me.”

“Send for me, Mrs Tomkins, any moment, day or night, and I’ll be with you directly.”