understand why He should hurt me so. The hurt of the others I felt was hard to bear, but it was nothing compared to this.

I knew she had made many friends, but how many there were I did not know until then; there were so many flowers that it looked as if she were lying in a garden. There were, all told, eighty-six baskets and sprays, and so many people that we didn’t know where to put them all. She was just as beautiful in death as when she was living. So we laid her with the rest, and I thought like most people, that she went to heaven, and if I lived a clean and honest life I would someday be there too; for I had never heard anything about spirit return.

I grieved so terribly for my child; I shed no tears, but that awful ache within me I can never forget. Then too, I used to get such strange dreams; almost every night I used to see her way up high, and she’d fall, but always when I’d pick her up she was living and laughing. Or else she fell in the water and I’d go after her, and always when I’d get her out she was living and laughing. I would always wake up drenched in hot perspiration from head to foot.

I KEPT on dreaming that way until I grew to believe she was not dead, but living, and was happy; because that was why she always was laughing. After that I never had those awful dreams, but instead she came in my dreams as she always was before her leaving—a happy little child.

Then came a day in November just four months after her passing away, while I was sitting reading a book and not thinking of anything about the story, when I heard her call me, just like she always did, as she stood at the front gate. She had one certain way of calling, so that I couldn’t help but know it was she. So real it was that I got up and walked to the front door, without realizing that she was gone. Then I came back and after a few minutes started to read again, trying to forget; when suddenly she called again, so very plainly that it frightened me. And then all was quiet.

I was always very much alone, for my husband worked out of town; but my nights after that as I sat alone she would come and talk to me. She would tell me not to grieve for her, that she was very happy; that she was with the rest of her sisters and brothers; that she was with Jesus and with God, Whom we both