"Not thus could I have kissed thy lips--Lucy--had they been red with life. White are they--and white must they long have been! No pollution on them--nor on that poor bosom now. Contrite tears had long since washed out thy sin. A feeble hand traced these lines--and in them a humble heart said nothing but God's truth. Child--behold your mother. Art thou afraid to touch the dead?"
"No--father--I am not afraid to kiss her lips--as you did now. Sometimes, when you thought me asleep, I have heard you praying for my mother."
"Oh! child! cease--cease--or my heart will burst."
People began to gather about the body--but awe kept them aloof; and as for removing it to a house, none who saw it but knew such care would have been vain, for doubt there could be none that there lay death. So the groups remained for a while at a distance--even the old pastor went a good many paces apart; and under the shadow of that tree the father and child composed her limbs, and closed her eyes, and continued to sit beside her, as still as if they had been watching over one asleep.
That death was seen by all to be a strange calamity to him who had lived long among them--had adopted many of their customs--and was even as one of themselves--so it seemed--in the familiar intercourse of man with man. Some dim notion that this was the dead body of his wife was entertained by many, they knew not why; and their clergyman felt that then there needed to be neither concealment nor avowal of the truth. So in solemn sympathy they approached the body and its watchers; a bier had been prepared: and walking at the head, as if it had been a funeral, the Father of little Lucy holding her hand, silently directed the procession towards his own house--out of the FIELD OF FLOWERS.
Have you any intention, dear reader, of building a house in the country? If you have, pray, for your own sake and ours, let it not be a Cottage. We presume that you are obliged to live, one half of the year at least, in a town. Then why change altogether the character of your domicile and your establishment? You are an inhabitant of Edinburgh, and have a house in the Circus, or Heriot Row, or Abercromby Place, or Queen Street. The said house has five or six stories, and is such a palace as one might expect in the City of Palaces. Your drawing-rooms can, at a pinch, hold some ten score of modern Athenians--your dining-room might feast one half of the contributors to _Blackwood's Magazine_--your "placens uxor" has her boudoir--your eldest daughter, now verging on womanhood, her music-room--your boys their own studio--the governess her retreat--and the tutor his den--the housekeeper sits like an overgrown spider in her own sanctum--the butler bargains for his dim apartment--and the four maids must have their front area-window. In short, from cellarage to garret all is complete, and Number Forty-two is really a splendid mansion.