Home, the paradise of the
absent--home, the heaven of the affections--with all its tenderness and
blessed sympathies, rushed upon his heart. His father's deep but quiet
kindness, his mother's sedulous love; his brothers, all that they had
been to him--these, with their thousand heart-stirring associations,
started into life before him again and again. But he was now ill, and
the mother--Ah! the enduring sense of that mother's love placed her
brightest, and strongest, and tenderest, in the far and distant group
which his imagination bodied forth.
"Mother!" he exclaimed--"Oh, mother, why--why did I ever lave you?
Mother! the son you loved is dyin' without a kind word, lonely and
neglected, in a strange land! Oh, my own mother! why did I ever lave
you?"
The conflict between his illness and his affections overcame him; he
staggered--he grasped as if for assistance at the vacant air--he fell,
and lay for some time in a state of insensibility.
The season was then that of midsummer, and early meadows were falling
before the scythe. As the boy sank to the earth, a few laborers were
eating their scanty dinner of bread and milk so near him, that only
a dry low ditch ran between him and them. They had heard his words
indistinctly, and one of them was putting the milk bottle to his lips
when, attracted by the voice, he looked in the direction of the speaker,
and saw him fall. They immediately recognized "the poor scholar," and in
a moment were attempting to recover him.
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