I know the effort is hard; but think that there's a loving hand waiting to take yours; there's One that loves you, better than you have ever loved anyone yourself, waiting the other side of the darkness.
Oh, only think of that, and it will not be hard! Dear friend," he said--"for I may call you that--we have all of us the same passage before us, but we have all the same hope: and He hears the words you speak to Him.

He has been here, He is here now, to listen to your very thoughts.

He has seen your trouble, and wished He could help you--why He can not I am not able to tell you; but it will all be well.
"Let me say one prayer with you." And he began in his low quiet voice.

The woman knelt down beside him, shaken with sobbing.

Till, at the words "Suffer us not, for any pains of death, to fall from thee," poor George put out his old withered hand and took Arthur's, and smiled through his pain--"the first time he ever smiled since his illness began," his wife told us after his death, "and he smiled many times after that." He did not speak to us again; the effort had been too great.