The first day by a death-bed! The first drive out to the cemetery, where poor little Joe is laid close to Shelley's heart (_Cor cordium_, says the epitaph), and where the mother insisted on going when she and I went out in the carriage together.

I am horribly weak about such things.

I can't look on the earth-side of death; I flinch from corpses and graves, and never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror.

When I look deathwards I look _over_ death, and upwards, or I can't look that way at all.

So that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sate so calmly--not to drop from the seat, which would have been worse than absurd of me.