A situation like this will not awaken in common natures religious trust.
Under such protracted suffering, the animal outgrows the spiritual in
frightful disproportion. Yet the mother's sublime faith, which had
brought her thus far through her agonies, with a heart still warm toward
those who shared them, did not fail her now. She spoke gently to one and
another; asked her husband to repeat the litany, and the children to
join her in the responses; and endeavored to fix their minds upon the
time when the relief would probably come. Nature, as unerringly as
philosophy could have done, taught her that the only hope of sustaining
those about her, was to set before them a termination to their
sufferings.
What days and nights were those that went by while they waited! Life
waning visibly in those about her; not a morsel of food to offer them;
her own infant - and the little one that had been cherished and saved
through all by the mother now dead-wasting hourly into the more perfect
image of death; her husband worn to a skeleton; it needed the fullest
measure of exalted faith, of womanly tenderness and self-sacrifice, to
sustain her through such a season. She watched by night as well as by
day. She gathered wood to keep them warm. She boiled the handful of tea
and dispensed it to them, and when she found one sunken and speechless,
she broke with her teeth a morsel of the precious sugar, and put it in
his lips.
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