more gruesome performance than that which I saw, over that horrible, unburied body, no one could imagine. To-day that same village sits as it did then, with background of mountain and foreground of sea, but how changed! All is Christian; Sunday is a day of rest, and every house is represented at the service in the chapel. They have lived down old-fashioned death in that village and exchanged it for quiet sleep.—James S. Gale, "Korea in Transition."
(686)
DEATH COMPELLING SINCERITY
When the great man comes to the hour of
his death, we expect him to be natural,
avoiding all sentiments that are forced or
incongruous. That is the striking thing
about the last words of Sir Walter Raleigh;
they were the inevitable and necessary words.
Looking down upon his enemies and his
friends, Raleigh exclaimed about the executioner's
axe, "It is a sharp medicine, but
it is a sure cure of all diseases." When the
sheriff asked if the niche in the block would
fit his neck, Raleigh answered, "It matters
not how the head lies, if only the heart be
right."—N. D. Hillis.
(687)
DEATH DOES NOT CHANGE
CHARACTER
When corn is cut down and is lying on
the ground, and is afterward put into the
granary, it is the very same corn as had
grown up to full maturity in the earth. So
also the souls in the granary above are the
very same souls as had grown up to maturity
in heaven on earth. When they are
transferred to heaven above, they are not
tares which had been cut down on earth,
and which somehow in the process of cutting
had been transformed into corn or
wheat. Unless wheat will grow up as wheat
in the earth, and be harvested as wheat, it
will not turn into wheat in the act of cutting,
or while it is being removed to the
granary.—Alexander Miller, "Heaven and
Hell Here."
(688)
DEATH MADE PLAIN
To Paul Laurence Dunbar the secret of death has already been made plain, of which before he died he wrote as follows:
The smell of the sea in my nostrils,
The sound of the sea in mine ears;
The touch of the spray on my burning face,
Like the mist of reluctant tears;
The blue of the sky above me,
The green of the waves beneath;
The sun flashing down on a gray-white sail
Like a simitar from its sheath.
So I said to my heart, "Be silent;
The mystery of time is here;
Death's way will be plain when we fathom the main,
And the secret of life be clear."
(689)
DEATH MASKED IN BEAUTY
A news item from Chicago says:
Robert Wahl, one of the foremost chemists
in the United States, with a knowledge of
drugs and subtle poisons far beyond the ken
of the average alchemist, is charged with
threatening to kill his wife by giving her a
flower to smell.
It would have been a murder that no latter-day coroner or detective could have proved—something unheard of since the days of the Borgias.
The deadliest influence may be conveyed
to the mind and soul as well as
to the senses by the most delicate and
apparently beautiful means.
(690)
DEATH NOT TO BE FEARED
The following lines by Maltbie D. Babcock were read by him just before sailing abroad on the voyage from which he never returned:
Why be afraid of death as tho your life were breath ?
Death but anoints your eyes with clay. O, glad surprize!
Why should you be forlorn? Death only husks the corn.
Why should you fear to meet the Thresher of the wheat?
Is sleep a thing to dread? Yet sleeping you are dead
Till you awake and rise, here, or beyond the skies.
Why should it be a wrench to leave your wooden bench?
Why not with happy shout run home when school is out?
