Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/44

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JOHN BROWN

one until I got home. Father heard me then telling about it and said, 'Don't you know what girl lost it?' I told him I did not. 'Well, when you go to school to-morrow take it with you and find out if you can who lost it. It is a trifling thing but always remember that if you should lose anything you valued, no matter how small, you would want the person who found it to give it back to you.'" He "showed a great deal of tenderness to me," continues the daughter, "and one thing I always noticed was my father's peculiar tenderness and devotion to his father. In cold weather he always tucked the bedclothes around grandfather when he went to bed, and would get up in the night to ask him if he slept warm—always seeming so kind and loving to him that his example was beautiful to see."

Especially were his sympathy and devotion evident in sickness: "When his children were ill with scarlet lever, he took care of us himself and if he saw persons coming to the house, would go to the gate and meet them, not wishing them to come in. for fear of spreading the disease.[1] . . . When any of the family were sick he did not often trust watchers to care for the sick one, but sat up himself and was like a tender mother. At one time he sat up every night for two weeks while mother was sick, for fear he would oversleep if he went to bed, and then the fire would go out and she take cold."[2]

The death of one little girl shows how deeply he

  1. Ruth Brown in Sanborn, pp. 93–94.
  2. Ibid., p. 104.