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 836 'GOD'S PEACE'

DECEMBER,

XXIV T WALK with Greta to my mother's grave. It is J. winter-dark in the graveyard. In the black garden of death only the white crosses shine. It has just been raining, and noiselessly we walk across the fallen leaves.

Death seems greater and more sinister in his •winter-garment. In summer time we cover his strange terror with multi-coloured flowers and smiling foliage. We try to make death gentle and sweet with the rich offerings of summer. But in winter death stands in all his sinister majesty, spreads out his sombre cloak and fastens his cross- bone mark to every tree in the graveyard.

I walk with Greta through the winter-dark graveyard, but the horror of death does not frighten me. I walk in league with the great Lord of Life, and it seems to me, that Death with- draws as we walk forward.

We sit down on the bench at the grave, and Greta says, ' Though you have often talked to me about your mother, you have never told me what she looked like. Yet when she died, you must have been old enough to have a vivid memory of her.'

' The clearest image I have of my mother is not from her very last years. It is from the time, before illness had ravaged her, from the time she was still young and beautiful, or, at least, seemed so to me. I see her on a beautiful summer day standing in the middle of the lawn in our garden, She wore a