Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/25

 house was cool on the hottest days. But the air in it was never fresh, always stuffy—old-fashioned air. I remember when my uncle died. I saw him in his coffin. Fancy letting a child—a little child—see a dead person in a coffin! It seemed to me that his coffin was like a small edition of our house—a stricter interpretation of the spirit of our house. I remember thinking, though I was only a little child, that my father and my mother and my sister and I had all been born buried, and that when we really and truly died we would simply be put into smaller coffins. Our house was a coffin that you could breathe in; a real coffin was smaller and you could not breathe in it—that was the only difference.

"My father and my mother loved me. I know that because one day they prayed for the heathen in foreign lands, and I asked them why they did that, and they said it was because they loved the heathen in foreign lands. And they used to pray for me, so they must have loved me too. But they didn't love me the way I