Before she knew
what it was, she had begun to forget. In the minds of children the
grass grows very quickly over their buried dead. But now she learned
what death meant, or rather what love had been; not, however, as an
added grief: it comforted her to remember how her father had loved her;
and she said her prayers the oftener, because they seemed to go
somewhere near the place where her father was. She did not think of her
father being where God was, but of God being where her father was.
The winter was drawing nearer too, and the days were now short and
cold. A watery time began, and for many days together the rain kept
falling without intermission. I almost think Annie would have died, but
for her dead father to think about. On one of those rainy days,
however, she began to find that it is in the nature of good things to
come in odd ways. It had rained the whole day, not tamely and
drizzingly, but in real earnest, dancing and rebounding from the pools,
and raising a mist by the very "crash of water-drops." Now and then the
school became silent, just to listen to the wide noise made by the busy
cataract of the heavens, each drop a messenger of good, a sweet
returning of earth's aspirations, in the form of Heaven's _Amen_! But
the boys thought only of the fun of dabbling in the torrents as they
went home; or the delights of net-fishing in the swollen and muddy
rivers, when the fish no longer see their way, but go wandering about
in perplexity, just as we human mortals do in a thick fog, whether of
the atmosphere or of circumstance.
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