The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them
with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as
the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended
her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise"
her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there
was a fair chance she would take after her father.
A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years
and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the
particular persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but
thought it very shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with
foreboding looks and dreary deathbed stories, it was a wonder the child
made out to live through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it
distressed her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully
taken in, should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break
down the natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely
worse, to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the
Father of All has strewed its downward path.
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