The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

A PAINFUL CONVERSATION.

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never understood nor sympathized with her. As we sat
together, Mr. Henderson entered the room, gracious and
kind as was his wont, but with a grave, sad face, and an
utter lack of his usual alertness. Nights of wakefulness
and grief had left lines on his face, and deepened the hollows of his glorious eyes. He had aged ten years in the
last few days. He had come to arrange with his wife the
small details of the burial, which was to take place at sunset.
"Where have you selected the burial-place " I inquired.
"Liberty Hill has long been the family burial-place;"
was Mr. Henderson's response.
" Laura had a great horror of Liberty Hill," I answered.
"I think she had a presentiment of approaching death.
You remember how she shrank from this visit to the Blackstocks, and wished to be left at home,- how she tried to
excuse herself from the ball, and was even reluctant to
enter the ball-room, while it was being decorated. After
her objections had been overruled, she surrendered herself
to the inevitable, and resigned herself to her fate. But she
exacted from me a promise to tell you of her horror of
being buried at Liberty Hill, feeling sure that her wishes
would be respected."
A frank conversation followed, and a painful one; but
we all reached the same conclusion. Laura had felt the
approach of death in every fibre of her sensitive being, and
saw its shadow deepening around her. And we were
amazed at our own blindness, which saw in her, not a prescience of her departure, but a morbid state of mind, to be
disregarded and crushed out. And so we had led her into
the arms of the very death from which she strove to be
delivered.
"Poor child! " said the tearful mother; "she might be
with us now, had we been less dull of comprehension."