Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1877 — Her Papa’s Grave. [ARTICLE]

Her Papa’s Grave.

A little girl with tangled locks peeping irout under a calico hood, clad in a dress of chintz that hungall awry, loitered behind as the great, dastv crowd moved out of the gates or Mt.Adna, the other day, after they had scattered their flowers nnd doaefronor to the dead. Half dreamily she gazed after them, her eyes filled with a far-away look of tenderness, until the last one had disappeared and the rattle of the drums had died away, ’then she turned and vaguely scanned the mounds that rose about her, clutching still tighter the fastfading bunch of dandelions and gravegrass that her chubby hand held. An old man passed by, and gently patted her gufrly head, as he spoke her name, but she only shrank back still further, and when he told a passing, stranger that the little one’s fattier was one who went on the battle-field and never came back, there was only a tear-drop in the child’s eye to tell that she heard or knew the story. W hen they were gone she moved on further to a neglected, empty lot, and kneeling down she packed up a mound of earth, whispering as she patted it down, and smoothed it with her chubby hand: “Tbiswibn’t be so awtully b»g as the others, I 'guess, but maybe it’ll be big enough so that God will see it, and think that papa is buried here.” Carefully she trimmed the sides with the stray grasses she plucked, murmuring on: “And maybe it will grow so that it will be like the rest in two or four years; and then, maybe, papa sometime will come back amt ” Rut she paused as though it suddenly dawned npon her young' mind that he rested where the Southern breezes whispers “unknown;” and the tear-drops that sprang to her eyes moistened the little bunch-of dandelions that she planted among the grasses on the mound she had reared. , , ■ When the sexton passed thit way at night as he went to close the gates, he found the little one fast asleep, with her head pillowed on the mound, and when he roused her she started up and looking dreamily aronnd for a moment, and then smilingly faltered: 1 “ Yes. I’ll go home now, for God-says' He will watch papa's grave.” —FuUon (NT.) Tima.