His purpose in traveling to London was to make the necessary
arrangements for his wife's future existence, and then to get
employment which would separate him from his home and from all
its associations. A missionary expedition to one of the Pacific
Islands accepted him as a volunteer. Broken in body and spirit,
his last look of England from the deck of the ship was his last
look at land. A fortnight afterward, his brethren read the
burial-service over him on a calm, cloudless evening at sea.
Before he was committed to the deep, his little pocket Bible,
which had been a present from his wife, was, in accordance with
his dying wishes, placed open on his breast, so that the
inscription, "To my dear Husband," might rest over his heart.
His unhappy wife still lives. When the farewell lines of her
husband's writing reached her she was incapable of comprehending
them. The mental prostration which had followed the parting scene
was soon complicated by physical suffering--by fever on the
brain. To the surprise of all who attended her, she lived through
the shock, recovering with the complete loss of one faculty,
which, in her situation, poor thing, was a mercy and a gain to
her--the faculty of memory. From that time to this she has never
had the slightest gleam of recollection of anything that happened
before her illness.
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