Obituary

The editor of this paper,[H. C. Ashbaugh] and wife, desire to to hereby express their appreciation of numerous kind favors extended by friends in this city, during the recent sickness and burial of their little daughter. It is a comforting thought, and now more fully realize, to know that we live among kind and sympathetic friends, who are ever ready to assist in soothing sorrow and alleviating the pains of sickness and death. Under the most lingering approaches, death, when it does come, is sudden, the transition between time and eternity quick as a flash. Between this world and the next is but a heart beat. When with our dead, in the first gust of grief, and especially so when we such little and innocent forms placed in the cold grave. Listen to the heavy dirt clods fall upon the coffin lid, we ask what meaneth all this and feel that earth has not on its surface enough good to compensate for the loss. But, thank heaven, there is no grief without some beneficent prevision to soften its intensiveness. When the pure and lovely die, the memory of their good deeds and all the attributes which drew us towards them, like the moonbeams on the stormy seas, light up our darkened hearts, and lends to the surrounding gloom, a beauty so sad, so sweet, that we would not if we could, dispel the darkness that environs it.

The young, the fair, the pure, the tendered hearted,
A moment bloom, then gently pass away;
Like frail, bright flowers of spring time, the departed,
And who remain so pure, so bright as they;
As fairy visions, or as dreams they passed
To fair, too bright, too beautiful to last.