“From that sleep in which I had left him he had never awakened, for he lay just as he was at midnight. There was not a dry eye in the ship when it was told that poor George, whom we all loved, was dead.
“We dressed him in his clean clothes, and bore his body upon deck, where we covered it with the American flag. At noon the sad cry of ‘All hands to bury the dead’ sounded gloomily through the ship.
“The body of poor George, sewed up in a piece of sailcloth, was placed on a plank, still covered with the American flag. It was raised upon the rail, ready to be cast into the sea.
“The captain, with his eyes brim full of tears, and hardly able to speak from grief, read prayers; and all was ready to launch the body into the deep. The canvas had been left open at the head, and the wind blew the fair brown locks upon the cold brow of poor George, just as when he had stood by my side on the cross-trees.
“One by one the sailors kissed his marble cheeks,—kissed him for his mother,—and wiped the tears from their brown faces. The canvas was sewed up, the word was given, and the body slid off the plank into the great ocean, there to sleep till the graves give up their dead.
“The ship filled away upon her course, and it was many and many a day before we ceased to think of the poor sailor boy in his ocean grave.
“When I got home, I went to New York to see poor George’s mother. I found her without trouble, and told her the story of her lost child. A few days after she was taken to an insane asylum, where she died. Poor George! Poor mother!”
Every one of the children was crying when Uncle Ben finished his story, and even when they went home, their eyes were red and swollen with weeping.
“What is the matter, Flora?” asked Mrs. Lee, when her two children entered the house.
“Nothing, mother.”