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Show WHITHER ARE WE GOING? Three Flashlight Views of the Mystery Mys-tery Called Death. " (Nashville American.) Editor William Allen White of Kansas relates that he took luncheon, v. ith. Thomas B. Reed on the day Mc-Kinley Mc-Kinley died, and that after the simple meal Reed pushed back his chair and began to talk. For three long hours he discoursed most beautifully upon life, its uncertainty, its real rewards and its checks i'and balances; upon fame and its accidents and its emptiness: upon death and immortality and God and all His ways and works. It was a kind of funeral oration, the like of which few men are privileged to hear. At the end of it all the big man threw back his head and looked ud at the great oak rafters of the room for a long while and then let his hands fall heavily on the short arms of the chair as he sighed: "Hi ho! What docs it all mean? Where is it going? Who are we? What is this unfathomed mystery mys-tery we call life God knows! I don't." Roscoe Conkling, In his eulogy of Oliver P. Morton shortly after that stateman's death, said: "Death is nature's na-ture's supreme abhorrence. The dark valley, with its weird and solemn shad- ows illumined by the rays of Ciiris-j Ciiris-j tianity, 1st stil! the ground which iH'&n ! shudders to approach. The gi im por-' por-' tals end the narrow house eeem in the ) lapse of centuries to have gained rather than lost in impressive and foreboding horror." Yet Conkling went bravely, for all that, when the time came to go. needier needi-er expressed a different idea of death-He death-He said: "When we comprehend t!n fullness of what death will do for us, in all our outlook and forelouk. dying is triumph. Nowhere is there so fair a sight, so sweet a prospect, as when a young sou! is passing away out of life and time through the gate ' death the easy. th. royal, the solder:, the pearly gate of death. Dentil is riH sweet as flowers are. It ij as blessed as bird singing in spring. 1 never hear of tho death of anyone v.!;, Is read;.' to die that my hear: does not sing lik-j a harp. I uiii sor-y rVr ti;c?e who arg left behind, but inr. for those who have gone before. A a grow older and come nearer to death I look upon it more and more with complacent joy, and out of every li:g!ng I hear God say: 'Oh. trusting, hungering one. come to Me.' What the othr life will bring I know not. only that F will awake in Cod's likeness and see as He i?. Speed o:t, then. oh. heart, and yearn for dying. I have drunk at many a fountain. h;.i thirpt cams again; I have fed at iv.any a bounteous table, hut hunger returned: I havs seen many bright and loveij things, but while I gazed th-'r lustre faded. There i. nothing her tliat cpr. give me rest, but whn ; behold Thee,' O God. I shall be saCsSeJ." Here are three tla alight v-tts of thre thinkers concsniln tho mystery, and tragedy of liV- an! uoath. Beech-er's Beech-er's is the more cheerful v!ev. arid hij was unquestionably the greatest intellect. intel-lect. How much has intellect to d.i with views of the whence and whith-r. the hereafter, the unknowable? What is it that causes one intellect to approach ap-proach the grave nlth serene confidence confi-dence and contentment and another to drift into the mysii,- shadows with questioning tiirir to wh'eh comes no ! reply? Dv.es any man die without a lingering faith, a hope 0f the hereafter? here-after? Where are Rue-i and Conkling and Bcecher? ! m mm , |