he approached our God and obtained for us his will; but now our Prophet, our Counsellor, our General, our Leader was gone; and amid the fiery ordeal that we then had to pass through, we were left alone without his aid; and as our future guide, for things spiritual or temporal— for all things pertaining to this world or the next— he had spoken for the last time on earth.
These reflections and a thousand others flashed upon the mind. I thought why must the good perish and the virtuous be destroyed? Why must God’s nobility, the salt of the earth, the most exalted of the human family; and the most perfect types of all excellence, fall victims to the cruel, fiendish hate of incarnate devils?
The poignanancy of my grief, I presume, however, was some what allayed by the extreme suffering that I endured from my wounds.
Soon afterwards I was taken to the head of the stairs and laid there where I had a full view of the our beloved, and now murdered There he lay as I had left him, he had not mo[ved] d a limb; he lay placid and calm, a monument of greatness even in death; but his noble spirit had le[ft] its and gone to dwell in regions more cong[e]nial to his exalted nature. Poor ! he was [a] good man and my soul was cemented to his. If ever there was an exemplary, honest, good and virtuo[us] man, an embodiment of all that is noble in the human form was its representative
While I lay there a number of persons ca[me] [p. 53]