As a private person, 1 have just asked myself as editor or the Magazine for a corner of that periodical in which to express my own and my wife's sincere thanks for all the sympathy we have received in our recent bereavement.

To watch a son dying for four months, with never any real hope or relief, except a straw to grasp at from time to time, has heen a heavy burden. Finally, to lose him as we did, with his Mother deprived of a last sight of him hy an attack of scarlet scarlet fever within a day or two of his death, seemed to squeeze one’s heart dry; and it is in that rather numbed condition that I write these lines.

In time we hope to catch up with all the letters we both long to answer; but it is a difficult thing to write what one feels over and over again; so I am trying to put down a little bit of it here.

Our little Michael, so recently our pride as the finest of children, died just alter mid-night on tbe first of February, and what was left of his poor little body now lies in the children’s corner of the cemetery at Old Cairo, close to the grave of Sir Lee Stack. We have as yet no stone erected, but when there is one it will bear these words: “Yea, like as a father pitieth his own children” … “And his mother kept all his sayings” You see what I mean. One begins to realise what it must mean for our Heavenly Father to watch day by day the sickening and weakening and death of any of His children, and His Willingness to give Himself, His own life, in order to give us life and the health which is salvation. That He sends suffering and death I refuse to believe. It is to Him, I am certain, as poignant a pang as has been our loss to us – a perpetual Gethsemene an Calvary within His very being until the last enemy is finally destroyed.

Our thanks to all who have thought and prayed with and for us; and thanks to God for the promise of his victory, and reunion so soon as all is achieved according to His loving will and purpose for His children.

Charles Steer