Florence Ruby Smith

 
The News
Cartersville, Georgia
March 5, 1901, Page 1
 
Transcribed by:  
 

Tax Collector F. V. SMITH and wife have the sympathy of a large circle of relatives and friends in the loss of their fifteen year old daughter, RUBY, whose death occurred from pneumonia, Tuesday night.  The burial was yesterday, many attending.

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April 19, 1901
Page 6.

In Memoriam.

On the night of the second of April, Florence Ruby Smith, the eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. F. V. Smith, breathed her last at their home on Cassville street.  She was in her fourteenth year, and was a general favorite with all who knew her.

I first met her last summer, when I went out to preach at Rowland Springs.  I was deeply impressed with the earnestness of the child.  There was an intense yearning within her deep lustrous eyes of brown, that seemed to be looking almost to the infinite.

When her father moved his family to town, she became a member of my Sunday school and she was present at nearly every service.  She had given her heart to God and seemed to enjoy giving Him the best gifts she had.  Even as I write these lines, her face rises before me, not as I last saw it, but as it appeared to me in the Sunday school, looking through a rift in the congregation upon the gospel as it was outlined in bright colors upon the chalkboard.  She seemed to drink in the words of the lesson.  This earnestness was with her in her school life, and at home, where the willing hands made the burden of life rest lighter upon the loving father and mother.  To our poor human understanding it appears strange that God should take such a bright blossom from the flower garden of humanity.  (I always love to think of the children as flowers among the men and women of the earth.)  In this, as in many other cases death proved that he still loves a shining mark and one comfort that can come to those who knew and loved her is that

“The choicest gifts
That heaven both kindly
Lent to earth
Are ever first to seek again
The country of their birth.”

This life is but a stopping place where we may prepare ourselves for a better and a brighter land beyond the grave.  This girl felt the importance of making this preparation and I feel that her life was not blotted out, though it brightly shone on earth.  No, not blotted out, but like the morning star that blazes in the sky for a little while to be swallowed up into the brighter light of the day, her young life did not go out but melted away into the day dawn of heaven.  When the night of life is over and heaven’s day has dawned she will be found the precious jewel that deck the master’s brow a ruby rare within His diadem.

I knew her but a short while but I had learned to love her and I drop this little tribute to her worth as a wreath of immortelles to rest above the sacred spot beneath which she sleeps to wait the rising of the resurrection morn.

Alex W. Bealer.

 

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