Person:Wesley Smelser (4)

First name may be Westley
!NEWSPAPER:
The Silver State
March 24, 1885
Page 3, Column 3
MEMORIAL TRIBUTE

Saturday last I was called upon to conduct the funeral services of the little son of Isaiah and Eliza Smelser, who are prominent and favorably known residents of our neighboring village, Golconda. It therefore becomes my pleasing duty to offer this last tribute of respect to the memory of their dear little son, Wesley Levi Smelser, aged 8 years and 11 months, who by injudici?ously playing in a cold mountain stream that ripples by the school house, fell a sudden victim to rheumatic fever. His sufferings were of the most acute and excruciating type, but of short duration, for despite the skill of the attending physician, who did all in his power to mitigate his sufferings and save him to his weeping parents, he expried at half-past 7 Friday morning, March 20th. The circumstances attening (sic) his last moments were truly remarkable for a child of his tender years. Raising his little eyes twoards the ceiling and stretching forth his arms in that direction as though he saw some one reaching down to lift him thither he exclaimed: "Pa I will have to leave you-I must go," and then after three attempts to repeat the Lord's Prayer, he sweetly passed away. Wesley was a faithful and dutiful son, a prococious child and a good boy. The sentiment of the Lord's Prayer which he had learned to repeat, from one of his teachers in the day school, had made an indellible impression on his tender heart. If man is possed of no spritual (sic) essence--if indeed the germ of immortality is not planted within him, to bloom and bear fruit on the other side of death's turbid waters, why such deathbed realization as this?

Mysterious indeed are the ways of providence. Why it is that the little one is taken away in the freshness of its early dawn, leaving the parental roof desolate, fond hearts sad and sweet hopes forever blasted, we shall doubtless never be able in this life to fully answer. But our consolation rests in the fact, that the divine light beaming from the skies brings with it the assurance that the length of human life is not always the measure of its usefulness, and that therefore teh child's work is not finished when it dies, for God has called it to a higher mission than any on earth. To loving sorrowing ones let me say: Think not of the child as dead, but as living--not as a withered bud, but as a blooming flower transplanted in Paradise. It has gone from your embrace that it may shed its fragrence upon the banks of Eden's perennial stream, leaving one less tie of earth and creating one more of heaven to draw you thither.
C. Chenoweth