mptations, and the
roughness that awaited him--nay, from the mere effort of perseverance,
and could almost have sighed to think how nearly the death-pang had
been over, and the home of Love, Life, and Light had been won for
ever:--

'I am come that they might have life,
And that they might have it more abundantly.'

The words returned on him, and with them what his father had said, 'You
have had a thread running through your life.' He was in a state
between sleeping and waking, when the confines of reflection and
dreaming came very near together, and when vague impressions, hardly
noticed at the time they were made, began to tell on him without his
own conscious volition. It was to him as if from that brightening
eastern heaven, multitudes of threads of light were floating hither and
thither, as he had often watched the gossamer undulating in the
sunshine. Some were firm, purely white, and glistening here and there
with rainbow tints as they tended straight upwards, shining more and
more into the perfect day; but for the most part they were tangled
together in inextricable confusion, intermingled with many a broken
end, like fleeces of cobweb driven together by the autumn wind,--some
sailing aimlessly, or with shattered tangled strands-some white, some
dark, some anchored to mere leaves or sprays, some tending down to the
abyss, but all in such a perplexed maze that the eye could seldom trace
which were directed up, which downwards, which were of pure texture,
which defiled and stained.

In the abortive, unsatisfactory attempt to follow out one fluctuating
clue, not without whiteness, and heaving often upwards, but frail,
wavering, ravelled, and tangled, so that scarcely could he find one
line that held together, Louis awoke to find his father wondering that
he could sleep with the sun shining full on his face.

'It was hardly quite a dream,' said Louis, as he related it to Mrs.
Frost.

'It would make a very pretty allegory.'

'It is too real for that just now,' he said. 'It was the moral of all
my broken strands that Mary held up to me yesterday.'

'I hope you are going to do more than point your moral, my dear. You
always were good at that.'

'I mean it,' said Louis, earnestly. 'I do not believe such an
illness--ay, or such a dream--can come for nothing.'

So back went his thoughts to the flaws in his own course; and chiefly
he bewailed his want of sympathy for his father. Material obedie