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Title: A Little Pilgrim

Author: Mrs. Oliphant

Release Date: March 19, 2005 [eBook #15410]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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A LITTLE PILGRIM

In the Unseen

by

MRS. OLIPHANT

London
MacMillan and Co., Limited
New York: The MacMillan Company

1899

Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle.

_Purgaterio_, Canto xxxiii.

The sympathetic reader will easily understand that the following pages
were never meant to be connected with any author's name. They sprang out
of those thoughts that arise in the heart, when the door of the Unseen
has been suddenly opened close by us; and are little more than a wistful
attempt to follow a gentle soul which never knew doubt into the New
World, and to catch a glimpse of something of its glory through her
simple and child-like eyes.

In Memoriam

E.C.

25TH FEBRUARY 1882

A LITTLE PILGRIM IN THE UNSEEN

She had been talking of dying only the evening before, with a friend,
and had described her own sensations after a long illness when she had
been at the point of death. "I suppose," she said, "that I was as nearly
gone as any one ever was to come back again. There was no pain in it,
only a sense of sinking down, down--through the bed as if nothing could
hold me or give me support enough--but no pain." And then they had
spoken of another friend in the same circumstances, who also had come
back from the very verge, and who described her sensations as those of
one floating upon a summer sea without pain or suffering, in a lovely
nook of the Mediterranean, blue as the sky. These soft and soothing
images of the passage which all men dread had been talked over with low
voices, yet with smiles and a grateful sense that "the warm precincts of
the cheerful day" were once more familiar to both. And very cheerfully
she went to rest that night, talking of what was to be done on the
morrow, and fell a