couch, asleep and dreaming, with the dead around you."

"Alas! when I but dream how am I to know it? The dream best dreamed is
the likest to the waking truth!"

"When you are quite dead, you will dream no false dream. The soul that
is true can generate nothing that is not true, neither can the false
enter it."

"But, sir," I faltered, "how am I to distinguish betwixt the true and
the false where both alike seem real?"

"Do you not understand?" he returned, with a smile that might have slain
all the sorrows of all his children. "You CANNOT perfectly distinguish
between the true and the false while you are not yet quite dead; neither
indeed will you when you are quite dead--that is, quite alive, for then
the false will never present itself. At this moment, believe me, you are
on your bed in the house of death."

"I am trying hard to believe you, father. I do indeed believe you,
although I can neither see nor feel the truth of what you say."

"You are not to blame that you cannot. And because even in a dream you
believe me, I will help you.--Put forth your left hand open, and close
it gently: it will clasp the hand of your Lona, who lies asleep where
you lie dreaming you are awake."

I put forth my hand: it closed on the hand of Lona, firm and soft and
deathless.

"But, father," I cried, "she is warm!"

"Your hand is as warm to hers. Cold is a thing unknown in our country.
Neither she nor you are yet in the fields of home, but each to each is
alive and warm and healthful."

Then my heart was glad. But immediately supervened a sharp-stinging
doubt.

"Father," I said, "forgive me, but how am I to know surely that this
also is not a part of the lovely dream in which I am now walking with
thyself?"

"Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly
believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a
world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while
not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being
true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be for ever dead.
Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom.
Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast
not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him
through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save
in a glass darkly--that which, indeed, never can be known save by its
innate splendour shining