ed prisoner. Her
spirit, rejoicing in the thought of casting off the heavy shackles
of human existence, jubilantly prepared to ascend to its real home.
"Is death so easy?" she mused.

As that thought came to her the medley of confusing noises around
her--the surging of the waves, the murmur of the wind, the shrieks
of the drowning, and the noises made by the colliding of the
various objects that were drifting around on the water--all seemed
to resolve themselves into words in the same way as shapeless
clouds sometimes form themselves into pictures. And this was what
she heard:

"It is a fact that death is easy, but to live, that is the
difficult thing!"

"Ah, so it is!" she thought, and wondered what was needed to make
living as easy as dying.

Round about her the shipwrecked people fought and struggled for the
floating wreckage and the overturned boats. But amid the mad cries
and curses, again the noises resolved themselves into clear and
powerful words:

"That which is needed to make life as easy as death is UNITY,
UNITY, UNITY."

It seemed to her that the Lord of all the earth had converted these
noises into a speaking tube, through which He himself had answered
her.

While the words that had been spoken were still ringing in her
ears, she was rescued. She had been drawn up into a small boat in
which there were only three persons besides herself--a brawny old
sailor dressed in his best, an elderly woman with round, owlish
eyes, and a poor little heartbroken boy, who had on nothing but a
torn shirt.

***

Late in the afternoon of the following day a Norwegian ship sailed
along the great banks of Newfoundland in the direction of the
fishing grounds. The sky was clear, and the sea was like a mirror.
The vessel could make but little headway. All the sails were set so
as to catch the last breaths of the dying breeze.

The sea looked very beautiful. It was a clear blue and smooth as
glass, but where the faintest breeze passed over it, it was a
silvery white.

When the afternoon stillness had continued for a while, the ship's
crew sighted a dark object floating on the water. Gradually it came
nearer, and soon they discovered that it was a human body. As it
was being carried by the current past the ship, they could tell by
the clothing that it was the body of a sailor. It was lying on its
back, with eyes wide open, and with a look of peace on its face.
Evidently the body had not been long enough in the wat