ter tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw
him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people
perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was
not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
with a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light
course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Bosto